Exemplaria

Medieval, Early Modern, Theory

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Shakespeare, Gascoigne, and the Hunter’s Uneasy

Conscience

Rob Wakeman

To cite this article: Rob Wakeman (2017) Shakespeare, Gascoigne, and the Hunter’s Uneasy
Conscience, Exemplaria, 29:2, 136-156, DOI: 10.1080/10412573.2017.1305603

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10412573.2017.1305603

Published online: 05 Jun 2017.

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Exemplaria, 2017
VOL. 29, NO. 2, 136–156
https://doi.org/10.1080/10412573.2017.1305603

Shakespeare, Gascoigne, and the Hunter’s Uneasy Conscience

Rob Wakeman
Mount Saint Mary College, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This essay explores prosopopoeia and anthropomorphosis as William Shakespeare; George
expressions of conscience, in good faith and in bad, in plays by Gascoigne; José Ortega
William Shakespeare and poetry by George Gascoigne. In order to y Gasset; animal studies;
reconsider José Ortega y Gasset’s assertion that hunting is a “poetic ethics; anthropomorphosis;
prosopopoeia
task,” I examine the hunting scenes of Love’s Labor’s Lost, As You Like
It, “Gascoigne’s Woodmanship,” and the complaint poems included
in The Noble Arte of Venerie. When faced with the prospect of a kill,
Shakespeare’s and Gascoigne’s hunters experience a moment of doubt
and hesitation, giving rise to a venatic rhetoric through which they
are called upon to justify the taking of life. Although recent work
in animal studies has persuasively demonstrated the importance
of anthropomorphosis and prosopopoiea for the enfranchisement
of nonhuman others within the moral and political imagination, I
consider the consequences of giving voice to animals in bad faith
which may disguise tyranny as conscientious sovereignty.

From at least the seventeenth century to the present day, sporting clubs across Europe and
North America have adopted the legacy of Saint Hubert of Tongres (c. 656–727), patron
saint of venery, to affirm the probity of hunting. In St.-Hubert, site of the saint’s tomb and
basilica, the church sanctions the conscientious killing of wild animals. St.-Hubert, the
soi-disant “European Capital of Hunting” and pilgrimage site for sportsmen from around
the world, hosts the “International Days of Hunting and Nature” on the first weekend of
September and the Feast of Saint Hubert on November 3 (Le Patrimoine Culturel Immatériel
de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles 2017). A village tourist brochure demonstrates how
hunting and religious cultures are still entwined in the Ardennes:
Une Grand-messe est sonnée en la basilique par les sonneurs de trompes de chasse. Au cours
de cette célébration à lieu la bénédiction des pains suivie de la bénédiction des animaux. …
Ces rites sont destinés à manifester la protection accordée par saint Hubert aux chasseurs et à
leurs animaux (chevaux, chiens, oiseaux de proie).

The hunting horns sound a High Mass in the basilica. During this celebration, the blessing of
the bread takes place, followed by the blessing of the animals. … These rituals are intended to
demonstrate the protection accorded by Saint Hubert to the hunters and their animals (horses,
dogs, hunting birds). (Le Pays de Saint-Hubert 2016, 39–40)

CONTACT  Rob Wakeman  rob.wakeman@gmail.com

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 EXEMPLARIA   137

Such a close relationship between hunting and religious culture may seem odd, given the
story of Hubert’s conversion. According to late medieval hagiographies, the young courtier
who devoted his life to the chase was hunting in the Forest of Ardennes one Good Friday
when he found himself confronted by a stag. The great animal, bearing an image of the
Crucifix between his antlers, asked: “O Hubert, Hubert, jusques à quand poursuivrez-vous
les bestes des Forests? jusqu’à quand cette vaine passion vous fera-t-elle negliger vostre
salut?” (Histoire en abrégé de la vie de S. Hubert 1678, 25; O Hubert, Hubert, how long will
you pursue the beasts of the Forests? How long will this vain passion make you neglect your
salvation?). In the middle of the chase, the voice of an animal — or something that seems
to emanate from the animal, whether it is the voice of God or the voice of conscience —
interrupts the venatic act. In the gap between the human and animal consciousness, a
prosopopoeic “voice” arises precisely at the moment of the kill, articulating reservations
and begging restraint.
In this essay, I explore the stag’s voice in the hunter’s imagination; more generally, I
investigate prosopopoeia as a mediator between human conscience and beasts of venery
within the political and ethical ecologies of the forest. Hubert’s encounter in the Ardennes
points us to the woods of two writers who test the ethical relationships between hunter and
hunted: William Shakespeare and George Gascoigne. Because personified animals in their
plays and poetry directly address the crisis of conscience occasioned by the decision to take
life, they solicit doubt and prompt hunters to come to terms with killing for pleasure. In the
vexing gap between the unsettled moral status of hunted animal and the legal prerogative
of the hunter, the hunters of Shakespeare and Gascoigne exhibit an uneasy conscience
thoughtfully inclined toward justice.
In Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost and in the complaint poems from Gascoigne’s Noble
Arte of Venerie, hunters find themselves called to justify their “detested crimes” (LLL
4.1.31) before putting animals to the sword.1 For As You Like It’s Jaques and the speaker of
“Gascoigne’s Woodmanship,” the wrongful deaths of a stag and a doe promote reformation
lest hunters commit themselves to further irreparable action. Anything but settled, the
political ecologies of these two writers subject the legitimacy of venery to constant inter-
rogation and transform seemingly untroubled predator–prey relationships into inquiries
of conscience. Before Shakespeare’s and Gascoigne’s poet-hunters raise their bows to shoot,
they search for words that will exculpate their imminent violence. What, they ask, distin-
guishes sacrifice from cruelty, honor from treachery, and hunting from assassination?2
This reading complicates recent scholarship that has examined how early modern poetry
recognizes the voices of animals and attests to their membership within the polity. Laurie
Shannon identifies a “political idiom” invoked in much early modern writing on animals
which denotes a “constitutionalist sense of legitimated capacities, authorities, and rights that
set animals within the scope of justice and the span of political imagination” (2013, 2–3).
Tobias Menely argues that eighteenth-century poetry of sensibility upholds human respon-
siveness to the “impassioned voice” of emotive and expressive animals as “the elemen-
tal medium of community” (2015, 2–3). Both of these models differentiate conscientious
sovereign from tyrant. But a savvy rhetor can undermine trust in interspecies politics by
misusing or abusing a claim to speak with an animal’s interest at heart. The murky crises of
conscience exhibited in Shakespeare and Gascoigne — where the gap between the arresting
conscience and the outward rhetoric of the hunter remains unresolved — leaves open the
question of whether the hunter represents animals in good faith or in bad. It may be that
138   R. WAKEMAN

