Have you ever suspected someone of pretending to be something they’re not? Have you ever felt like an impostor yourself? Have you ever actually been one? This Amplified Edition situates “Ambitious Apes” in the context of a seventeenth-century vogue for paintings of monkeys and invites us to understand and appreciate the poem as an imitation of an imitation, in which the poet pretends to be a monkey pretending to be the poet.
At first glance, “Ambitious Apes” looks like little more than the sequel to This Flying Fish (Emblem 25)90, which immediately precedes it among Pulter’s emblems. Both poems appear to caution readers against aspiring too high, lest, like Nimrod, the tyrant who commissioned the Tower of Babel (and the subject of Pulter’s first emblem), they bring destruction on themselves. But the apes in this poem never get off the ground, fool no one, and accomplish nothing: “… up they could not get for all their pains; / They straight [immediately] were caught and led away in chains.” If only Richard III or Oliver Cromwell, both of whom the poem posits as tokens of this type, had been so easily defeated and effortlessly fettered. Indeed, the titular apes so little resemble the two bloody regicides—the vehicle is so remarkably unlike its tenors—that this opening epic simile becomes upon close examination an epic fail. Richard III, whom Pulter calls “Crook-Back,” and Cromwell, whom she refers to as “one O,” seem like diabolical and demonic superhumans, while the apes to which they’re likened seem more like The Stately Moose (Emblem 27)92, the emblem which immediately follows in Pulter’s manuscript: powerless and unsuspecting victims wandering into a predator’s trap. These monkeys are endangered rather than dangerous. These monkeys are tricked and deceived by means of the human garments they try on; they do not, however, trick or deceive anyone, much less rise to positions of authority themselves. Or do they?
Unlike the eponymous apes of the poem which are easily identified and apprehended in their human clothes, and thus create no confusion whatsoever for the huntsmen, Pulter’s verse often makes it difficult for the reader to discern human from ape. This animal emblem begins unusually by first describing not the apes themselves but humans who are paid (by other, unseen humans) to capture them. Grammatically, the ape-catchers are the subject of the first three lines: it is they who “catch” and “watch” and “scatter” clothes on the ground; the apes, meanwhile, are mere objects (grammatically and otherwise), defenseless and unsuspecting prey, first watched and then caught by means of a trap. From its very first couplet, this poem complicates perspectives and confounds expectations: the first word of the poem, “Those,” is a demonstrative pronoun, which points something out, but in this case points away from the apes and toward the unseen hunters, who are hiding, watching, and waiting to ambush the apes; this initial confusion is only compounded in the second line where the selfsame pronoun, “they,” refers alternately to apes and humans with only one word between them. The Elemental Edition inserts a gloss to clarify the respective antecedent for each “they,” but Pulter’s verse purposefully blurs the boundaries between monkeys and mankind, leaving the unguided, first-time reader to wonder several times: “Which is the ape-catcher and which the ape?”
The Elemental Edition inserts another helpful gloss at the start of line 7 to explain that “They draw them on” means “The apes pull on the clothes.” In Pulter’s day, as in our own, “To draw on” might refer to two distinct activities: (1) “To pull on (a boot, glove, or other item of clothing”); and (2) “To induce or influence (a person) to come to a place or join in a venture; to lead on.”1 Given the scenario established in the first six lines, especially given how the grammatical subject switches from the human hunters in lines 1–3 to the hunted apes in lines 4–6, “They draw them on” at the start of the seventh line does indeed refer to the apes pulling on the clothes, as the Elemental Edition suggests, but it also glancingly acknowledges the ape-catchers who draw the monkeys on by means of a ruse. Likewise, the poem’s phrasing of “those which took a town once from the Moors” in line 11, complete with the demonstrative pronoun, exactly parallels “Those that employed are the apes to catch” in line 1, which would seem to indicate that the apes are analogous to the dispossessed Moors, while the ape-catchers more closely resemble the ambitious Spanish invaders. While the headnote to the Elemental Edition is correct when it states that “apes who inappropriately dress in human clothes” are equated with “imperial conquests (like Spain’s conquest of Muslim territories),” the editors’ clear account belies Pulter’s own confusing wording and obscures the fact that the apes did not dispossess anyone when seizing the human clothes (used for the express purpose of catching them), while the ape-catchers did dispossess the apes when they displaced them from their natural habitat. Thus, the apes’ attempt to scale trees, far from being a metaphor for ambitious upward mobility, is an act of self-defense and indigenous resistance to discovery and domination.
