Shakespeare

Yet in other passages he laments the plight of the “sobbing deer” and the stricken deer who seeks the water. These were commonplaces of Renaissance literature, of course, but they may also reflect his instinctive attitude.

The allusions to hunting also carry a different significance in late sixteenth-century England, where it was still considered to be primarily an aristocratic pursuit. It was a mimic war and, perhaps more significantly for Shakespeare, an exercise for nobility and for gentlemen. In that sense it suited Shakespeare’s abiding preoccupation with gentility. His hunters are noblemen, such as the Lord in The Taming of the Shrew and the Duke of Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It may also be significant that, in both of these plays, the hunt acts as a prelude and context for theatrical performances. The hunt is itself a form of theatre. The lord of the hunt might also be the patron of a group of players, confirming the strangely disconcerting association. The hunt and the theatre both present ritualised forms of conflict and violence, and the killing of the noble stag to the sound of horns may be compared to the mimic murder of a king. The hands of the hunters in the field, and the hands of the assassins in Julius Caesar, are similarly dyed in blood. The writer of the plays confesses to a “dyer’s hand.” The mature Shakespeare has often been described as a poacher of other men’s plays or plots. It is impossible to untangle the web of associations and resemblances that may be glimpsed here. But we may be sure that we are looking into the heart of Shakespeare’s design. The stray story of the poacher Shakespeare has carried us a long way.

There are many other references to outdoor pursuits that suggest the presence of personal experience. He could have played bowls, for example, and the language of falconry becomes almost his private possession. One book upon his imagery fills no fewer than eight pages with his references to trained hawks and hawking, to the “check” and the “quarry,” the “haggard” and the “Jesse.” There are eighty separate and technical allusions to the sport in his published writing, whereas there are very few in the work of any other dramatist of the period. The Taming of the Shrew uses the taming of the falcon as a metaphor throughout. The process of stitching up a bird’s eyelids was known as “seeling.” Thus in Macbeth (991-2) occurs the imprecation-

Come, seeling Night,

Skarfe vp the tender Eye of pittifull Day

Nor does he commit errors or solecisms. His references may of course have been derived from book-learning, or from his attempts to internalise what was in large part an aristocratic sport; but he speaks the language of practice, much of which is still in use.

He alludes to the hunting of hares, and of foxes, on several occasions. It was the practice of countrymen then to hunt hares on foot, with nets at the ready. Shakespeare notes how the quarry “outruns the wind,” and “crankes and crosses with a thousand doubles” (Venus and Adonis, 681-2). In this context he uses the very specific term of “musit” for a round hole in a hedge or fence through which the hare escapes; he could not have learned this from any book.

On the basis of dramatic references one early biographer has also safely concluded that Shakespeare “was an angler” who “did not use a fly but was familiar with bottom-fishing”;⁸ the Avon was close by, but it is hard to imagine a still and patient Shakespeare. He seems preoccupied, too, with the liming of birds. This was the practice of the fowler, who smeared twigs and branches with the white glutinous paste of bird-lime in order to capture his terrified prey. It is one of those images particularly favoured by Shakespeare; it emerges in a variety of contexts and situations, and represents some primitive or primary scene of his imagination. He responds eloquently to the idea of speed being checked or free flight being hampered; the picture of a bird struggling to be free impressed itself upon him. It lies behind the “limed soul” of Claudius in Hamlet, or the bush “limed” for the Duchess of Gloucester in the second part of Henry VI. Shakespeare was familiar with all the sports of the field and the open air – which is, perhaps, no more than to say that he had a conventional rural boyhood.