these hunted animals are only brought into the moral and political imagination in order to
authorize honorable venery. Because these hunters have already decided to kill, these scenes
of doubt exist to shore up a hunter’s own sense of his or her legitimacy.
For his part, Saint Hubert, rebuked for the pursuit of flesh on the holiest of fast days,
converted to Christianity. He became the first Bishop of Liège and the “pioneer evangelist
of the Ardennes”; but — much to the relief of Christians fond of the chase — this speaking
stag apparently did not command Hubert to give up hunting entirely.3 Instead, the story
of Hubert’s conversion became a lesson in judicious restraint and the saint became a cele-
brated progenitor of hunting ethics and responsible deer management.4 The Reformation
diminished the stature of Saint Hubert in England, but George Gascoigne, author of six-
teenth-century England’s most comprehensive and popular hunting treatise, The Noble Arte
of Venerie (1575), still extols the virtues of the bloodhounds that “aunciently come from
Sainct Huberts abbay in Ardene”:
These are the hounds which the Abbots of Sainct Hubert haue always kept some of their race
or kynde, in honour and remembrance of the Sainct which was a hunter with Sainct Eustace.
Wherevpon we may coniecture that (by the grace of God) all good huntsmen shall follow them
into Paradise. (1575, 12–13)
This is the only mention of Saint Hubert in Gascoigne’s The Noble Arte of Venerie. But
Hubert’s speaking stag nonetheless echoes in the voices of hunted animals in Gascoigne’s
four complaint poems. “The wofull wordes of the Hart to the Hunter” begins with a hart
yielding himself to his human pursuer:
Since I to him appeale, when hounds pursue me sore,
As who should say (Now saue me man, for else I may no more.)
Why dost thou then (ô Man) (ô Hunter) me pursue,
With cry of hounds, with blast of horne, with hallow, and with hue?
Or why dost thou deuise, such nets and instruments, 
Such toyles & toyes, as hunters vse, to bring me to their bents?
The hart does not deny the legality of hunting per se, asking instead, “Why arte thou not
content, (ô murdryng cruell minde) / Thy selfe alone to hunte me so, which arte my foe
by kynde” (1575, 136–37). In other words, the hart questions why his natural “foe” should
require the support of hounds and implements, not to mention instruction from a hunting
manual. The fundamental issue here is not whether hunting is right or wrong, but what
constitutes wanton hunting behavior. While Hubert’s stag reprimands the saint for taking
pride in hunting over all other responsibilities, Gascoigne’s woeful hart accuses hunters of
clutching to unfair advantages out of vanity. In both cases, the harts decry sport hunting
not governed by honorable restraint, but by wickedness.
The emphasis on due process in early modern hawking and hunting manuals testifies
to the suspicion on the part of Gascoigne, Juliana Berners, Jacques du Fouilloux, George
Turberville, and others that there is something unjust about hunting. In many cases,
these manuals respond to the questions raised by the hunted animals’ complaint poems.
Gascoigne, for example, supports the woeful hart by admonishing, among other things,
the overuse of “toyles” (the large nets) used to corral game. When venery uses equipment
designed to kill great numbers of animals efficiently, neither hunter nor hound “learne
to hunte nor to quest” (Gascoigne 1575, 35). Nets may have their role in the hunt, but
 EXEMPLARIA   139

Gascoigne discounts their use when they deny deer a sporting chance. In response to the
doubts that undermine the morality of hunting, manuals provide a precise method for
how to (and how not to) properly pursue, kill, and dress a stag, and so temper the ethical
uncertainties that surround hunters’ bloody work.

Hunting’s “poetic task”

When, how, and why does one kill a member of the most regal species in the English forest
for a meal that only temporarily sustains the hunter? Paradoxically necessary and super-
fluous, hunting is an activity in which hunters take responsibility for the deaths of animals
even as they acknowledge their privileged participation in what was deemed a sport. Hence,
the ethical trap of the heterotroph, who must take more life from the world than he will give
back to it, disquiets even the most resolute conscience.5 Although all animals must eat and
must die, doubt still arrests the human hunter who strives to rationalize the luxury of his or
her sport. Even Meditations on Hunting, José Ortega y Gasset’s searching twentieth-century
paean to the venatic act, questions the moral rectitude of killing animals, the worth of the
animal, and the integrity of the hunter:
More than once, the sportsman, within shooting range of a splendid animal, hesitates in pulling
the trigger. The idea that such a slender life is going to be annulled surprises him for an instant.
Every good hunter is uneasy in the depths of his conscience when faced with the death he is about
to inflict on the enchanting animal. He does not have the final and firm conviction that his
conduct is correct. But neither, it should be understood, is he certain of the opposite. Finding
himself in an ambivalent situation which he has often wanted to clear up, he thinks about the
issue without ever obtaining the sought-after evidence. (1985, 88, emphasis in original)
According to Ortega, the morality of taking an animal’s life remains an open question, even
as hunters proudly celebrate the caboched head as a trophy. The hunter’s uneasy conscience
is symptomatic of the “equivocal nature of man’s relationship with animals”; it cannot be
otherwise, he maintains, “because man has never really known exactly what an animal is”
(1985, 88). But, for Ortega, recognizing the absence of certainty about what, if anything,
humans owe to animals shows that the sportsman is an ethical creature. In the expression of
doubt, Ortega sees the defining quality of “Every good hunter,” that is, a moral and political
imagination that demands deliberation before action.6
The need or effort to rationalize hunting gives rise to a rhetoric whereby hunters invent
arguments for their action’s integrity. As Ortega puts it, the hunter assumes “a poetic task,
like the playwright’s or the novelist’s; that of inventing a plot for his existence, giving it a
character which will make it both suggestive and appealing” (1985, 24). Ortega’s hunter does
not have to kill in order to eat; rather, he dedicates himself to hunting because killing in order
to eat provides moral edification. Ortega imagines recreational sport as part of the moral
education of noble persons entrusted with the right to take life in justified circumstances.
Confirming and rejecting Ortega’s thesis avant la lettre, the hunters in Gascoigne’s poetry
and Shakespeare’s plays frequently appear anxious in the moment before the kill, but the
plots that they construct are often more guilt-ridden than agreeable. By expressing doubt,
these characters tap into a cultural undercurrent of skepticism regarding the nobility’s role
as apex predator.7 In their apologias for early modern venery, Gascoigne’s and Shakespeare’s
hunters deploy exculpatory language that halfway redeems their grisly acts; but when these
characters make doomed animals speak on behalf of human agendas, their shame and
140   R. WAKEMAN

