One of the most compelling early-modern expressions of the monstrous drunkard was the metaphor of the beastly metamorphosis. Like modern zombies, animals were understood as beastly, that is, incapable of controlling their appetites, violence, and other behaviors because they lacked the capacity for reason and free will associated with human beings. Writing long before the development of modern medical concepts of habituation, compulsion, and addiction, early modern English literature seems to suggest that the beastly metamorphosis takes place as the drinker becomes intoxicated. One of the first popular writers to describe the drunkard’s beastly metamorphosis as a transformation from man to monster was sixteenth-century playwright and poet George Gascoigne. Portraying the monstrous drunkard as a human-animal hybrid suggested that the drunkard’s characteristics had become unchangeable by injecting nascent conceptualizations of race into the metaphor.

Source: The Guardian December 30, 2025 07:53 UTC