[In the following essay, Daley questions the nature of the hunt in As You Like It, stating that it indicates the desperation of Duke Senior, and that it functions on an allegorical level as well.]

Dr. Samuel Johnson counsels us that, “He who will understand Shakespeare must not be content to study him in the closet, he must look for his meaning sometimes among the sports of the field.”¹ This good counsel certainly applies to studying As You Like It, which is in some respects a hunter's play. We learn in the opening scene that the banished duke has taken refuge in the Forest of Arden, and in Elizabethan parlance forest means a spacious habitat for game. Almost immediately thereafter we learn that the hapless duke and his fellow outlaws live like old Robin Hood of England, that is to say by shooting deer for venison. In keeping with this role they will come on wearing, like Robin Hood, the forester's standard summer coat of camouflage green. We are prepared to see why, “in these woods,” the exiles must “go and kill us venison” (2.1.21), and hear them talk at some length about a stag “that from the hunter's aim had ta’en a hurt,” and come “to languish” at a sylvan brookside (34-35).² Subsequently, the topic appears in three more scenes, culminating in the ancient motif of the princely hero who pits his strength and skill against the royal beast, a lioness. Elsewhere, too, the diction and action of venery supplies symbols, metaphors, and similes for lovers, the jester's shaft of wit, and so on.³

The pervasiveness and centrality of the theme can be indicated by the extent to which it attaches to the core character, Rosalind, when she plans to escape to the forest disguised as a boy, no less a one than “Jove's own page,” Ganymed. It merits attention here since nothing has been made of its significance. For the long, dangerous tramp to the Forest of Arden, Rosalind dresses like a stripling soldier (many then going to the Irish war) or a boyish hunter. Lodge armed his Rosalynde with only a gentlemanly rapier, but Shakespeare gives Rosalind the formidable armament of a “curtle-ax upon my thigh / A boar spear in my hand” (1.3.117-18). The boar spear introduces a fitting symbolism as a traditional weapon for a champion of virtue against intemperance and, more specifically, lust, both being vices represented sometimes by a boar or sanglier.⁴ Rosalind's boar spear, then, betokens her temperance and chastity, qualities she shares with a “goodlie Ladie clad in hunter's weed,” Spenser's Belphoebe, of whom he declares that “in her hand a sharpe bore-speare she held” (Faerie Queene 2.1.21.7 and 29.1). Spenser's chaste and noble Britomart also yields a puissant spear. Moreover, classical symbolism assigns a spear to the goddess of wisdom and sometimes the virgin goddess of hunting, Diana. On the stage, a trident would have especially suggested the “chaste eyed, thrice-crowned queen of night,” later invoked by Orlando when he rightly identifies “the fair, the chaste, the unexpressive” Rosalind as a huntress of Diana,⁵ because Rosalind's role, like Belphoebe's, is Dianan as well as Venerean.

In a pleasantly allusive manner, royal Rosalind's hunting spear also relates her to her new namesake, for Ganymed, the puer regius, as readers of Aeneid V. 251-57 (Loeb Classics edition, pp. 462/463) would recall, was pursuing fleet stags with a javelin in his hand when Jove's eagle swooped to abduct him. Rosalind herself has recourse to the hart-heart pun, and she understands the figurative meaning of hunting the hare, the medieval hunt of Venus (4.3.18).⁶ Then, too, in the forest context, with a slyly lewd rhyme and pun (on hind and lined), the Clown likens Rosalind to an estrous hind and hound bitch (2.2.101-2; 105-6). Altogether, this mélange of allusions and symbols drawn from classical and contemporary venery corresponds to the complexities of Rosalind's character and its dramatic tensions with her predicament, making her both the hunted and the huntress, pursued and pursuer, and a Renaissance Venerean-Dianan figure harmonizing in herself virtues both masculine and feminine.

Merely to notice Shakespeare's allusions to hunting, however, no longer assures our understanding of the sixteenth-century facts he designates by them, because to us, the words convey little exact meaning. A production of A Midsummer Night's Dream 4.1 that turned the royal couple into bird shooters illustrates the problem. The Amazon Queen came on, fowling piece at the ready, looking like, say, a painting of the Electress of Bavaria in Hunting Costume. She, Duke Theseus, and loaders have pushed into the woods, like Puck, through bog, bush, brake, and brier before sunup on May Day, shooting en route the pheasants draped on their aide. Haply, the shooting has not startled awake the charmed sleepers, like russet-pated choughs “rising and cawing at the gun's report” (3.2.21-22). They need to be aroused by a blast of a deer hunter's horn! The date, time (first light), and place of this astonishing pheasant hunt left the audience unperturbed.

Nor did the audience seem puzzled, much less bewildered, by the totally incongruous conviction of Duke Theseus that he was in the woods to set up a stag hunt. The presence of himself, with his forester, huntsmen and a pack of deerhounds in the woods at daybreak means that they have been harbouring, i.e. searching for, a warrantable stag in the covert. (A “palace wood” [1.2.101] is a deer park.) Duke Theseus wants the report without delay so that the chase can be started, as was usually done, in the “vaward of the day” (4.1.105): “Dispatch, I say, and find the forester” (108). The dialogue reports routine preliminaries of a deer chase. The birdshoot innovators believed, or expected us to believe, that the Duke's pack of basset hounds had been brought along in couples to track down, with tunable thunder, the nesting pheasants.⁷ In the woods! With hunting horn calls! As Theseus says in another connection, “Such tricks have strong imagination” (5.1.18). But the lesson is that in this arena actions now speak louder than words; for the audience, the Duke simply uttered high-sounding phatic patter. For both audience and players, the startling, even hilarious, contradiction between what was seen and what was spoken did not exist.

This passage uses technical details (103-11, 182-83) to account plausibly for the presence of Theseus and Hippolyta in the woods before the lovers awake at sunrise. They are keeping the hunt assembly at which the woodmen will describe the harbouring of the deer so that one may be selected. In short, their “observation is perform’d” (104) apparently for the game and for the rites of May simultaneously, and the Duke now sends impatiently for the forester (103, 108, and cf. 3.2.390-93) to come and report the tokens. Meanwhile, the huntsmen with their horns (138) and the coupled deer hounds (107) with their handlers stand by at wood's edge ready to begin “Our purpos’d hunting” (183). The only birds of note are the lark (94), signalling approaching sunrise, and the still sleeping “wood-birds” (140), whose discovery delays the preliminaries of the intended chase beyond resumption.⁸

I think it useful, therefore, to discriminate among the usual kinds of Elizabethan deer hunting so that the means of capture can be recognized and, in consequence, their implications about the conditions, purpose, and mood of the participants clarified. These findings can help to solve several interpretive and critical problems. In As You Like It, for example, are the refugees fleeting the time in careless idyllic escape, or eking out their existence in fairly straitened circumstances? Are they killing deer as a noble pastime sport, or are they hunting for survival? Is the Duke the comfortable old humbug invented by Shaw's untutored fancy, or a competent, compassionate, and indeed, ideal figure of the Renaissance governor? Is the hunting an arbitrarily imposed piece of humanistic propaganda against blood sports, or is it, on the contrary, an element artistically organic to the meaning of the play? What is there about the shot the Duke mentions that “irks” him? These and other matters in As You Like It, may be elucidated by reviewing the pertinent Elizabethan hunting practice and terminology.⁹

Broadly speaking, the Elizabethans pursued or sought for deer (their only big game) either on horseback or on foot, and killed their prey with, respectively, an arme blanche or a missile weapon. For the pursuit on horseback, the two common methods were coursing with greyhounds or chasing with scent-tracking hounds. The present-day British restriction of the word hunt to the use of horses with hounds came in later, but is anticipated as in Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster (1608-10), 4.2, where one woodman declares that the princess will shoot and his fellow denies it, saying, “No, she’ll hunt.”¹⁰ Both kinds of mounted pursuit may be called the chase, as was also a private game preserve large enough for enjoying them. Only the landed well-to-do could afford the many servants, horses, scores of hounds, hundreds of deer, appertaining facilities, and the extensive hunting rights required by this royal sport. The Queen spent far more on her hunting establishment than on her Office of Revels.