If the hapless bunch of simians described in the poem’s first 10 lines bears no resemblance to “Crook’d-Back” (Richard III) and Cromwell (“one O”), and only a slight resemblance to “those which took a town once from the Moors,” then perhaps they bear a stronger resemblance to the only other figure they are said to resemble: Semiramis. There is a potentially interesting connection between the apes dressing in human clothes and an anecdote Lodowick Lloyd recounts in The Pilgrimage of Princes, Penned out of Sundry Greeke and Latine Aucthours:
Semiramis Quéene of Babilon … perceiuing her yong sonne Ninus, to bee too tender to gouerne the stoute Babilonians and Assirians, [and] knowyng the nature of the people to bée impaciente of a womans gouernemente, … became in apparell like a man, and rule[d] the kyngdome, vntill her sonne came vnto ripe age.
Lodowick Lloyd, The Pilgrimage of Princes, Penned out of Sundry Greeke and Latine Aucthours (London, 1573).
But Pulter’s poem never mentions Semiramis donning “apparel like a man” and, even if it did, there would still be a big difference between vehicle and tenor because for Semiramis the ruse succeeds: she reigns long enough for her son to become king. Again, the monkeys described in the first ten lines fool no one with their clothes; to the contrary, the clothes are used to fool them. Meanwhile, what Pulter chooses to mention about Semiramis is odd, and seemingly off the mark, given the likening of this Assyrian queen to apes that could not get up a tree: ambition, we are told, “turned [Semiramis] to a dove.” A dove? In what sense is a dove, which can fly, like an ape unable to get up a tree? Why does the simile spanning the first 18 lines of the poem break down repeatedly?
At line 19 the poem swaps its stalled vehicle of easily apprehended apes for a new one:
But there’s a Nemesis that will look down
On all usurpers of their masters’ crown.
So Jezebel bid furious Jehu see
The curséd end of Zimri’s treachery.
Nemesis, the Greek goddess of retribution, was a familiar figure in Renaissance emblem books, having appeared in Andrea Alciati’s Emblemata (1531) and Geffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes (1586). But here Nemesis herself is not emblematized, not described in any detail; indeed, the indefinite article, “a,” indicates that, despite its capitalization in the manuscript, Pulter uses “Nemuses” as a common rather than a proper noun. This nemesis figure serves as the start of a new simile: in just the same way that it “will look down / On all usurpers of their masters’ crown,” even “So Jezebel bid furious Jehu see / The curséd end of Zimri’s treachery.” The clipped tone of this couplet leaves much to be filled in by the reader (see Jezebel), but most important for our purposes here is the fact that Jehu, unlike Zimri, was never captured or killed. Instead, he literally got away with murder, with regicide.
Another of Pulter’s examples, Diocles, was also never captured or killed: the marginal note in the Elemental Edition informs readers that “Diocletian was the first Roman emperor to abdicate his position voluntarily.” What is going on here? How can this emblem effectively warn readers that “a dreadful fate awaits those who try to move above their station,” in the words of the headnote to the Elemental Edition, when several of its examples show the opposite? Now is a good time to return to several questions already raised: why does Pulter blur the line between apes and humans by describing each in terms that evoke the other? Why does the epic simile that begins the poem fail—that is, why does it liken monkeys who get captured because they are unable to climb a tree to social climbers who install themselves in positions of high authority? Finally, why does the poem several times allude to impostors, regicides, and usurpers who profited from their ambition rather than being punished for it?
To answer these questions, I would like to draw the reader’s attention to the only triplet in a poem otherwise comprising twenty couplets:
Phocion the royal family subdued,
And in their princely blood his hands imbrued,
Which horrid action he and his all rued.
Both the Elemental Edition and Alice Eardley call attention in their notes to the fact that Pulter’s allusion to Phocion here is completely at odds with her presumable source, Plutarch’s Lives. Indeed, it would be hard to overstate the degree of revisionism involved in Pulter’s altered account because Plutarch celebrates Phocion not merely as a “just and moral leader,” as the gloss in the Elemental Edition states, but as the antithesis of ambition. If the first definition for “ambitio” in the Oxford Latin Dictionary is “Canvassing for votes,” then it is worth noting that although Phocion “held the office of general more frequently than any man,” never, not once, Plutarch tells us, did Phocion “seek the office or canvass for it.”2 While Phocion might not be much of a name to reckon with in the twenty-first century, in 1648 the French artist Nicolas Poussin painted two masterpieces—Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion and The Funeral of Phocion—memorializing the Athenian statesman who had been unjustly exiled and executed before having his reputation posthumously restored. There were, moreover, readymade exemplars of ambition on offer in Plutarch’s Lives. John Dryden in his translation of Plutarch writes of Alcibiades, “the one most prevailing of all [his passions] was his ambition and his desire for superiority.”3 Why, then, does Pulter choose Phocion? Is there any connection between the egregious form of this triplet and its equally egregious content, rewriting the legacy of “Phocion the Good,” as he came to be known, to suggest that he was caught red-handed in the act of murder?
