Shakespeare and the Hunt: A Cultural and Social Study (review)

Edward Berry's ambitious attempt to explicate and historicize "nearly every major Shakespearean allusion to hunting" (x) fulfills a critical task long overdue in Shakespeare studies. Lucid, well-documented, and persuasively argued, Shakespeare and the Hunt not only offers new readings of the work of a poet-playwright who often seems obsessed with hunting imagery and metaphor but also presents cogent evidence that Shakespeare's various allusions to hunting reveal his own profound skepticism about the ethics and social functionality of the controversial, aristocratic sport.

While Berry is careful not to oversimplify the complex range of beliefs about his subject, his readings of early modern hunting culture hinge on what he refers to in chapter 1 as the contemporary pro-hunting and anti-hunting discourses. The traditional arguments that the sport served to prepare men for war and improved the health of practitioners are relatively well documented by early modern historians. More interesting is Berry's discussion of the impressively systematic anti-hunting arguments of three generally defined groups: humanists such as More and Erasmus, who criticized hunting for "its cruelty and its tendency to brutalize" men (25); sentimentalists such as Luther, whose views of the sport reflected "an emerging sympathy for animals" (28); and Puritans such as Philip Stubbes, who were most concerned about the social abuses that might result from idle recreations and sports. Although allusions to hunting in the plays reflect Shakespeare's awareness of the multiplicity of arguments in early modern culture, Berry claims, in the end, that Shakespeare was critical of the sport (209) and that his imagery of the hunt implies a "deep affinity" between hunting and war (218).

Berry focuses chapter 2 on the role of huntresses in Venus and Adonis and Love's Labor's Lost. His discussion of Venus centers on the traditional custom of "blooding," the symbolic process of smearing or daubing one's face (usually a young boy's) with the blood of one's first kill or, if not a first kill, of an unusually heroic one. The blooding ritual marks the end of an initiatory quest into manhood and into the knowledge of oneself. After Adonis is killed by the boar in the poem, Venus collapses beside him and "stains her face with his congealed blood" (l. 1122). Berry draws on Shakespeare's direct correlation between Adonis's literal hunting of the boar, Venus's hunting of Adonis, and the ties between Venus and the boar as the boy's murderers. Venus's enactment of the blooding ritual is the culmination of her own initiatory quest into self-awareness; she realizes that her destructive passion and "emasculating energy" (55) link her inextricably to the beast that has murdered her beloved. Berry's reading of Love's Labor's Lost centers on the often-ignored murder of a deer in Act 4, scene 1, by the reluctant and sympathetic huntress, the Princess of France. Shakespeare's juxtaposition of this death scene and the unexpected announcement of the French king's death in Act 5 highlights a"link between human and animal suffering" (68) and thereby works to expose the negligence of an aristocracy defined by vanity and destructive aggressiveness. Berry justifies what seems like a questionable decision to explore such different works in one chapter by emphasizing how both huntresses "represent . . . deep social tensions within the bloody customs of the hunt" (39). Still, one senses from the somewhat vague connections between them that the two texts could have been better handled in two separate chapters.

The next chapter also considers hunting in two works, Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar. What binds these plays together is a similar preoccupation with hunting and ceremonial culture in general. More specifically, both plays demonstrate the Erasmian view of hunting as a sport that tends to bestialize human beings (79). When Demetrius and Chiron plan the rape...