Coursing was the less complicated kind of horse and hound hunting. One or more dog varlets on foot accompanied the courser, each leading a brace or leash of greyhounds, swift, keen-sighted dogs. When a suitable hart or buck was located and started, they slipped the greyhounds, and the courser tried to be on hand to kill the animal when the greyhounds caught it. References to horses and the crossbow—or “bent” bow—indicate coursing. Since the courser usually shot the animal held by his greyhounds, he carried his crossbow “bent,” i.e. with the string levered back against the powerful steel bow and cocked, ready to discharge the bolt. In contrast, the English longbow, which was bent only in the act of aiming and shooting, could not be effectively handled by a horseman.

A detail in Benozzo Gozzoli's “The Journey of the Magi to Jerusalem” shows a lance-carrying rider pursuing a large red-deer hind, seasonable at that time of year. The dog varlet has just slipped his leash of three greyhounds. Although it was painted about 1460, the detail gives us an easily looked-up picture of this sport if we imagine for the lance a more likely sword or crossbow.¹¹ In As You Like It, however, only the stag's tears “Cours’d one another down his innocent nose / In piteous chase” (2.1.39-40).

A stereotype of the criticism holds that, as R. P. Draper (1958) puts it, the play is concerned with “an ideally leisured existence which gives men and women the opportunity to enjoy life.” Are we, then, to picture the refugees passing the days mindlessly chasing the deer? The commentators have given so little analysis to this question that the New Variorum Edition (1977) has no index entry for hunting. In recent years, Marco Mincoff has announced as if it were self-evident that “the picture develops rather on the background of the Elizabethan chase than on the Robin Hood ballads.” Madeleine Doran assures us that Duke Senior's “companions find hunting and rough weather at least temporarily attractive,” intimating a party of wealthy sportsmen roughing it in the backwoods. Speaking of Jaques' lament for the wounded deer, Claus Uhlig opines that “In As You Like It as a whole this characteristically Shakespearean assimilation of the humanistic topos investigated [the cruelty of hunting], serves, especially since hunting belongs to the trifling pastimes of courtiers, to accentuate strongly the criticism of courtly life which pervades the play and is explicitly formulated by the banished duke (2.1.1-8).”¹² For our present purpose, Judy Z. Kronenfeld excellently states this position and some of its interpretative consequences. Along the way, an uneasy sense of an ambiguity amounting to artistic incompatibility reveals itself.

Outside a specifically pastoral setting, hunting is a way to turn a noble's “banishment” into holiday “liberty” (1.3.138). For this reason, the Duke's remarks about hunting, seen in a specifically pastoral context, seem to point to a discrepancy between the social idealism of pastoral (which opposes hunting) and the reality of privilege (which licenses it). It is true that Robin Hood, the hunter who champions the poor, becomes a pastoral figure in Renaissance literature, but his hunting is surely in part a matter of denying noble privilege. In Arden hunting seems not clearly a necessity (in which case it might be excused), for fruit and wine are apparently available (2.6[7]. 98; 2.5.32). So it seems quite likely that Shakespeare is mildly questioning the Duke's position. And if this genuine questioning is muted by the self-indulgent sentimentality of Jaques' anti-hunting sentiments, it is still important to remember that hunting is a specifically non-pastoral activity—the prototype of the exploitation of man by man and of war, and unknown in the vegetarian and communal Golden Age. … Thus the Duke enters into an exploitative relation with the forest—a relation to which our attention is called—by engaging in the specifically noble leisure-time sport of hunting, which is traditionally opposed to the peaceful activities of shepherds who live in harmony with nature.¹³

This discourse poses the critical points to be examined here. To begin with, the “specifically noble leisure-time sport of hunting” has been understood for centuries as being above all the chase or hunt at force. This is the noble sport that Robert Langham praises for being “incomparable.”¹⁴ The author of Turbervile's Booke of Hunting (1576) announces that “I thinke meete likewise to instruct (according to my simple skill) the huntsmen on horseback how to chase and hunte an Harte at force.” (My emphasis.) He several times reminds his reader of this aim. Although a fallow deer (the species described in As You Like It) might be chased, it was, the author points out, “the hart, the whiche is the right chace to yeeld pleasure unto Kyngs and Princes.”¹⁵ By a hunt at force (French, à force; cf. Chaucer, slee with strengthe) Turberville's readers understood the pursuit of a deer by a party of horsemen and auxiliaries with as many as fifty or more scenting-hounds across, usually, miles of country open enough for their passage.

In his unfinished play, The Sad Shepherd, Ben Jonson has Robin Hood's woodmen put on (surprisingly) a hunt at force “to kill him venison” for a June feast. The interest to us here is the compression into the dialogue of Scenes 2 and 6 of Act 1 of an epitome—a useful cram—of the textbook stages and technical vocabulary of such a hunt, from the harboring and rousing of the stag to breaking it up and rewarding the hounds and raven. The game is not only a warrantable stag, a hart of ten, but a big wily one which runs for “five hours and more,” a heroic hunt.

It is apparent that this sport partook of elements of a cavalry terrain exercise, and Elizabethans emphasized its value in providing the nobility and gentry with an exciting schooling in cavalry techniques. Indeed, the sport had been considered for centuries as a mimic war, hence a recreation of merit, a duty in fact, for princes and noblemen. Thus Thomas Dekker explains in some detail that “hunting is a noble, a manly, and a healthful exercise; it is a very true picture of warre, nay it is a war in itself.”¹⁶

In 1599, the year that As You Like It was perhaps first presented, James VI of Scotland, advising his heir about suitable physical exercises, writes, “I cannot omit heere the hunting, namelye with running houndes; which is the moste honourable and noblest sorte thereof,” and he deprecates the rival sport of hawking partly “because it neither resembleth the warres as neere as hunting dothe, in making a man hardy, and skilfully ridden in all groundes.”¹⁷ Near the end of the era, Henry Peacham cites the opinion of Eusebius “that wilde beasts were of purpose created by God, that men by chasing and encountring them, might be fitted and enabled for warlike exercises.”¹⁸ Not surprisingly it is the logical source of some of Shakespeare's metaphors for the exigencies of battle. His Forest of Arden was good country for the chase and the hunt at force.

