ABSTRACT

This chapter will argue that in his depictions of hunting rituals, Shakespeare draws upon and demonstrates the symbolic significance of the early modern hunt, and its relationship to a number of early modern folk customs which used the body of the dead animal to enact and explore social relationships. Records exist of several contemporary practices—some organized by the church or other institutions, others less formal local affairs—which saw the processing of a buck’s head around the local parish, often accompanied by costumed participants, dancing, and music. Calendar customs such as the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance and the processions at Tutbury, St. Paul’s, and Broad Chalke are mirrored by tantalizing hints in medieval hunting manuals and early modern drama of a customary celebratory ritual concluding the aristocratic hunt, which appears to have incorporated the body of the slain quarry.

René Girard’s discussion of sacrifice as symbolic action which is protective of social harmony, through its deflection of violence to an external rather than internal target, provides a perspective from which to explore what the dismembered animal meant, and why, when it appeared in these apparent expressions of communal harmony. These ritualized events were usually overt statements of community cohesion and co-operation, yet they drew their symbolic charge from the inherent violence of the hunt and the sacrificial prominence of the dead animal’s physical dismemberment. The references to ritualized hunting customs which appear in Shakespearean comedies such as As You Like It and The Merry Wives of Windsor encapsulate a similar concern with community and social identity. The status, power, and virtue signaled by aristocratic hunting, on the one hand, and its visual emphasis on savagery and sacrifice, on the other, lent it a particular emblematic charge in early modern popular culture. This chapter will suggest that Shakespeare exploits this resonance, using the body of the dead deer to represent and explore the subtexts of social inclusion and exclusion, hierarchy, status, and local identity which were so bound up in folk customs incorporating the hunt.