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The Introduction provides a concise survey of the historical development of beast literature in western Europe, which will serve as background for later chapters. It traces the medieval tradition of beast fable from its origins in the late Roman writer Phaedrus (first century ad), and Avianus (fourth/fifth century ad), through later Latin adaptations and expansions, to translation into the vernacular languages of Europe. In contrast to the venerable ancestry of fable, beast epic is a purely medieval creation: some of its narrative material can be glimpsed in short animal‐poems dating back to the Carolingian period, but its real starting point is the Ysengrimus (1148 × 1152), which gave rise to the French Roman de Renart and other vernacular epics, making Reynard a household name. A final section deals with the essentially independent tradition of bestiaries.

This chapter provides a theoretical basis for the discussion of individual works in subsequent chapters. Taking examples from the Latin prose rendition of Phaedran fables known as the Romulus vulgaris, it analyses ‘how animals mean’ in beast fable, emphasizing the deliberate brevity and sparseness of fable narrative, and connecting these features with the mistrust of words that fable characteristically teaches. In contrast, in beast epic (represented here by the Ysengrimus), words proliferate, and the simple moral conclusion in which the action of beast fable culminates is dissolved in a sea of animal moralizing whose effect is comic rather than didactic. Beast fable and beat epic also differ in their relation to historical reality: whereas fable is a‐historical in itself but can be used as a whole to comment on a historical situation, epic can incorporate topical satire into its narrative.

The Conclusion re‐emphasizes the two major themes running through the works discussed. The first is the power of nature, which is sometimes connected with the idea of social hierarchy, and sometimes with attitudes to sexuality. The second is the contrast between words and deeds (dicta and facta) or rhetoric and reality. Whereas fable is mistrustful of words, which are seen as a mere camouflage for the appetites that govern behaviour, in beast epic words run riot and the human ability to pour forth endless interpretations of reality is seen as a matter for comic celebration. A strain of self‐reflexivity also runs through these works: conscious of the tendency of words to mislead not only others but the speaker him/herself, writers must also be conscious that this is true of their own words as well. Hence the frequency of an ironic relation between writer and work in this tradition.

The redundancy of language is also a source of comedy in The Owl and the Nightingale, a Middle English debate‐poem which draws on an eclectic range of traditions—lyric, bestiary, fable, lai, as well as debate. The shifting invocations of these various literary modes comically unsettle the reader's sense of how each animal is to be judged, and the introduction of details of avian appearance and habits, alongside appeals to ‘Nature’ as the amoral determinant of each bird's characteristics, carries this unsettling process even further. The birds also use beast literature (Marie's lai of Laüstic, and one of her fables) as ‘evidence’ against each other, moralizing animal behaviour in sublime disregard of the mechanisms by which it is usually given moral implication for humans, but not for the animals themselves. This reversal of direction reaches its climax with the surprisingly serious reinterpretation in terms of Nature, rather than in terms of religious dogma.

This chapter examines the disguise and threat of the feminine in Dryden's long, bewildering beast fable, The Hind and the Panther (1687), which apparently defends James II's Edict of Toleration while offering the public their long-awaited story of Dryden's conversion to Roman Catholicism. The laureate bursts every convention of fable and public relations to challenge readers hungry for blood with a confusing self-image. He invokes the feminine symbol of Eastern mystery and anti-Catholic propaganda — the Scarlet Whore of Babylon and Beast of the Apocalypse — to create protective mystification: against an ominous setting of violent menace he creates not one but two female voices, predator and prey, two beastly mother churches that eerily resemble each other, while the narrator intrudes digressive self-reflection. The lady beasts match wits and exchange dark prophetic fables late into the night to forestall the end of their encounter and the real physical violence threatening the King.

This chapter discusses the use of animal imagery in Hamlet and Mother Hubberds Tale. It observes that most analyses of the animal imagery in these plays focus on iconographic and symbolic meanings instead of looking at this image pattern as linking the play to the beast fable genre. The chapter then describes Mother Hubberds Tale and studies beast satire in Hamlet. It also shows that the beast fable genre is known to function in part in reaction to the perceived permeability of the limits between human and animal, and even to satirise and instruct powerful people. The chapter is futhermore concerned with an analysis of Hamlet's analogies to Mother Hubberds Tale.