In Poly-Olbion Michael Drayton describes a hunt at force as a representative feature of the Forest of Arden. He devotes seventy-five lines, “Song 13,” 87-161, to a vigorous sketch of a “most princely chase” with its troop of huntsmen, horses, and hounds streaming across the Arden landscapes and raising a bedlam of shouts, horn blasts, and barking as they follow “the noble deer” over pasture and ploughland, through herds and hamlets. Such a hunt began by first light, as noted in the plays, when the lord of the hunt had singled out one of the warrantable stags located by the woodman. Once laid on, the hunt might run across country for many miles before it caught up with the deer; despite his ruses, the animal probably rarely escaped from the “piteous chase” unless night fall intervened. With his “legs then fayling him at length” (140), the beast tried in his simple, instinctive way to find a place favorable for defending himself with his antlers against “The cruell ravenous hounds and bloody hunters neere” (151), e.g., “Some banke or quick-set” (153) to back into, or a pond or river where deep water would hamper the hounds.¹⁹

“Such,” marvels Turberville, “is the benefite of nature to give the dumbe beast understanding which way to help himself … and to save its selfe by all meanes possible.”²⁰ As the stag took his forlorn stand “in such a desperate bay of death” (R3, 4.4.233), the “bloody hounds with heads of steel” (1H6, 4.2.51) closed in clamoring, and he was quickly “bay’d about with many enemies” (JC, 4.1.49). Then a hunter dismounted, crept upon the distracted creature and cut its throat, or stabbed it to the heart, the horns winding “the mort o’ th’ deer” (WT, 1.2.118). Beholding dead Caesar, Antony recalls such a scene: “Here wast thou bay’d, brave hart, / Here did thou fall, and here thy hunters stand, / Sign’d in thy spoil, and crimson’d in thy lethe” (JC, 3.1.204-6). After that they field-dressed the carcass and awarded the “fees” to hounds and hunters according to longstanding practice.²¹

If Shakespeare had intended the audience to blame Duke Senior's party for an excessive indulgence in the chase for no better excuse than their sport, he could have made it known easily and forcefully. On the contrary, he does nothing of the kind. The dialogue avoids mention of any of the unmistakable features of the chase. The beasts are fallow, not red deer. We hear nothing of huntsmen, horns, horses, or hounds. Terms of the chase such as emboss or bay, which Shakespeare uses elsewhere, appear in this play only in their respective medical and geographic senses. Above all, apart from the argument of silence, the sport is, or was, ruled out by its glaring implausibility.

In this connection, it is to be remembered that a great many Elizabethans from the Queen to the ploughman understood the facts of hunting and shooting. Participation in, not to mention observation of, hunting at force, coursing with greyhounds, and shooting driven deer from stands was common enough for a citizen of London, one like Thomas Lodge the son of a Lord Mayor, to enjoy all three pastimes. In Letters Written by John Chamberlain During the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, ed. Sarah Williams, Camden Society ser. 1, no. 79 (1861; rpt New York: Johnson Reprint, 1968), pp. 114 and 150, Chamberlain reports from Ascot, 13 August 1601, that at Beckley Park “we coursed, and killed, and carried nothing away,” and at Woodstock “last weeke” had great sport bow shooting, presumably from a stand at driven deer. It must have been a real battue: he likens the volume of shooting to a soldiers' skirmish. Then, a year later, on 2 October, he mentions having been in at the chase of a huge stag “which we hunted at force” over two counties.

The many people familiar with the chase would hardly have imagined that a deposed duke hiding in the woods of a “desert inaccessible” with a few fellow exiles “whose lands and revenues enrich the new Duke” (1.1.102), fugitives who have left their “wealth and ease” (2.5.52) to play in “a woeful pageant” (2.7.138), could have got together the large number of expensive, delicate animals, a retinue of foresters and woodmen, grooms and farriers, stable boys and dog varlets, with carters, butchers, and others, and constructed for them necessary stables, kennels, courts, offices, and lodgings. One did not winter horses on picket lines or bed greyhounds and basset hounds in the rain and snow. In that connection, the Duke would need a number of kennels for the scores of dogs required to enjoy a holiday of several hunts a week, each kennel “a little house or lodge, with a spacious and large chimney in the same, wherein in the wintertime you shal allow fire, before which your dogs returned from hunting may stretch, pick, dry, and trim themselues.”²² The dog varlet lodged on the second floor of his charges' kennel. One does not seriously think that the noble proprietors would have returned from a wintry hunt to crouch in a cave, or that they “endur’d shrewd days and nights” (5.4.173) in woodland hovels. Surely their foresters or dog varlets would have taken them in.

On the grounds of silence and verisimilitude, we may dismiss the speculation of any specific leisure-time indulgence in the chase or hunt at force. The elimination of hunting on horseback now leaves deer shooting to be considered as the method.

Before the different ways of shooting deer are explained, it is useful to understand that they were not classed with the noble form of the chase or hunting at force. In Tudor opinion, the shooting methods had come to be tainted with crass utilitarianism. Elyot writes that, “Killing of deer with bows or greyhounds serveth well for the pot (as is the common saying), and there it must of necessity be sometimes used. But it containeth therein no commendable solace or exercise, in comparison to other forms of hunting, if it be diligently perceived.”²³ Turberville simply ignores shooting. In the Basilikon Doron, James warns his heir that “it is a thievish forme of hunting to shoote with gunnes and bowes.”²⁴ In Ben Jonson's The Gipsies Metamorphosed, Part I, lines 215-18, the Captain compliments James for being one who loves “a horse and a hound,” and “hunt[s] the brave stag not so much for your food, / As for the weal of your body and the health of your blood.” William Harrison had reported that the sale of venison by aristocrats excited strong popular disapproval, “infinite scoffes and mockes, euen of the poorest pezzants of the countrie, who thinke them as odious matters,” being one of “such like affaires as belong not to men of honor.”²⁵ Peacham, in turn, cites for his young gentleman reader the example of ancient kings who hunted “not to purchase Venison and purvey for the belly, but to maintain their strength, and preserve their health” (218).

One form of shooting, as will be seen, was certainly a pastime for princes and noble persons, but evidently not a noble pastime in the same sense as the chase. Today, Americans who kill deer for meat and by-products do not think of their activity as primarily a sport,²⁶ and apparently neither did the Elizabethans. The realization of this attitude toward pot hunting gives distinctive connotations to Duke Senior's command, “Come, shall we go and kill us venison?” (2.1.21), meanings that help us to understand the significance of the deer shooting in As You Like It. It is not a matter of noble sport; the Robin Hood type was not a sportsman but a survivor. He killed to eat.

For investigating the subject of shooting deer, two basic means remain to be considered. In one, stand-and-bow shooting, the shooter took a partially screened position (“stand”) in or near a bush where he had unobstructed aim at any animal passing him at close range. The Elizabethans used this arrangement in two very different ways. One I shall explain later, the other provided a fashionable, even spectacular entertainment for grand personages, especially women of high rank and eminent men who had passed their physical prime. In such events, the host's woodmen drove selected deer along a killing ground in front of the stands. Since some of the animals would be wounded rather than killed outright, foresters with greyhounds, and sometimes bloodhounds, stood by to run down and dispatch them. In order to regulate the drive and supervise the shooting, stand-and-bow entertainments took place in a large park, which was by definition enclosed with a “pale” or fence designed to confine herds of deer kept for meat and recreation and managed by the estate forester. The identifying details of such an amusement, put on in a royal park for the visiting Princess of France, are carefully mentioned in Love's Labors Lost. An elaborate one had been given for Queen Elizabeth in August, 1591, by Lord Montacute in his park at Cowdray where refreshments were served to the spectators and musicians played while the Queen shot deer with a crossbow presented to her by a Nymph singing a ditty.²⁷

Almost exactly one year later, two days of shooting were arranged for the heir to the Duchy of Württemberg, Count Frederick Mompelgard, at Windsor Castle, where, his secretary relates, “there are upwards of sixty parks … so contiguous that in order to have a glorious and royal sport the animals can be driven out of one enclosure into another, and so on; all which enclosures are encompassed by fences.” While no such shooting occurs in As You Like It, it does illustrate matters of interest in the play. The secretary's narrative continues:

And thus it happened: the huntsmen who had been ordered for the occasion, and who live in splendid separate lodges in these parks, made some capital sport for his Highness. In the first enclosure his Highness shot off the leg of a fallow-deer, and the dogs soon after caught the animal. In the second, they chased a stag for a long time backwards and forwards with particularly good hounds, over an extensive and delightful plain; at length his Highness shot him in front with an English cross-bow, and this deer the dogs finally worried and caught. In the third the greyhounds chased a deer, but much too soon [cf. 1H4, 1.3. 178, “Before the game is afoot, Thou still let'st slip.”] for they caught it directly. …

[Two days later], August 21st, … his Highness shot two fallow deer, one with a gun, the other with an English cross-bow; the latter deer we were obliged to follow a very long while, until at length a stray track- or blood-hound, as they are called, by its wonderful and peculiar nature, singled out the deer from several hundred others and pursued it so long, till at last the wounded deer was found on one side of a brook [cf. AYL, 2.1. 33, 35, “To which place a poor sequest’red stag … Did come to languish”] and the dog quite exhausted on the other [cf. Shr., Ind. 1.17, “(Brach Merriman, the poor cur, is emboss’d)”]; and the stag, which could go no further, was taken by the huntsmen, and the hound feasted with its blood.²⁸

In passing one notes that this historical example suggests contemporary realities behind some of Shakespeare's hunting images. For example, when Talbot realizes that he and his troops have been trapped by superior French forces, the park hunt metaphor defines his predicament exactly: “How are we park’d and bounded in a pale, / A little herd of England's timorous deer, / Maz’d with a yelping kennel of French curs!” (1H6, 4.2.45-47). More particularly, perhaps, we can see what the Princess of France had in mind when, taking her shooting stand, she said, “But come, the bow: now mercy goes to kill … Not wounding, pity would not let me do it” (LLL, 4.1.24, 26).

More directly to our subject, these examples suggest some of the reasons why it irks the Duke that the deer of “this desert city / should in their own confines, with forked heads / Have their round haunches gored” (AYL, 2.1.23-25). First, his “native burghers” are not captive park deer, such as we have just seen, but free wild animals, the ferae naturae that live under God and the sovereign “In their assign’d and native dwelling place” (63) in keeping with the divine dispensation (a text for this concept was Job 39:1-8). Second, a quick, clean kill largely depended on the physical fitness and skill of the archer. The preferred target was, and is, the heart-region seen broadside, but the cervine's slim, narrow conformation makes this small target just behind the foreshoulder difficult to hit. The other vital areas, the neck and the upper part of the head, present a small and restless mark. These well-known facts lie behind shooting exploits in romance and ballad, as well as incidents in the plays. Thus Robyn makes the perfect shot when he and Gandelayn go to the wood to get them meat: “Robyn bent hys joly bowe; / Therein he set a flo [arrow]. / The fattest der of alle / The herte he clef a to.” Again, the poacher-poet of the Prologue of The Parliament of the Three Ages (ca. 1350) illustrates the well-known fact that even a fatally wounded deer may still run for some distance before it falls, even though the shot had “the herte smote, / And happenyd that I hitt hym by hynde the lefte scholdire” (53-54), i.e., the preferred point of aim.²⁹

In Lodge's romance, Rosalynde comforts Rosader with the thought that wounded game sometimes escapes, saying, “What newes Forrester? hast thou wounded some deere, and lost him in the falle? … 'Tis hunters lucke, to ayme faire and misse: and a woodmans fortune to strike and yet goe without the game.”³⁰ The shot in the rump that Duke Senior speaks of, however, has not only that but other disturbing consequences. He would be further irked for reasons made clear by William F. Hollister, a wildlife biologist and bowhunter: “A rump or rear end shot is undoubtedly one of the worst that can be taken by an archer. Most modern bowhunters with any ethics and concern for the animal will pass up a rump shot. The likely effect on a deer hit with an arrow in [the] rump would more than likely result in a flesh wound in the ‘hams’. If, however, the arrow passes through the ‘hams’ into the intestines and paunch the chances are that animal will die a lingering death.”³¹ (Cf. AYL 2.1.33-37).

In the dramatic situation, a bad hit resulting in the animal's escape (such as is reported by the First Lord), means the loss of a hundred pounds or more of food, and even if the carcass be recovered, the haunch, which was esteemed to be the choice cut, may be totally spoiled. In As You Like It, “to strike and yet goe without the game” means a calamity. Even though hunting for belly cheer may be demeaning and irksome to a nobleman, the refugees in the Forest of Arden face starvation, and therefore in the play's given circumstances hunting is as natural and needful as it had been for millenniums of human existence. Moreover, an attentive reading or auditing of the play, especially of Act 2, confutes the opinion that “alfresco meals are abundantly provided … and there is no worse hardship than a salubrious winter wind,”³² or, in the criticism quoted above, that “In Arden hunting seems not clearly a necessity (in which case it might be excused), for fruit and wine are apparently available (2.6.98; 2.5.32).” On the contrary, hardships crowd Act 2, including affliction by unsalubrious winds both winter and summer (2.1.7; 5.8; 6.15; 7.174). Shakespeare stresses afflictions in Act 2, but one above all, and that is hunger. Because of the persistent denial of these dark facts, it seems appropriate to state the record of hunger that colors Act 2.

2.1.21. Come, shall we go and kill us venison?
2.3.31. What, wouldst thou have me go and beg my food?
2.3.43-45. Take that, and He that doth the ravens feed, / Yea, providently
caters for the sparrow, / Be comfort to my age! (Biblical allusions; Job 39.3
[Geneva; A.V., 38.41], Ps. 147.9, Matt. 10.29 and Luke 12.6, 24.)
2.4.64-66. … question yond man, / If he for gold will give us
any food; / I faint almost to death. (This distress is Shakespeare's
addition; in Lodge, they have food.)
2.4.73. Bring us where we may rest ourselves and feed.
2.4.80-83. My master is of churlish disposition, / And little reaks
to find the way to heaven / By doing deeds of hospitality. (Allusions are
seen to 1 Sam. 25, and, of course, to Matt. 25.31ff.)
2.4.85-86. … there is nothing / That you will feed on; but what
is, come see, …(33)
2.5.31-32. Sirs, cover the while; the Duke will drink under this tree.
2.5.39-41. [Who] loves to live i’ th’ sun, / Seeking the
food he eats, / And pleas’d with what he gets. …(34)
2.5.62. And I’ll go seek the Duke; his banket is prepar’d.
2.6.1-2. Dear master, I can go no further. O, I die for food!
2.6.16-18. … thou shalt not die for lack of a dinner if there
live anything in this desert. (And more, but no thought of fruit!)
2.7.88, 89. Forbear, and eat no more … till necessity be serv’d.
2.7.105. I almost die for food, and let me have it.
2.7.128-29. Whiles, like a doe, I go to find my fawn, / And give it
food.(35)
2.7.129, 132. There is an old poor man … / Oppress’d with
two weak evils, age and hunger …
2.7.171. Welcome, fall to …

All but one, then, of the seven scenes of Act 2 feature hunger and food, a dramatic fact quite disregarded by the commentators. Yet, as the Duke makes clear at the outset, in the woods one lives not only in hardship, but also in peril. It may be morally commendable to take refuge there from ambition, but it is a risky place to seek one's food. The Duke's opinion has corroboration.