embarrassment are unmistakable. Although a poetic epitaph or eulogy for a dying animal
is often meant as a sign of respect, it seems all the more impure when it camouflages the
possibility that the kill may have no warrant at all.
Perhaps because it is less mechanical and less methodical than the slaughter of domes-
ticated food animals, scenes of hunting in early modern literature give rise to ethical quan-
daries less prevalent in the production of other meat. Especially in the case of error, the
hunter runs the risk of becoming a scavenger trying to salvage profit from carrion. Gascoigne
poses this hypothetical situation in “Gascoigne’s Woodmanship” (1573), a poem in which
he recounts his series of unsuccessful careers. This autobiography of botched ambition
culminates in a failed hunting expedition with his prospective patron, Lord Arthur Grey.8 A
lifetime of missteps produced a “tast of miserie” that has “bene always full bitter in his bit”
(Gascoigne 1983, 57–58).9 Now the prodigal and notoriously indebted Gascoigne appears
weary of his parasitism:
He cannot spoile the simple sakeles man,
Which is content to feede him with his bread.
He cannot pinch the painefull souldiers pay,
And sheare him out his share in ragged sheetes,
He cannot stoupe to take a greedy pray
Upon his fellowes groveling in the streets. (75–80)
Searching for a meal that will satisfy and sustain him, Gascoigne is struck by the predatory
dexterity of Lord Grey and his hunting party. Perhaps a successful hunt — the chance to
“put some experience in my mawe” (108) — will cleanse the taste of failure. Yet, when the
opportunity presents itself in the form of culling barren does before winter, “The hearde
goeth by, and farewell gentle does” (122). Transfixed in thought, he cannot act. Another
botched chance added to his vitae, Gascoigne supposes that he will be asked by Lord Grey
“[w]hat makes me misse, and why I doe not shoote” (126):
Let me imagine in this worthless verse,
If right before mee, at my standings foote
There stoode a doe, and I should strike her deade.
And then shee prove a carrian carkas too,
What figure might I finde within my head,
To scuse the rage whiche ruled mee so to doo?
Some myght interprete by playne paraphrase,
That lacke of skill or fortune ledde the chaunce,
But I must otherwise expounde the case.
I say Jehova did this Doe advaunce,
And made hir bolde to stande before mee so,
Till I had thrust mine arrowe to hir harte,
That by the sodaine of her overthrowe,
I might endevour to amende my parte. (127–40)
 EXEMPLARIA   141

In a particularly twisted bout of self-deprecation, Gascoigne evokes not only his consistent
failure to hit the right prize, but imagines the death of a pregnant doe, a beast who would
have nourished him in future lean winters. It remains to wrench a profitable lesson from his
terrible error. Hence Gascoigne taps his skill in poetic invention and promises to correct his
behavior and prodigal lifestyle, but false humility and faux-piety taint his reformation. “Let
me imagine” signals a rhetorical fashioning of the situation in order to make the kill seem
less clumsy or grotesque. Although others might settle for a “playne paraphrase,” Gascoigne
pauses and searches for the most persuasive language not only to “expounde the case,” but
to “scuse” his madness. A justification dawns on him: This was not butchery but an act
orchestrated by Jehova. Gascoigne has acted rashly, having been lured by “guylefull markes,”
which “though they glister outwardely like golde, / Are inwardly but brasse” (142–44). Now,
from this wreckage, he dreams up a moral lesson for his misprision. Anticipating Ortega’s
meditation on the hunter’s “poetic task” — to “invent a plot for the hunter’s existence” —
Gascoigne gives voice to the wrongfully killed deer:
And when I see the milke hang in hir teate,
Me thinks it sayth, olde babe now learne to sucke,
Who in thy youth couldst never learne the feate
To hitte the whytes whiche live with all good lucke. (145–48)
Not a triumphant predator but a suckling, Gascoigne imagines himself crossing over a thresh-
old of embarrassment that ought to lead to his reformation. But none of his poetic skill can
“amende” the dead animal, the bloody remainder of this disturbing object lesson. The Latin tag
at the end of the poem — Haud ictus sapio (151; Struck, but not understanding) — suggests that
Gascoigne’s hunt for the sustaining meal of patronage will always be undermined by self-doubt
and the suspect aims of his “rhetorical virtuosity” (McCoy 1985, 40).10
In “Gascoigne’s Woodmanship,” the ability to traverse the complex ethics of hunting’s
terrain relies, with questionable success, on the poet’s ability to invent a plot that will s­ atisfy
his doubts — Ortega’s “poetic task.” Concerned principally with himself in this poem,
Gascoigne does not quite acknowledge the baffling relationship between human hunter and
animals with an unclear moral status; instead, he authors a statement of faith or aspiration
designed to assuage his uneasy conscience. Shakespearean hunters find themselves in similar
rhetorical situations, but unlike the speaker of “Woodmanship,” characters in Love’s Labor’s
Lost and As You Like It pause to debate the virtues and abuses of hunting itself. For her part,
the Princess of France in Love’s Labor’s Lost expresses reservations about the leisureliness
of lethal sport: “Then, forester, my friend, where is the bush / That we must stand and play
the murtherer in?” (4.1.7–8). Perhaps to “play the murtherer” is to guard against actually
becoming one; but either way, if one speaks of “murdering” deer, then one is thinking of
them as subjects of the law. Here we see the Princess, though an experienced hunter and
an excellent shot, vacillating over the venatic act:
But come, the bow: now mercy goes to kill,
And shooting well is then accounted ill.
Thus will I save my credit in the shoot:
Not wounding, pity would not let me do’t;
If wounding, then it was to show my skill,
That more for praise than purpose meant to kill.
142   R. WAKEMAN

And out of question so it is sometimes:

Glory grows guilty of detested crimes,
When, for fame’s sake, for praise, an outward part,
We bend to that the working of the heart;
As I for praise alone now seek to spill
The poor deer’s blood, that my heart means no ill. (4.1.24–35)
Critics routinely read the play’s hunting interlude as an extended metaphor for the play’s
map of gender relations (e.g., Breitenberg 1992, 445–46). But, as I have been suggesting,
we should also ask why Shakespeare should use hunting specifically to occasion these self-
doubts and finely nuanced defenses. The Princess deliberates her kill from that hazardous
ethical ridge running between need and needlessness. Because missing, wounding, or killing
might each be “accounted ill,” she beats about for a defense that will preserve her “credit,”
although she seems fully alert to her bad faith. We know this because she has already asked
for the bow and committed herself to a predatory role. The Princess acknowledges the moral
complexity of the moment, then shoots.
In As You Like It, Duke Senior shares the Princess of France’s hesitation, but similarly
acknowledges his doubt only after he seems to have made the decision to kill:
Come, shall we go and kill us venison?
And yet it irks me the poor dappled fools,
Being native burghers of this desert city,
Should in their own confines with forked heads
Have their round haunches gor’d. (2.1.21–25)
Duke Senior follows the Princess of France in worrying that the wounding or killing of deer
might be counted as “detested crimes.” Should the deer in the forest be regarded as venison
for the pot or indigenous citizens deserving of immunity? If he and his party are the strangers
and the deer are the “native burghers,” then human desires should be subordinated to the
rules of the local jurisdiction and the best interests of the herd. Laurie Shannon argues that
Shakespeare frames Arden as “a place populated by citizen-creatures whose unhonored
entitlements persist in forms sufficient to irk or trouble interloping bipeds” (2013, 81).
But, for the Duke, acknowledging this bothersome niggle is enough to differentiate him
from the tyrant who does not need to take others into account. Recognition, and public
performance, of self-doubt serves to legitimate and uphold the enterprise as judiciously
conducted. When told that the “melancholy Jaques grieves at” Duke Senior’s hunting and
“swears you do more usurp / Than doth your brother that hath banish’d you” (2.1.26–28),
the Duke wants to hear more from this conscientious objector:
SENIOR: And did you leave him in this contemplation?
2nd LORD: We did, my lord, weeping and commenting
Upon the sobbing deer.
SENIOR: Show me the place.
I love to cope him in these sullen fits,
For then he’s full of matter. (2.1.64–68)
 EXEMPLARIA   143

Unlike the French Princess, Duke Senior decides not to hunt — at least not this time — opt-
ing instead to tussle with Jaques. But as the presentation of a dead deer to the Duke makes
clear in Act 4, Scene 2, the hunting party never bows to the complaint.
Like the speaker of “Gascoigne’s Woodmanship,” Jaques is a woodsman who thinks too
much. He is full of rhetorical flourish, but lacks the desire to act; his head is full of figures,
but his hands remain empty (4.1.21–25). When Duke Senior asks if Jaques “moralize[d]
the spectacle” of the hunting accident, the First Lord relays Jaques’s epitaph for the stag:
O, yes, into a thousand similes.
First, for his weeping into the needless stream;
“Poor deer,” quoth he, “thou makest a testament
As worldlings do, giving thy sum of more
To that which had too much.” Then, being there alone,
Left and abandon’d of his velvet friends,
“Tis right:” quoth he; “thus misery doth part
The flux of company.” Anon a careless herd,
Full of the pasture, jumps along by him
And never stays to greet him; “Ay” quoth Jaques,
“Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens;
‘Tis just the fashion: wherefore do you look
Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there?”
Thus most invectively he pierceth through
The body of [the] country, city, court,
Yea, and of this our life, swearing that we
Are mere usurpers, tyrants and what’s worse,
To fright the animals and to kill them up
In their assign’d and native dwelling-place. (2.1.43–63)
Jaques’s language here approaches the bathetic, but its manner is quite different from the
self-doubt of the speaker seeking patronage in “Gascoigne’s Woodmanship.”11 Much of the
scholarship on Jaques describes him as “hysterical” (Hunt 2008, 18), a “fabulist” (Daley
1986, 154), a “dilettante” (Scoufos 1981, 220), or a “social dropout or alienated intellectual”
whose melancholy is explicable only as a fashionable “pose of intellectualism” (Bennett 1976,
190). Questioning why Jaques should profess such sadness, Judy Z. Kronenfeld writes that
he indulges in “the luxury of woe” since “it surely is a luxury to weep for deer when men
are unkind” (1976, 459).
Criticism of Jaques’s anthropomorphosis of the stag is based both on doubts about the
sincerity of his feelings and the extent to which he co-opts the stag’s perspective to advance
his own agenda. Robert B. Bennett describes Jaques’s eulogy for the sobbing deer as an
“absurdity” rife with category mistakes; anthropomorphosis commits the linguistic sin of
misrepresenting the elements of nature, “measur[ing] their actions by a standard of respon-
sibility that is properly demanded only of humans. Jaques is also in error when he judges
man’s rule over the deer in societal terms of tyranny and usurpation” (1976). According to
144   R. WAKEMAN

