Shakespeare and the Hunt: A Cultural and Social Study. By Edward Berry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xi + 253; 10 illustrations. $59.95.

No other English Renaissance dramatist uses imagery of the hunt as pervasively as Shakespeare. "One poem and eight of the plays include hunting scenes or episodes, and hunting imagery recurs throughout the canon. Shakespeare's plays are unusual not only in the frequency of their allusions . . . but in the impression of technical mastery" that they convey (p. 14). Whether Shakespeare himself ever hunted (let alone poached, as in legend, the Charlecote deer) is unknown; but as Edward Berry points out, "throughout his life he was situated-economically, socially and geographically-on the margins of the culture of the hunt" (p. 14). The town boy had access to forest; the London dramatist served also the court; and the coat-of-arms procured official entrŽe into the privileged world of the chase. ("Not without antlers," Ben Jonson may have sniffed, as he looked about New Place.) Fascinatingly, the image of a trapped creature ringed by predatory attackers "haunts Shakespeare's imagination" (p. 218), from Talbot's extended metaphor of defiance in 1 Henry VI ("desperate stags / Turn on the bloody hounds," IV.ii.50-51) and the assassination of Julius Caesar, to the blinding of Gloucester, the humiliation of Falstaff at Herne's Oak, and the murder of Coriolanus, among others. (Such preoccupation may prove of interest, I think, to those who think Shakespeare a Catholic in the England where Walsingham manhunted; but it may equally derive from the actor's tensile experience of the encircled Elizabethan stage.)

Chris Fitter
Rutgers University at Camden