In a possible source, Anthony Munday's The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntington, The Malone Society Reprints (1601; Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), 1. 670, Prince John succinctly describes the outlawed earl as “The banisht, beggerd, bankrupt Huntington.” When outlawed Fitzwater, “An aged man … Neere pin’d with hunger,” happens upon Maid Marian in the forest, she gives him wine, venison, and “a manchet fine.” He is welcomed like Adam (ll. 1517-27). Writing from experience, Spenser pictures the fate of the outcast Irish: “Out of every corner of the woods and glens they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them; they looked like anatomies of death.” When Spenser's vagrant Ape and Fox had “long straied … / Through everie field and forrest farre and nere,” they too “almost sterv’d.”³⁶ The Fox could hardly walk. In a famous scene, 2 Henry VI, 4.10, Jack Cade too illustrates the fate of one who fled to the woods (“Fie on ambitions”), where he fruitlessly sought meat for five days, when, weak and desperate for food, rather like Orlando, he draws upon Alexander Iden, who kills him.

The great dearth of the late nineties would have made hunger of concern (the noted poor relief statute had passed Parliament in 1597). Furthermore, Elizabethans could respond to the subject with a considerable empirical knowledge of diet—Adam gives a brief example in scene 3. Jaques' simile of the “remainder biscuit” (2.7.39) and his jibe about the marriage “but for two months victuall’d” (5.4.183) were not lost on them. They understood that people living north of fifty degrees latitude like themselves need a high energy intake, and the civil and military authorities and the masters and mistresses of large households and holdings gave feeding frequent attention. The protein-rich field rations prescribed for the Queen's troops represent contemporary thinking.³⁷

The commander of an isolated party forced to seek the food they eat would be eager to get protein-rich fresh venison, in Palamon's accurate phrase “lusty meat” (TNK, 3.3.27). Moreover, three literary analogues clarify for us the Duke's situation in these respects. In the source, Rosalynde, the exiled King of France and his outlaws, “frolikt it with store of wine and venison,” with which they feed Rosader and old Adam. Later these two refresh Saladyne with “A peece of red Deere … and a bottle of wine. Tis Forresters fare brother, quoth Rosader: and so they sate downe and fell to their cates.”³⁸ The analogue in the source behind Rosalynde, the romance of Gamelyn, comes closer when Gamelyn tells the outlaw king that he and Adam Spenser are seeking their food “under woode-shawes:”

He moste needes walke in woode                    that may not
walke in toune.
Sire, we walke not heer                    noon harm for to do,
But if we meete with a deer                    to sheete thereto
As men that been hungry                    and mow no mete find
And been harde bistad                    under woode-linde.

(Lines 672-76)

They are then bid to sit and eat of the outlaws' repast.³⁹ Third, Cymbeline, a later play (about 1610) yet one which resembles As You Like It with its deerhunting cave dwellers, who “are held as outlaws” (4.2.67, 138), a starving fugitive from the court and wilderness setting, presents a Shakespearean analogue with the deer hunting in Arden.

In straitened circumstances similar to those in the Forest of Arden, Belarius and the royal youths can kill deer in two ways only. One is the kind of stand-and-bow shooting that I have not yet described, often called still hunting nowadays, i.e., remaining quietly in concealment in a stand beside a deer run in order to ambush passing game. Sometimes a partner of the shooter tries to drive a deer to within range of the stand. An example occurs in 3 Henry VI, 3.1 where two keepers discuss the arrangements. The other way is stalking, i.e. working stealthily into close bowshot range without alarming the extremely wary beast; stalking is the demanding art of the “best woodman,” the tribute awarded Guiderius. Even after the adoption of the long-range rifle for Highland stalking, a Victorian authority described the successful practitioner as a superior type of man: “The model deer-stalker … should be of good proportions, moderately tall, narrow-hipped to give speed, and with powerful loins and well-developed chest for giving endurance and wind … He … should care neither for fatigue, nor cold, nor wet. … The bodily powers are not the only ones which should be well developed, for the brain should be as active and energetic as the body itself.”⁴⁰ And somewhat more. A man who could fence, wrestle, and pull the powerful long bow must have possessed similar physical qualities.

In any case, physical exertion gets attention in Cymbeline, which excludes hunting on horseback and mentions no dog. They start out at dawn (3.3.4, 7) when Belarius orders Guiderius and Arviragus, “Now for our mountain sport: up to yond hill, / Your legs are young” (10-11), and they return with their deer (75) “thoroughly weary” and “weak with toil” (3.6.36-37) to cook their “meat” (38-39), i.e. venison. Here, again, hunting means no trifling noble pastime, but an arduous pursuit of food, on foot with the bow and arrow in the usual way of banished men, outlaws, poachers, and others who “live i’ th’ sun.”

With their assumptions of pothunting and feeding on venison, all three analogues assume the hunters' charity. “If that he be heende and come of gentil blood,” Gamelyn asserts of the outlaw's king, “He woll yeve us mete and drink and doon us some good” (663-64). Moreover, being of “gentil blood,” a true aristocrat, and even more, a prince, was especially inclined to mercy because, unlike a churl, he was graced with a piteous heart, i.e. the capacity for “sacred pity” (2.7.123) which the Duke exemplifies.⁴¹

A historical analogue occurs in a book that Shakespeare probably had read, The New Chronicles of England and France by Robert Fabyan where, in Capitulum Clxxii, Alfred (“Alured”) the Great's charity to an old religious man changes his fortunes. Several close parallels between the circumstances of Alfred and Duke Senior are seen.

Alured, being thus overset in multytude of enemyes, as affermeth Policronica and other, ladde an uncertayne lyfe, and uneasy, with fewe folkes aboute hym, in the wode countree … and had ryght scante to lyve with, but suche as he & his people myght purchase by huntynge and fysshynge. [In whiche mysery, he thus by a certayne of tyme contynuynge, … Upon a tyme when his company was from hym departed and besyed in purchasynge of vytayle, … a pylgryme … requyred his almes in Goddes name … Then the kynge anone called his servant, that hadde but one lofe and a lytell whatte of wyne, and bad hym gyve the halfe thereof unto the poore man: … Shortly after his company retourned to theyr maister, and brought with theym great plenty of fysshe that they hadde than taken. …]

That night, in a vision, St. Cuthbert reveals himself as the pilgrim and promises Alfred victory over the Danes. “Than Alured, after this vysyon, was well comforted, & shewyd hym more at large. So … dayly resorted to hym men … tyll … he was strongly companyed.”⁴²

The uncertain, uneasy life of King Alfred and his few followers in the wooded country gives a good idea of that of Duke Senior, for he too would have “ryght scante to lyue with, but suche as he & his people myght purchase by huntynge and fysshynge.” Shakespeare makes abundantly clear in Acts 1 and 2 the impoverishment of the exiles and Orlando and Rosalind by the tyrants' confiscations and embezzlements (1.1.38-39, 102-4; 2.245-47; 3.65; 2.3.31; 5.52). Like the banished men and other fugitives in the sources and analogues examined here, the Duke's men suffer deprivation which forces them to seek their living in the sun like the outlaws idealized in “old Robin Hood of England.” In consequence they give not out of superfluity but out of exiguity.