Is it significant that the only triplet in the poem also creates the poem’s only acrostic? If one reads vertically the first letter of each line in succession, these rhyming lines on Phocion spell “PAW.” This acrostic, consisting of only three letters, could of course be an accident, sheer happenstance, what Andrew Sofer calls a “nonce acrostic,” in which “a random series of adjacent letters throws up an English word or phrase.”4 Is this acrostic worth noticing? Should this “PAW” give the reader pause? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the noun “paw” refers to “The foot of an animal having claws and pads. Also: the hand of a monkey or ape.”5 The verb “paw,” according to the OED, means “to touch or handle roughly, awkwardly… [and] clumsily.”6 As we have seen, this poem maladroitly mishandles more than its allusion to Phocion. Did a monkey have a hand—or paw—in writing this poem?
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “ape” became a verb in the 1640s, meaning “to imitate, mimic” most often “pretentiously, irrationally, or absurdly,” but sometimes “in a good or neutral sense” too. In 1658, the verb phrase “to ape it,” meaning “to play the ape, mimic the reality” entered the language and it did so in the specific context of a Royalist poet satirizing Oliver Cromwell: “What’s a Protector?” James Cleveland asks, before answering, “He’s a stately Thing, that Apes it in the Non-Age of a King.”7 A few years prior to Cleveland coining the phrase, “to ape it,” Hester Pulter, another royalist poet, also wrote a poem satirizing Oliver Cromwell. But Pulter, I suspect, also “apes”—that is, imitates “pretentiously, irrationally, or absurdly”—the emblem genre itself.8 Does this emblem about dissembling thus double as a dissembling emblem?
The more one studies it, the more Emblem 26 reads like a “monkey trick,” which, according to the OED, is a phrase dating back to 1653, most likely the year before Pulter composed this poem, and meaning “a mischievous, foolish, or underhand trick or act, an antic.”9 According to H.W. Janson, apes were regarded as “the most laughable of animals,” especially once they were caught and brought into closer contact with humans: “the ape as domestic pet,” Janson explains, “was the exact counterpart of the fool or jester,” adding that both “were kept, not for their beauty or utility but as sources of amusement, and thus enjoyed a license not permitted to other members of the household.”10 The association of monkeys with court jesters is most evident in a painting by the artist Anthony Van Dyck of Queen Henrietta Maria in 1633: here, Pulter’s queen appears in a vibrant blue hunting dress made of silk and a wide-brimmed hat with a feather protruding from it, but more striking than the image of Henrietta Maria herself are two additional figures to her left, Jeffrey Hudson, the court dwarf, and Pug, the queen’s monkey, who is positioned on Hudson’s shoulder and being petted by the queen. While Henrietta Maria was not the first English queen to be painted with a pet monkey—see Apes and Art: From Bruegel to Banksy and Beyond—Pulter’s lifetime did coincide with an increasing artistic awareness of and interest in such “apes.”
It is worth noting that an “ape” for Pulter would not have meant one of the great apes—chimpanzees, gorillas, or orangutans—because with very few exceptions, Europeans had not seen “apes” of this sort, nor was the word was applied to them until 1699 when Edward Tyson published Anatomy of a Pygmy, which described his dissection of a chimpanzee. What Pulter meant by “apes” were what we would describe as monkeys: Barbary macaques, a tailless North African species common in ancient Greece and Rome, or Capuchin monkeys, native to Central and South America and thus living emblems of England’s global commerce and conquest. Barbary apes and Capuchin monkeys were caught and imported to England as exotic pets for wealthy women and as trained performers. In Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Autolycus, the peddler-turned-pickpocket, was also once “an ape-bearer,” which means “One who carried a monkey about for exhibition.”11 Like Autolycus, monkeys had a reputation in the seventeenth century for being scheming pranksters.
Is Pulter a prankster in this poem? Is the poem written from the perspective of the one (monkey) that got away? That would explain the “paw print” in the poem and its egregious mishandling of the Phocion legend. That would explain the poem paying homage to ambitious figures in whom the vice was either never detected or only punished long after they prospered. That would explain the epic simile at the poem’s start, which turns out not to be an epic fail: after all, an ambitious ape did climb to freedom and became the poem’s ultimate authority, the author. If, as the poem says, all apes “would be men,” this ape (like Cromwell and Crookback) got its wish. And, for the most part, the monkey-author gets away with its ruse. Only the reader who dwells with the emblem, lavishing time meditating with and puzzling over it, reading it vertically (which makes sense, given how the apes aim to climb up a tree while a “Nemuses” looks down) as well as from left to right, will have the satisfaction of seeing a “PAW” hiding in plain sight.