Bennett, laws “bind” a man only “with members of his own kind” (1976, 196). Robert N.
Watson argues that Jaques’s inauthenticity is the symptom of incurable “Pyrrhonist anxieties,
the suspicion that we can know things only as we liken them, never in or as themselves”
(2006, 77). Watson deems treatment of deer as citizens, or even as “the native burghers of
this desert city” (2.1.23), as perhaps even more sinister than hunting. Readings that see
“emotional aid and comfort to the animal rights movement” in As You Like It impose the
modern environmentalist’s sentimental vision of idyllic and innocent nature onto what
Watson sees as the wild’s natural state, nothing less than “open sporadic warfare.” A moralist
such as Jaques “becomes all the more invasive the more he tries to be sympathetic. … The
‘bankrupt’ but fashionably ‘velvet’ deer, abandoned by companions ‘full of the pasture,’ does
not need Jaques’s tears, any more than the stream needs those of the deer.” According to
Watson, such moralism is the epitome of human narcissism and, like hunting, it is simply
another tactic to gain control of nature (2006, 82).12
Steven Doloff ’s suggestion that the sobbing deer recalls the story of Cyparissus in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses might, at first, seem to support Watson’s argument (1994: 487–88). In Arthur
Golding’s translation, Cyparissus befriends and domesticates a “goodly mighty stag” whom
he wreathes with “sundry flowers between his hornes vppon his hed.” Because the domesti-
cated stag has “quyght / Forgot his natiue fearefulnesse,” Cyparissus’s animal companion does
not flee while the young man sports in the grove. One day, while hunting, the “Unweeting
Cyparissus” — unwitting or uninformed — “with a Dart did strike this Hart / Quyght
through. And when that of the wound he saw he must depart, / He purposd for too die
himself ” (Ovid 1567, 125r).13 The god Phoebus honors the repentant Cyparissus’s last request
by transforming him into a cypress tree so that “he myght thenceforth from moorning
neuer rest.” This tale might be read in light of Watson’s argument that an over-fondness for
animals may precipitate tragic consequences. But Cyparissus’s expression of conscience also
part-way atones for his botch by uniting human and nature through melancholy, evidenced
in Phoebus’s ad memoriam for his beloved: “The God did sigh, and sadly sayd. Myselfe shall
moorne for thee, / And thou for others: and ay one in moorning thou shalt bee” (Ovid
1567, 125r–25v). Hence, Cyparissus’s error was not too much love for the one domesticated
stag, but a lack of attachment to all other creatures. In his “unweeting,” unthinking failure
to hesitate in the moment before he threw his spear, Cyparissus fails to anthropomorphize
and is left bereft.
Critics who deride anthropomorphosis too frequently underestimate the intelligence and
rich emotional lives of animals. What they label “anthropomorphic” is often recognition of
a capacity shared by humans and many other species of animal. Recently, the Dutch cog-
nitive ethologist Frans de Waal has proposed turning this accusation on its head, coining
the term “anthropodenial” to protest a priori assumptions of human/animal dissimilarity.
Because expressive behavior is intelligible across species lines, at least to the trained and
attentive observer, De Waal proposes “shifting the burden of proof and ask[ing] those who
wish to avoid humanlike terminology [to describe animal behavior] to first prove that a
tickled ape, who almost chokes on its hoarse giggles, is in fact in a different state of mind
from a tickled human child” (2016, 25). From this perspective, category mistakes do not
stem from projecting across the divide between human and animal, but from assuming an
insurmountable divide existed in the first place.14
Critics who deride anthropomorphosis as a facile attempt to overcome the epistemologi-
cal abyss that separates humans and animals often point to Michel de Montaigne’s skepticism
 EXEMPLARIA   145

regarding the knowability of nonhuman minds, encapsulated in the famous query from “The
Apology for Raymond Sebond”: “When I am playing with my Cat, who knowes whether she
have more sport in dallying with me, than I have in gaming with her?” (Montaigne 1603,
260).15 But while the chasm between humans and nonhumans is wide, few who work with
animals would claim that it is absolute. Shannon argues that Montaigne recognizes “play”
as a form of “cross-species imitation,” which “testifies as strongly to another’s prerogative
as it may be possible to do” (2013, 123). For Montaigne to imagine his cat playing with him
is not anthropomorphic, if anthropomorphosis means the projection of uniquely human
qualities onto nonhuman others, since many species engage in play behavior.
The Belgian philosopher of science Vinciane Despret further vindicates “play” as the
space in which animals (both human and nonhuman) come to know and understand alien
minds. By breaking down the ontologically sequestered categories of human and animal,
interspecies play enacts mutuality. For Despret, play is the ground on which animals feel
each other out and learn the limits of acceptable behavior:
When animals play, they employ a range of behaviors that are relevant to other spheres of
activity: they attack, they play dead, roll on the ground, lie down, wrestle, follow one another,
threaten, run away … If misunderstandings are rare, it is because playing can only exist on
the basis of an agreement and attunement [un accord] that is constantly being expressed and
realized. (2016, 78)
Even though there are limits to how well human and nonhuman animals can understand
the minds of others, play and sport can establish common ground for what is considered
honorable: “when one carefully observes animals playing, it is clear that play implements a
well-defined sense, on the part of the animals themselves, of what is and what is not just, of
what is acceptable and what is subject to disapproval — in short, the manners and codes of
morality” (Despret 2016, 78). The relationship between play and ethics surely is present in
hunting as well, which depends upon a sense of fairness to distinguish itself from bloodlust
and to maintain its legitimacy (Ortega 1985, 49–51). Hunting, in which “game” is pursued as
“sport,” takes the ethical stakes of interspecies attunement to their bloody extreme. Though
it does not result from “play” exactly, the effort to inhabit another’s mind, to understand
another species’ perspective, and to trace the limits of good morality is evident both in
Gascoigne’s keys to a successful hunt and in Jaques’s testimony for the slain beast.
I want to suggest that we can take Jaques’s apostrophe for the dying stag as pontification
in its most literal etymological sense: a bridge-making between the experiences of humans
and animals. For the attentive observer trained to recognize and interpret the expressive
behavior of animals — such as an experienced hunter — As You Like It’s dying stag is
anything but inscrutable. The stag’s struggling movement, bellowing, sobbing, and other
outward behaviors can be described in figurative language that does not aspire to jurisdic-
tion or power over him. The poet does not necessarily project human experience in order
to imagine the perspective of the beast nor does the use of figurative language necessarily
demonstrate anthropomorphic intent. C. M. Coolidge’s Dogs Playing Poker is anthropo-
morphic; contemplating the anguish of an injured beast is not. The figurations of animal
minds are necessarily approximations of the thing being represented; but if we are to care
about the suffering of animals, then surely it is better for us to attempt to meet the animal
halfway than not at all.
Jaques’s epitaph for the stag points beyond consumers and commodities to a more mean-
ingful relationship between humans and nonhumans rooted in political affect. Responding
146   R. WAKEMAN

