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of growth contribute. To depict the relationship between these orders, Disney adapts popular attitudes about Shakespeare’s views on social organization. Although Mufasa teaches Simba that nature requires a delicate balance between respecting creatures and eating them in the ‘‘great circle of life,” the group in the shadows seems outside this scheme. Mufasa’s depiction of a natural food chain borrows from the “great chain of being,” popularized by E.M.W. Tillyard’s Elizabethan World Picture (1943). (Hamlet himself gestures to the concept when speaking to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Before he recognizes that his friends have betrayed his trust, he declares of man: “How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god—the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!” [2.2.293–97]). Disney reifies Tillyard’s now-discarded metaphysical construct by giving it a visual, horizontal geography. As in Troilus and Cressida or even Henry V, Shakespeare never presents concepts of natural order without questioning the motives of his speakers. Disney, however, erases Shakespeare’s contingencies, presenting him to the modern marketplace as a believer in natural orders.

Beyond the chain or circle, Scar and his henchmen are represented as outside culture through gender inversion: once they take over, the males send the lionesses out to hunt food while they remain at home. As a histrionic, vaguely Wildeian figure whose style contrasts with the hyper-masculinity of his brother Mufasa, even Scar’s name more than hints at castration. Because of his ambiguously gay mannerisms, the film makes him a figure both of Simba’s Oedipal crisis and of forbidden adolescent eroticism. Gazing at Scar’s troops in the shadowy world beyond the kingdom’s geographic borders, Simba seems to be acting on a fluidity of desire. When his father punishes him for it, we see the film colluding with parents’ desires for regulation: erotized curiosity is outside culture. The film thus replicates Shakespeare’s supposedly Oedipal design to authorize the discipline of transgressive adolescent desires. At the same time, it offers a high-concept reading of Hamlet: a young Prince is prevented from taking his place in the masculine world of action and politics because of improper longings. The double appropriation of Shakespeare and Freud/Jones gives credence to the developmental scheme that Disney presents, in which male children risk being scarred and emasculated if they stray beyond the boundaries of discipline, desire, and dominance. With Simba

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