But where would Pulter get the idea that a monkey could write a poem? As it turns out, the seventeenth century saw an explosion of engravings and paintings that depicted monkeys engaged in all manner of human activities, from alchemy to ice skating to investing in the tulip market. This genre of the visual arts, known as singerie (French for “monkey trick”), frequently made much of the monkey’s paw, its human-like hand, complete with an opposable thumb, which enables the animal to use tools, once thought (and still sometimes believed) to be a uniquely human capacity. As the first Curation (“Apes and Art”) in this Amplified Edition demonstrates, the artists who created these scenes of monkeys acting like humans—including David Teniers the Younger who painted a monkey at an easel painting—enjoyed plugging monkeys into a wide variety of human scenarios, from the everyday to the extraordinary.
Does Pulter’s naked emblem poem belong to the early modern singerie genre? Is Hester Pulter one of those early modern artists who, in the words of Simona Cohen, “demonstrated their identification with a pet monkey or domesticated ape?"12 It is noteworthy that Pulter’s long lament, Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined57, in which the poet envies the freedom and liberty of countless creatures—from moths, flies, bees, and beetles through dolphins, whales and “every sort of fish” to “lion, tiger, elephant and bear”—makes no mention of “apes” or “monkeys.” That is because apes and monkeys in seventeenth-century England were, like Pulter, domesticated and confined. These creatures were often, if not always, fettered in clogs and chains. Perhaps this accounts for why Pulter chose the emblem on ambition to go ape. Or maybe the playfulness Pulter exhibits here is not confined to this one emblem. Should we assume the tone of Pulter’s other emblem poems—many of which also contain a clear moral supplemented by confusing allusions that subtly undercut their ostensible moral clarity—is earnest rather than irreverent? Should we assume her poetic persona is always autobiographical and not sometimes that of an animal avatar? Rather than faithfully following the emblem tradition she had inherited, might Hester Pulter have chosen, instead, to monkey with it?13
- OED Online v. “to draw on” def. 3 and 4.
- For the Oxford Latin Dictionary’s definition of “ambitio,” see William Casey King, Ambition, A History from Virtue to Vice (New Haven: Yale UP, 2013), 15; the English quotation from Plutarch on Phocion comes from Bernadotte Perrin’s translation in the Loeb Classical Library edition, vol. VIII (Cambridge, MA: 1919) of The Parallel Lives and is accessible here.
- For the quotation from Dryden’s translation of Plutarch on Alcibiades, see William Casey King, Ambition, A History from Virtue to Vice (New Haven: Yale UP, 2013), 12.
- Andrew Sofer, “All’s I-L-L that Starts ‘I’le’: Acrostic Space and Ludic Reading in the Margins of the Early Modern Play-Text,” Renaissance Drama 48, no. 2 (2020): 276.
- OED Online n. “paw” def. 1b.
- OED Online v. “paw” def. 1a.
- OED Online v. “to ape it”
- OED Online v. “ape” def. 1a.
- OED Online n. “monkey trick.”
- Janson, Apes and Ape Lore, 29, 211.
- OED Online n. “ape-bearer.”
- Simona Cohen, “Ars Simia Naturae: The Animal as Mediator and Alter Ego of the Artist in the Renaissance,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 43 (2017), 227. For more on apes and monkeys in the early modern period, see the following (far from exhaustive list): James Knowles, “Can ye not tell a man from a marmoset?: Apes and Others on the Early Modern Stage” in Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures, ed. Erica Fudge (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 138–163; Ken Gouwens, “Erasmus, Apes of Cicero, and Conceptual Blending,” Journal of the History of Ideas 71:4 (2010): 523–545; Scott Maisano, “Shakespearean primatology: A diptych,” Postmedieval 1 (2010): 115–123; Holly Dugan, “To Bark with Judgement: Playing Baboon in Early Modern London,” Shakespeare Studies 41 (2013): 77–93; Scott Maisano, “Rise of the Poet of the Apes,” Shakespeare Studies 41 (2013), 64–76; Holly Dugan and Scott Maisano, “Ape,” in Veer Ecology, eds. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 355–376; and Theresa Grant, Apes and Monkeys on the Early Modern Stage, 1603–1659 (New York: Palgrave, 2024).
- It has been nearly a decade since Rachel Dunn Zhang demonstrated that Pulter wrote at a time when the emblem book was undergoing a “generic existential crisis … after the deposition and regicide of Charles I.” Rachel Dunn Zhang, “Breaking a Tradition: Hester Pulter and the English Emblem Book,” The Seventeenth Century 30:1 (2015), 55–73.