to the sobbing deer’s groans, Jaques both certifies the human subject’s authority in the
forest and grants the stag a respectable place within the cultural and political imagination.
Although most productions of As You Like It treat Jaques’s sentimentalism with some con-
descension, no production or critic denies the facts of the sobbing deer’s situation, only
the values implied by Jaques’s epitaph. It is essential to recognize that the First Lord and
Amiens confirm the grievous wound, the deer’s heavy lowing, and the “big round tears”
which “Coursed one another down his innocent nose.”16 Significantly, it is not Jaques —
often upheld as the paradigmatic example of “melancholic attention to the animal voice”
(Menely 2015, 152) — who animates the deer’s pain for the audience. Instead, the audience
only imagines the stag’s cries because of the First Lord’s visceral and affecting ekphrasis.
After the stag “had ta’en hurt,” he “come[s] to languish” at the bank of the brook where he
“heav’d forth such groans / That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat / Almost to
bursting” (2.1.34–38). These signs amount to preponderance of evidence, legible to the
exiles: the visibility of the animal’s wound, the audibility of his pain, and the plausibility
of his innocence do not suggest anthropomorphosis at all, but recognition of the ways in
which a deer is able to express himself. To argue, as does Robert Bennett, that we should
be suspicious of Jaques’s melancholy because Arden is “remarkably free from the kind of
conditions that usually induce the malcontent state” (1976, 187) is to discount the mean-
ingful connection made between the human mind and the nonhuman suffering reported,
not only by Jaques, but by the First Lord as well. Arden may be free of hardship for Duke
Senior or Rosalind, but this poetry recognizes the wounds, groans, and melancholy of those
deer whose habitat has been transformed into a game farm.
In his critique of Jaques’s pathetic language, Robert Watson argues that “[r]epresentation
is a symptom, not a cure, of otherness” (2006, 91). Still, Shakespeare’s play suggests that
where a cure is impossible, representation of the hunted animal can at least prompt pause
and reflection before a hunter commits himself to an irreparable action. If Duke Senior’s
assembly is to hear the full range of perspectives in Arden, Jaques’s literary representation of
and political advocacy for the wounded stag must call attention to the network of relations
that binds hunter and hunted.
For Shakespeare, the manner in which Jaques “pierceth through / The body of the coun-
try, city, court” points to how interspecies relationships are embroiled in larger systems
whether political, economic, ecclesiastic, or ecological. Animal cries constitute testimony
in the court of human concern; they remind us that injustice works across species lines
even as they point to a common ground where, as Ovid’s Phoebus says, human and nonhu-
man can be “one in moorning.” Objections to anthropomorphosis erect boundaries across
which other species either may or must not trespass. Were the First Lord to have reported
dispassionately — were he not to have described the deer as a “poor” stag or a “wretched”
animal — his refusal of pathetic terms would only have served to demarcate an exclusive
domain of exceptional humanity that disenfranchises animals from pathos.
Even if Jaques believes that no one understands his lament and even if he believes that
the dying stag is not comforted by his sympathy, we might understand Jaques’s railing as an
appeal to the collective conscience of Arden. As Christopher Tilmouth writes, humanist dis-
course in the period conceived of the voice of conscience as an “imaginative experience” or
a “public, open, mutual mode of moral consciousness” (2009, 502–3). Living a conscientious
life required one to “cultivat[e] an external scrutinizing of his soul, in which respect con-
science begins to be constituted as something exterior to the self, an experience generated
 EXEMPLARIA   147

in conjunction with other men” (503). While Tilmouth’s study of early modern conscience
emphasizes conscience’s role as primarily concerned with the regulation of human interac-
tion, I have been arguing that the anthropomorphic representations of animals, particularly
through the prosopopoeic voice, serve as comparable witnesses to interspecies affairs. It is
true that some who read signs in the body of a dying deer, such as the speaker of “Gascoigne’s
Woodmanship,” act in bad faith by intentionally misrepresenting the voice of the animal they
claim to translate. But Jaques’s aim is harder to pin down because the text does not reveal
whether or not he knows he is being watched by the rest of the hunting party. Regardless, by
imagining the dying stag as a moral observer of human actions, Jaques’s commentary puts
Duke Senior’s party under the animal’s critical gaze and prompts conscientious reflection.
When hunted animals issue formal grievances against economic and political systems
about which, as nonhumans, they can have no clear concept, we are dealing with good
old-fashioned anthropomorphism. For example, the animals of Gascogine’s complaint
poems, which I discuss below, include invectives against landlords who fleece old widows,
hypocritical priests, and other matters alien to woodland creatures. But Jaques’s stag does
and says nothing that is not proper to the behavior of a stag, nor do Shakespeare’s charac-
ters endow the deer with any characteristics or stature that would be inappropriate to the
political ecology of the forest. To regard a wounded stag as an indecipherable “hieroglyph”
(Daley 1986, 105), as many critics do, is both to discount how well early modern woods-
men understood the ethology of their animal neighbors and to risk pushing the beast to
the margins of insignificance.
According to critics of the pathetic fallacy, animals are as unaided by human emotional
response as the stream is “needless” of Jaques’s tears. But short of lexical signs common
to human and nonhuman, prosopopoeia is a vital tool for the translation of an animal’s
bodily passions into a “testament” that invites human response and action. In As You Like
It, Jaques’s moralizing prompts characters and audiences alike to adjudicate the debate
over hunting’s virtues and vices, as well as the needlessness and necessity of sympathetic
feeling for nonhumans. Measured use of prosopopoeia, by affiliating the conscience of a
human hunter with the voice of a dying stag, enables a better understanding of cross-species
entanglements among Arden’s predators and prey.17 Figuration is not the perfect bridge; the
animal denizens of the wood remain alien others, never fully assimilated into the polity by
anthropomorphic language or sympathetic feeling, but I would say with Orlando that this
should not foreclose the “desire [that] we may be better strangers” (3.2.258).