Presumably the scattered references in 2.7 to the “banket” bill of fare pointed to food-simulating properties to be seen on the stage by the audience. In any case, only fruit is named (98), probably indicating local bush berries. In the circumstances, however, it would be a mistake not to overlook its significance as an attribute of personified Misery, for “His food, for most, was wild fruits of the tree,” Thomas Sackville tells us in The Induction of A Mirror for Magistrates (line 260).⁴³ Apart from fruit, the operative words are simply feed, food, and table. The dialogue supports two conclusions about the banket. First, food can hardly be abundant because the suppliant can only be offered “what help we have” (125), i.e., to the extent available to us. This implication is confirmed when the Duke assures Orlando, leaving to bring back Adam, “We will nothing waste till you return” (134). Second, while their food may be scanty, it must be substantial enough to revive the weak old man. “Let him feed,” urges their host, and “fall to,” expressions that suggest fare more substantial than, say, a bowl of berries. It seems logical that a cut of venison served as the expected pièce de résistance of the outlaws' woodland banket in the play as in the romances and Munday's Robin Hood plays.

We can conclude that they kill venison in As You Like It not for pastime but for food, and like woodmen or outlaws do so by shooting with the bow—probably the old-fashioned English longbow. Apart from Rosalind's “Love's keen arrows” (3.5.31), Celia mentions Orlando's bow and arrows (4.3.4) and Duke Senior speaks of wounding deer with the forked-head model (2.1.24). The deer that languishes by the brook has been shot, not chased. Moreover, Duke Senior has game shooting in mind when he remarks that Touchstone “uses his folly like a stalking-horse, and under the presentation of that he shoots his wit” (5.4.106-7). These outlaws shoot not for themselves alone, but for the common table of the band. Because for centuries hunters had shared their venison, they could typify on the stage one of the most distinctive human traits, the sharing of food.⁴⁴ The idea underlies Act 4, Scene 2, where the successful hunter's kill will be taken to the base camp to the Duke, who has not been with the party at all! Critics who accuse the Duke of indulgence in trifling pastime have not explained his absence from the deer kill.

The idea of hunting in As You Like It is to dramatize, first of all, the plight of the noble exiles. The particulars given us prevent our mistakenly supposing that they are carelessly passing the time in a happy, hunting holiday. In contrast, the introduction of the chase as their trifling pastime amidst an idyllic pastoral setting would be to trivialize and even falsify what began as a conflict of the virtuous and the loyal with the worldly unjust and capricious fortune. The first Act solidly establishes the reality of that evil and raises the issue of its remedy. To digress from this challenge into pastoral entertainments and anti-hunting topoi would be an artistically unjustifiable evasion of the dramatic issue that has been posed.

Presenting the deposed Duke and his loving lords as seeking their food with bows and arrows shows them reduced to means of survival that are both primitive and storied. Thus they identify with those outlaws in the analogues who “moste needes walke in woode that may not walke in toune,” and so become “hard bistad under woode-linde.” In the uncouth forest underneath the shade of melancholy boughs, they exist by their skill at pothunting. In addition to effecting this controlling circumstance, the idea of their hunting is to make clear the altruism of their sharing their scanty fare with Orlando and old Adam.

The idea of hunting makes other contributions to the play, of course, one being its rich allusiveness and symbolism.⁴⁵ But perhaps the essential idea flowers in Act 2, Scene 7 in the stage image of banished men, like outlaws and foresters, who, far from good men's feasts and where all things seem savage, welcome to their table two fellow players in this world's woeful pageant.

Notes

1. “Preface 1763,” in Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 7 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1968), 86.

2. My citations of Shakespeare are to The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947).

3. I discuss the pattern of hunting language in 2.1 (which determines the time of year and the species of deer) in “The Midsummer Deer of As You Like It, 2.1,” Philological Quarterly, 58 (1979), 103-7.

4. With reference to Rosalind's “martial outside,” cf. Faerie Queene, 4.2.42.9, “But speare and curtaxe both used Priamond in field.” Her weapons suggest a strong, tall girl. For the spear as an attribute see Adolf Katzenellenbogen, Allegories of the Virtues and Vices in Medieval Art, trans. Alan J. P. Crick (1939; rpt New York: W. W. Norton, 1964), 55. For boar and spear, James Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 49, 247, 288; Guy de Tervarent, Attributs et Symboles dans l’art profane 1450-1600 (Geneva: Libraire E. Droz, 1958): Minerva carries a hallbarde, col. 208, or a javelot, col. 224, as does Philosophy and, col. 225, Diana; also see lance, col. 230; and, col. 335, Sanglier, “Symbole ou Attribut de la Luxure.” Cf. Spenser's Sir Sanglier, the “wild boar.” Also, on boar symbolism, Beryl Rowland, Animals with Human Faces (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee, 1973), 38, and Marcelle Thiébaux, “The Mouth of the Boar as a Symbol in Medieval Literature,” Romance Philology, 22 (1969), 296-98. Ovid's Salmacis, a type of narcissistic lethargy, takes no hunting spear nor does she vary her ease with the hardships of the hunt. Hunting found approval as an antidote to sinful idleness.

5. Furthermore, Diana has a proprietary connection with the Forest of Arden; she and Apollo were patron deities of Britain (cf. the oaths by Apollo, Lr. 1.1.160). As Diana Nemorensis, or surnamed Arden, the huntress goddess presides over the Forest of Arden, which is above all not a pastoral but a hunting ground. These associations duly appear in Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion, where a nymph with a bow and arrows adorns the map of Warwickshire.

6. The chace du connin provided a classical hunting metaphor. Thus in the thirteenth century, with Ovid in mind, Jean de Meun speaks of his narrative as a “rabbit hunt” (ch. 81); see John V. Fleming, The Roman de la Rose: A Study in Allegory and Iconography (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), 186. D. W. Robertson, Jr., A Preface to Chaucer (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970) explains this familiar medieval “hunt of Venus,” 113, 263-64, and passim. Rosalind, in character, prefers the virtuous hunt of Diana. B. G. Koonce, Chaucer and the Tradition of Fame (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966), 111, n. 46, cites references including the Ovidian source. Marta Powell Harley, “Rosalind, the Hare, and the Hyena in Shakespeare's As You Like It,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 36 (1985), 335-37, arguing in part belief in the bisexuality of hares, relates the allusion to a latent “theme of homosexuality” (337) in the play. Actual hare hunting, coursing on horseback with greyhounds, was a popular upper-class recreation recommended for gentlewomen.

7. For the Duke's tracking hounds, slow goers with a true nose and a musical voice, see Henry L. Savage, “Hunting in the Middle Ages,” Speculum, 8 (1933), 36 (the Old Southern Hound or an allied type); C. P. Onions, ed., Shakespeare's England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1917), II, 347 (bassets); Sacheverell Sitwell, The Hunters and the Hunted (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 74 (bassets); and D. H. Madden, The Diary of Master William Silence, new ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1907), 47, 59, 78.

8. An early morning start adapts to the animal's habits; it often enabled the hunt to avoid the fatigues caused by the heat of the day. (Late hunts were shortened by being confined, as to a park.) The foresters first located one or more warrantable stags in their covert (“harbouring”) and presented the “tokens” of the animals' age and size to the assembled hunt: then, one being selected, it was roused from cover, the scenting hounds loosed on its trail, and the hunt was off. Turbervile's Booke of Hunting 1576, Tudor & Stuart Library (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908) devotes much attention to these preliminaries. Also, Shakespeare's England, II, 335-36; Madden, ch. 2 and 3; Marcelle Thiébaux, The Stag of Love: The Chase in Medieval Literature (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1974), 28-32. The early rising of foresters and hunters earned them admiring notice. On present-day practice, G. Kenneth Whitehead, Hunting and Stalking Deer Throughout the World (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982), 16-17, reports that when deer are in open country and can be easily located, “the stalk and shot can be taken during the middle part of the day, even though most of the deer will probably be resting. In dense woodland habitat, however, the shot normally has to be taken when the deer are at feed or on the move, and this is only possible at dawn and dusk.” Tudor bowmen would have followed much the same schedule, with a thought to saving daylight for the slow, arduous task of bringing in a heavy carcass unless they had a cart or pony for the purpose.