Testament poems and speech prostheses

Savvy rhetorical invention may or may not assuage the consciences of the proponents and
detractors of hunting. As the Princess of France, Duke Senior, Jaques, and the speaker of
“Gascoigne’s Woodmanship” debate the merits and demerits of feeling too much or feeling
too little for animals, each aims to win the support of the polis within the forest and without.
Each speaker expresses concern for a doomed deer, evading or addressing whether or not
it is right “to fright the animals and to kill them up / In their assign’d and native dwell-
ing-place” (AYLI 2.1.62–63). But in these plays and poems the rhetoric of hunters neither
completely convinces nor satisfies its audience. Gascoigne worries that Lord Grey might
laugh at his justification ( 6), while Duke Senior settles for “cop[ing]” with Jaques over the
148   R. WAKEMAN

analogy between hunting and usurpation (AYLI 2.1.67). Perhaps animals’ last wills and
testaments provide more clear and effective instruction about ethical obligations toward
nonhumans. Jaques himself references this genre when he responds to the dying stag’s
groans and acknowledges that the “Poor deer … makest a testament / As worldlings do,
giving [his] sum of more / To that which had too much.” This is to invoke a minor tradition
of sixteenth-century “last will and testament” poems written in the voices of nonhuman
entities (see Wilson 1994, 163–64).
Sometimes these poems serve anthropocentric interests, as in John Lacy’s Wyl Bucke His
Testament (c.1560). There, a hunter, having struck a buck in the haunches with an arrow,
tracks the injured beast “from .viii. of the clocke tile noon” until he finally brings his quarry
to bay beneath a “brode pawme.” The narrator hears the buck speak and accepts his request
to “Make his Testament, yet [e]r he dyed.” The hunter takes out pen and ink to set down these
last words, noting that such a plea “shuld not be denied.” Wyl Bucke proceeds to bequeath
his body to the many members of the hunting party. Some parts of that body are awarded
to persons according to their rank, some according to their utility, but everything is given
away. The buck’s bladder is fit for a purse, and his tail becomes a tassel for the hunter’s horn.
The remainders of the “cabage[d]” head are thrown to the dogs, the “tuell” is tossed to the
crows, and the “Rauens morsel” is left on “a thorne faste” for whatever scavengers may creep
into camp.18 Sinews are given to the assembly’s harpists so they may “makith meri soundes,”
while the pudding-wife is handed his “blode & [his] guttis” so she can make tasty morsels
for the king (Lacy 1560, A2r–A3r). The deeper Wyl Bucke dives into his body, the more this
“last will and testament” takes on the form of a menu. If not voluntarily, Wyl Bucke accepts
and submits to his preordained place at the dinner table. Once gobbled up, nothing will
remain but the document produced by his killer.
While Lacy’s poem cum receipt book downplays the fraught relationship between ani-
mal and hunter in order to dwell on the hunting party’s orderly meal, other works in the
“last will and testament” tradition bring into the open the animal’s discomfort with this
arrangement. The complaint poems by George Gascoigne included in The Noble Arte of
Venerie (1575) manifestly present the taking of an animal’s body as willful usurpation, not
as fated victory. In “The wofull wordes of the hart to the hunter,” the hart despises the fact
that “nouriture” taken from his body “[w]ill still prolong mens dayes on earth, since mine
so long endure.” The long-lived Hart, elder to the young man who kills him, is extinguished
to satisfy the hunter’s ephemeral lusts. Men deny harts the opportunity to feed on grains
in human fields, but then feel entitled to take flesh from the stateliest stags: “Must I with
mine owne fleshe, his hatefull fleshe so feede, / Whiche me disdaynes one bitte of grasse,
or corne in tyme of neede?” (1575, 139).
Gascoigne’s four complaint poems — “The wofull wordes of the hart to the hunter,” “The
hare to the hunter,” “The Otters Oration,” and “The Foxe to the Huntesman” — are all framed
as the last testaments of victims to their killers.19 Each animal claims that defenses of hunting
only seem self-assured because the beasts of venery cannot articulate their objections in
the form of (human) speech that is required to address injustice. The incapacity to speak
renders the animal’s body susceptible to exploitation. The lack of common language between
human and animal seems to make a common multispecies polis impossible. When Reynard
the Fox is charged with crimes against human property, he pleads his case by emphasizing
his inability to plead his case:
 EXEMPLARIA   149

IF dogs had tong at will to talke in their defence, 

If brutish beast might be so bold, to plead at barre for pence, 
If poore Tom Troth might speake, of all that is amysse, 
Then might would beare no right a down: then men would pardon this. (Gascoigne 1575, 197)
When Reynard rues animals’ (and “poore Tom[s]”) inability to take part in a legal system
that systematically punishes vermin, Gascoigne anticipates modern philosophers and liter-
ary scholars who argue that it is impossible for humans to have relationships with animals
without speech understood by both parties. But it is neither mawkish nor naive to presume
that animals are aware and can communicate (to different extents) their fears, desires,
pleasures, and discontents through other forms of embodied expression.20
By including these poems in The Noble Arte of Venerie, Gascoigne has these animals
address an audience of hunters that knows as well as anyone, and probably better than most,
that animals can communicate across species barriers since hunters arouse the sexual desire
of their prey by imitating their mating calls. And yet, representing the significance of the
animal’s voice requires prosopopoeia’s mediation. To render the animal intelligible to the
novice readers of The Noble Arte, the trained expert in ethology must take and transcribe
the testimony of animals. Nonhumans require proxy orators who will faithfully account for
what they have to say. For this reason, Bruno Latour argues for the creation and deployment
of “speech prostheses” that can enfranchise nonhumans and render them intelligible in
political terms (2004, 69). If, as Latour argues, scientists spoke quarks and climate change
into existence in the twentieth century, in the early modern period we see last will and tes-
tament poetry serving as speech prostheses for animal suffering and for the provocation of
conscience. We may be justifiably suspicious of the motives behind Gascoigne’s Noble Arte
and Lacy’s Wyl Bucke animal testaments. While Latour argues that speakers for nonhumans
should be “reliable witnesses” and “credible spokespersons” (2004, 110), the proxy orators
in these poems are the hunters responsible for killing the parties they seek to represent. As
it was for Shakespeare’s Princess of France and Duke Senior, evidence of hesitation occurs
only after the decision to kill has been made.
The question of why Gascoigne should interrupt his hunting manual and Lacy his receipt
book to include animal testimony has incited a fair amount of speculation (Borlik 2011,
171–72). Some have even argued that Gascoigne intends to undermine the ethical justifi-
cations for hunting by including these animal complaints (Bergman 2007, 71–73; Palmeri
2016, 62–63). But I propose that these poems serve to demonstrate the conscientious sov-
ereignty of the hunter who seeks to distinguish himself from the tyrant. Able to listen to
criticism before passing judgment, Gascoigne’s hunters, like Shakespeare’s Duke Senior, cope
with their opponents. According to Latour, a well-composed politics forbids “simplify[ing]
the number of propositions to be taken into account in the discussion” (2004, 105, emphasis
in original). The complaint poems’ use of prosopopoeia, which we might take to be another
version of Latour’s speech prosthesis, allows the convocation of disparate subjects of the
law on common ground. And, if these animals are indeed moral subjects, it is not anthro-
pomorphic for the conscientious hunter to hesitate and wonder if these animals deserve
representation at the bar. As Latour writes: “the barbarian sees barbarians everywhere, the
civilized being sees civilized beings everywhere” (2004, 208). Hence, by pausing to entertain
the doubts put forward by these complaint poems, the hunter establishes himself as sensitive
to hunting’s ethical quandary and responsible for the moral weight of the venatic moment.
150   R. WAKEMAN