9. Michael Drayton gives an Elizabethan's impression of “that wondrous sport” of chasing the deer in the Forest of Arden in “Song 13” of his Poly-Olbion, and describes the occupation of a forester and the tools of his trade in The Sixth Nymphal. Edward, Second Duke of York, The Master of Game, ed. William A. and F. Baillie-Grohman (London: Chatto & Windus, 1909), apart from five original chapters, is York's translation (1406-1413) of Gaston de Foix, Comte de Foix, Livre de Chasse of which Savage says it “still remains unsuperseded in its knowledge of the habits of European game and its insight into the nature of hounds” (31). Much information about deer hunting ca. 1500 can be found in Margaret B. Freeman, The Unicorn Tapestries (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976). Robert Langham (or Laneham) gives eye-witness accounts of the hunts put on for the Queen at the Kenilworth entertainments, 9-27 July 1575 in A Letter, ed. R. J. P. Kuin (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1983). John Manwood, A Treatise and Discourse of the Lawes of the Forrest (London: Thomas Wight and Bonham Norton, 1598) deals with legal and managerial aspects contemporary with the play. T. R. Henn, The Living Image (London: Methuen, 1972) has useful background information, and G. Kenneth Whitehead surveys the subject in Hunting and Stalking Deer in Britain Through the Ages (London: B. T. Batsford, 1980). Turbervile's Booke of Hunting 1576, already cited, reprints the 1576 black-letter edition of George Turberville's Noble Arte of Venerie or Hunting. Although a study of German procedures, a valuable reference is David Dalby, Lexicon of the Mediaeval German Hunt (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 1965). Tudor writers emphasize the recreational and warlike benefits of pursuing deer with hounds and profess disdain for utilitarian pothunting—a distinction not always pragmatically evident.

10. Of modern usage Whitehead, World, 13, says, “In the United States of America and in many other countries, shooting—whether it be deer or birds—is generally referred to as ‘hunting.’ In Great Britain, however, the word ‘hunting’ is reserved for any sport that entails the use of hounds.” Sixteenth-century English usage was less restrictive, yet hunting with horses and hounds is virtually the only subject of the early treatises, with regard to deer.

11. Coursers are seen in the foreground of a painting of the great hunting estate of Nonesuch Palace by David Vinckboens in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

12. Draper, Mincoff, and Doran are quoted from extracts of their criticism in A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: As You Like It, ed. Richard Knowles (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1977), 523, 524, and 525 respectively. This edition is cited hereafter as The New Variorum. Uhlig, “‘The Sobbing Deer’: As You Like It, 2.1.21-66 and the Historical Context,” Renaissance Drama, NS 3 (1970), 103.

13. Judy Z. Kronenfeld, “Social Rank and the Pastoral Ideals of As You Like It,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 29, (1978), 338-39.

14. Robert Langham, 44-45, describes “the hunting of the Hart of fors,” and asserts that “in mine opinion thear can be none [pastime] ony wey comparabl to this.” For the Queen's ease that particular affair took place late in the day.

15. Turbervile, 109-10 and 9.

16. Thomas Dekker, Lanthorne and Candlelight, ch. 4, in The Guls Hornbook and the Belman of London (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1905), 209, and 210; the noblest hunters are those who chase the deer.

17. BAΣIΛIKON ΔΩPON. or His Majesties instructions to his Dearest Sonne, Henry the Prince (1599; rpt. London, 1603), 121-22.

18. Henry Peacham, Peacham's Compleat Gentleman 1634, Tudor & Stuart Library (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), 218.

19. Present-day versions of this sport exist in England and France. In his letter of 10 June 1986, Peter Atkinson, British Field Sports Society, informs me that, “Deer are still hunted with hounds in England as they have been for many centuries. There are three packs of staghounds all centred in and around Exmoor in the counties of Devon and Somerset, and they hunt the red deer. Bucks (male fallow) are hunted by the New Forest Buckhounds.” He adds that, “The coursing of deer is no longer carried out in any form of organized way …” Whitehead, World, reports, “Hunting deer with horse and hound—chasse á courre—is still a very popular sport in France and more than eighty packs are actively hunting either stag or Roe buck—or both—throughout the country” (45).

20. The Tudor kill and that of the present-day English hunt seem to be significantly different. Atkinson states that, “The hunting of deer ends when the animal stands at bay. It is then shot either with a specifically adapted shotgun or a humane killer. The deer does not stand at bay when it is exhausted. It stands at bay when it discovers that [it cannot] escape the hounds. The hounds know that the deer is capable of putting up a robust defense and stand clear of it …” Drayton's huntsmen, however, run the animal to a standstill, when, like Actaeon's, their hounds lay “their cruell fangs on his harsh skin.” Such an attack may be seen in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings.

21. The ceremony of “breaking up” the deer and awarding customary portions to particular members of the hunting party, and the hounds, varied from place to place. Turbervile, 127ff, distinguishes between an English and a French procedure.

22. G[ervase] M[arkham], Countrey Contentments (1615), 14. Cf. Shr. Ind. I, 16, 28-29, where, after a severe run, the Lord gives orders for the recuperation of his pack—but the pack probably ought not to be run again “tomorrow.”

23. Sir Thomas Elyot, The Book Named the Governor, ed. S. E. Lehmberg (London: Dent, 1962), 68.

24. The King's aversion (121) resembles that expressed by [Charles] Estienne and [Jean] Liebault, Maison Rustique, or, The Countrey Farme, trans. Thomas Surflet (1600), 837, i.e., “The hunting of fower footed beasts … is performed principally with dogs, horses, and strength of bodie,” but the use of ropes, nets, and toils is “more fit for holidaie men, milke sops, and cowards, then for men of valour, which delight more in the taking of such beastes, in respecte of the exercise of their bodie and pleasure, then for the filling of the bellie.”

25. Holinshed's Chronicles (1807-1808; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1965), I, 344.

26. On this attitude, see White-tailed Deer Ecology and Management, ed. Lowell K. Halls (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1984), 710. The Tudor upper-class feeling that for a gentleman pothunting is unbecoming contrasts with their ancestors' uninhibited slaughter of game for food, e.g. the drives cited in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Ballad of Chevy Chase. In fact, the Elizabethans appear to have eaten the deer they killed, whatever the means. The nine hundred or so English game forests and parks had long been a major source of meat.

27. R. Warwick Bond, ed., The Complete Works of John Lyly (1902; rpt. Oxford: Vivien Ridler, 1967), I, 421-30. Also, E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), IV, 65. Madden somewhat digressively discusses the shooting from a stand, 226, 229-36. In Anthony Munday's The Death of Robert Earl of Huntington, the Queen Mother shoots “Mounted in a stand. / Six fallowe deere have dyed by her hand.” See the Malone Society Reprint (Oxford: Univ. Press, 1965 [1967]), 11. 41-42. The men, with crossbows (13, 68-69), are coursing the stags and bucks.

28. Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, II, The Comedies 1597-1603 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), 47-48. The state of Württemberg had and continued to have good hunting; as late as 1914 grand-veneur was a Court post there as it still was in several royal households of Europe. Details in Lucas Cranach's painting, ca. 1529, “The Stag Hunt of the Elector Frederick the Wise” in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, though on a lavish scale, might suggest typical features in the Count's hunting. The activities of the three potentates and their loaders, seen in the foreground, illustrate stand-and-bow shooting of the organized kind that Shakespeare presents in LLL, 4.1.

29. “Robyn and Gandelyn,” Middle English Literature, ed. Charles W. Dunn and Edward T. Byrnes (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973), 519, lines 20-23. Likewise, The Parliament of the Three Ages, 240.

30. Rosalynde, Euphues Golden Legacie, in Bullough, II, 200. Later, 215, Rosader shoots a deer “that but lightly hurt fled through the thicket.” Also, in The New Variorum, 422, 437.

31. Principal Fish and Wildlife Biologist, Division of Fish & Wildlife, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, letter to the author, 7 January 1986. In Aeneid 7, Ascanius looses exactly this “worse” shot, striking Silvia's pet stag through the paunch and the flank: perque uterum sonitu perque ilia venit harundo (499). The stricken deer flees and reaches its wonted shelter with fateful results. The Princess of France stresses the need to strike home, “Not wounding, pity would not let me do 't” (LLL, 4.1.27), and mutilated Lavinia, “Straying in the park, / Seeking to hide herself” is like “the deer / That hath receiv’d some unrecuring wound” (Tit. 3.1.88-90).

32. Harold Jenkins, “As You Like It,” Shakespeare Survey 8 (Cambridge: Univ. Press, 1968), 43. Since then, two editors who recognize the need to hunt food are Agnes Latham, The Arden Shakespeare (1975), lxix, and Roma Gill, Oxford School Shakespeare (1977). The latter observes that the duke “makes us aware that this life is not … the pastoral existence imagined by poets; in real life, men must eat meat, and they cannot do this without slaughtering the animals” (xvi). Whether Stoic storm or Adam's penalty, wind and winter are ancient symbols of human afflictions; they teach us to know ourselves.

33. Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery (1935; rpt. Cambridge: Univ. Press, 1965), 119, finds that, “The number of food and taste similes in As You Like It is remarkable.” Corin's apology reminds the audience of the laborer's unpalatable diet of black bread, bacon, beans, and peas with milk or whey and cheese, a fact behind Orlando's sarcasm, “He lets me feed with his hinds” (1.1.19). In the hungry years from 1595 to about 1599, it could have been worse. See Andrew B. Appleby, Famine in Tudor and Stuart England (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1978), 5-7, and J. C. Drummond and Anne Wilbraham, The Englishman's Food, rev. ed. (1939; rpt. London: Jonathan Cape, 1957), 48-54 and passim. The use of fruit and vegetables was negligible; scorbutic ailments were common. The dramatic point is that Corin, the good shepherd, represents charity here (“I pity her”). In contrast, Corin's absent master ignores the Queen's order of 2 November 1596 “to stay all good householders in their countries, there in charitable sort to keep hospitality” for relief of the poor; see Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations, III (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1969), 172.

34. New Cambridge Shakespeare (1926), 180-81, interprets “to live i’ th’ sun” to mean “to live the life of an outlaw.” The Arden (1975) editor aptly notes “a covert and paradoxical allusion to the distinction between living easily, under a roof, and living roughly exposed to all weather. Cf. the proverb ‘Out of God's blessing into the warm sun’” (43-44). Unsurprisingly we are told at the end that they “have endur’d shrewd days and nights” (5.4.172). The New Variorum does not report these senses which also seem implicit in Amiens' concern that the “stanzo” will depress Jaques (10), and his own reluctance to sing it. Furthermore, Jaques already has his own “verse to this note,” one which ridicules it. He who is “pleas’d with what he gets” makes a virtue of necessity.

35. The simile fits a period of a fortnight or so either side of Old Midsummer Day (5 July N.S.), and is consistent with Corin's “still handling our ewes” (2.2.53), the bucks being in velvet (1.1.50), and Jaques' charge that his companions “fright the animals” (2.1.62). Fawn habitat was supposed to be left undisturbed at this time, i.e. the “Fence Month.”

36. As late as 1598, the Stratford district required relief from famine; see my, “The Dispraise of the Country in As You Like It,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 36 (1985), 310, n. 25. Shakespeare was required to report his holdings of corn and malt at New Place, 4 February 1598. The shortage of food cereals had seriously affected north Arden from 1596. According to V. H. T. Skipp's study of five parishes above Stratford, Crisis and Development: An Ecological Case Study of the Forest of Arden (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978), 37, the crisis there was “characterized by a steady build-up in the number of pauper burials, while after two or three years the deaths of wanderers, strangers and beggars are recorded: unfortunate people whose lives had been unhinged by the severities of the times, leaving them no alternative but to take to the road and ultimately to die on it.”

37. See C. G. Cruickshank, Elizabeth's Army, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), ch. 5, “Rations,” esp. 82, and 88-89, where an issue of 1598 is given as a typical ration. Entries in the State Papers are numerous. On the necessity of adequate rations, Cruickshank points out that, “Although the bow weighed little, only a strong man could get the best out of it” (86), a fact relevant to the play. Also T. R. Henn, 78, 83. With respect to large households, even the minor landed gentry might feed a score or more of workers and dependents.

38. Rosalynde, 196 and 220 (New Variorum, 418, 441).

39. “Gamelyn,” Middle English Verse Romances, ed. Donald B. Sands (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), 174.

40. Stonehenge (John Henry Walsh), British Rural Sports, 13th ed. (London: Frederick Warne, 1877), 132. A diet of fruit and wine would soon render even this paragon of stalkers unfit.

41. Of interest here is J. D. Burnely, Chaucer's Language and the Philosopher's Tradition (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1979), where the medieval concept of the association of pitee with gentilesse and the identification of the villain or churl with hardheartedness is explored. Traits of such psychological and moral types, including the tyrant, identify antagonists in the play.

42. Robert Fabyan, The New Chronicles of England and France, ed. Henry Ellis, rpt. from Pynson's ed. of 1516 (London, 1811), 167. The editions of 1542 and 1559 omitted the bracketed text for partisan reasons.

43. Sackville's Induction, A Mirror for Magistrates, ed. Lily B. Campbell (1938; rpt. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1960), 307, lines 260-62. Fruit sometimes suggests charity, and the angels brought fruit to Jesus in the wilderness (Hall, 134, 298). If Jaques' “reasons” (2.7.100) punningly (reasons = raisins) signifies grapes, as some believe, they might possibly recall Hosea 9.10: “I founde Israel like grapes in the wilderness.”

44. Glynn Isaac, “The Food-Sharing Behavior of Protohuman Hominoids,” Scientific American, 238:4 (April 1978), 90, writes, “Evidence for food-sharing by early manlike animals suggest it is the essence of being human,” and, 92, “Among members of human social groupings of various sizes the active sharing of food is a characteristic form of behavior.” In Elizabethan terms, sharing food obeys the natural law; in the play's opening scene the “unnatural” brother, Oliver, had denied Orlando a rightful place at his table. The green of the hunters' jackets visually signalled the play's appeal to love, hope, and regeneration, as well as the deer hunter's folklore-hero's role.

45. For some of the allusions and symbols, secular and religious, associated with stricken deer and the careless herd, see my, “To Moralize a Spectacle: As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 1,” Philological Quarterly, 65 (1986), 147-70.