The distinguishing feature of the last will and testament tradition is not anthropomorpho-
sis — which transforms a nonhuman into a human — but prosopopoeia — which personifies
the nonhuman by granting it speech. Crucially important is the political distinction between
the anthropos — the human — and the prosopon — the person, empowered by a speech
prosthesis. Prosopopoeia’s granting of voice to the nonhuman expands the politeia so that
the conveyance of personhood is not restricted to human entities.21 When complaint poetry
affords animals legal standing, conscientious hunter-poets argue that certain legal rights
should extend to nonhuman actors even in the face of their nonhumanity.
Laurie Shannon points to a plethora of early modern writers who were not wholly
convinced that there was an unbridgeable divide between human and nonhuman; because
these authors reveal “a substrate of substantial likeness [across species lines], such an identi-
fication cannot be described as anthropomorphism” (2013, 10). The language of multispecies
“membership” in a common Creation — used in texts ranging from the Bible to Conrad
Gessner’s Historiae Animalium to Montaigne and Shakespeare — fosters what Shannon calls
a “fundamentally political idiom [that] characterize[s] the state of relationship thought to
hold among the world’s creatures. In calling this idiom ‘political,’” she continues, “I do not
refer to a general acknowledgment of power between humans and animals, but to a con-
stitutionalist sense of legitimated capacities, authorities, and rights that set animals within
the scope of justice and the span of political imagination” (2013, 3) .22
In Shannon’s argument, seeing signs in the world or hearing animal speech corresponds
to the tradition of a legible Book of Nature that makes “‘the Word’ an attribute of God, not
an index of humanity” (2013, 46, emphasis in original). However, for Gascoigne and Lacy
at least, it remains significant that the killed animals explicitly use the language of appeal
which calls upon the human addressee to transcribe, evaluate, and judge the testaments.
Because legal personhood is essentially poetic in character and because the personification
of animals depends on their representation by sometimes duplicitous humans, the authen-
ticity of the animal voice can be more slippery than Shannon suggests.23 If done with care,
prosopopoeic speech prostheses open the polis to a world of previously unheard nonhuman
perspectives; but prosopopoeia can also reinforce existing hierarchies, as in Lacy’s receipt
book, in which the deer Wyl Bucke creates a prix fixe menu for the consumption of his own
body. Gascoigne, for his part, claims a narrow middle path. He makes a finely articulated
distinction that balances the hunter’s prerogative with the moral status of noble animals.
This framework defends the human right to keep livestock, hunt animals, and eat meat,
but it also respects legal and moral responsibilities to “beasts of venerie” as matters of good
conscience. As Gascoigne puts it:
I woulde not haue my wordes wrested to this construction, that it were vnlawfull to kill a Deare
or such beasts of venerie: for so should I both speake agaynst the purpose which I haue taken
in hande, and agayne I should seeme to argue against Gods ordinances, since it seemeth that
suche beastes haue bene created to the vse of man and for his recreation: but as by all Fables
some good moralitie may be gathered, so by all Histories and examples, some good allegorie
and comparison may be made. (1575, 125)
Gascoigne’s complaint poems instruct “Princes and Potestates, yea and generally to all
estates, that they [should] bridle their minds” (1575, 125). Reminding the reader that what
is legal is not always ethical, Gascoigne argues that the methods and aims of hunting sanc-
tioned by God’s “ordinances” must be further subjected to “good moralitie.”24 Thus opens
 EXEMPLARIA   151

a notable gap between Watson’s Hobbesian forest, a site of “open sporadic warfare,” and
Gascoigne’s appeal to collective conscientious regard for hunted animals about to be killed.
The complaint poetry in As You Like It and The Noble Arte of Venerie does not prompt
hunters to abandon hunting. Instead, hunters sharpen increasingly nuanced defenses of
conscientious killing while they lament the deaths of ill-killed beasts. The stag for whom
Jaques weeps will die slowly and painfully thanks to the hunter’s poor aim. The complaint
poems, too, take up the morality of hunting methods and the ethic of good conduct — not
whether hunting itself is right or wrong.25 Although Gascoigne appears to disparage his
hunting manual as a “busie booke, / A looking Glasse of lessons lewde, wherein all Huntes
may looke,” the target of these poems’ complaints is fashionable hunting, not the “noble arte”
of what Gascoigne sees as humanity’s ancient inheritance (1575, 137). Such a distinction has
less to do with the language of a nascent animal rights movement than with a vision of an
enforced judicial order. The hunter’s sympathy for food animals does not secure their right
to live; it legitimates their deaths before they are judiciously and courteously dispatched.
Gascoigne’s “last will and testament” poems defend animals from excessive violence at the
same time that the hunting manual as a whole ennobles the good and thoughtful hunter’s
snout-to-tail feast.
When Touchstone tells us that Arden has “no temple but the wood, no assembly but
horn-beasts” (3.3.50–51), those “buts” evidently mean that Arden is not a “desert [unin-
habited] city” (2.1.23) after all. The forests of Saint Hubert, Shakespeare, and Gascoigne are
populated by personified stags who speak knowingly to the uneasy conscience of hunters.
When poets answer these voices, they inevitably recognize affinity between humans and
impassioned deer, and, indeed, all creatures of appetite and suffering. As prosopopoeia
mediates the species divide, the animal voices in testament poems compensate for the
hunter’s violent intent by producing sympathetic feeling while reaffirming the standards
that distinguish noble art from modish pastime, moderation from superfluity, conscientious
sovereignty from tyranny. Even when the claim to speak for animals is made in bad faith,
the perspective switching that such poetry encourages recognizes the incompleteness or
arbitrariness of multispecies politics and perpetuates the doubting conscience. Such uneas-
iness is inarguably preferable to the anthropocentric alternative that regards noble beasts
as disposable commodities, unassimilable to the laws of good conduct and fair treatment.

Notes
All quotations from Shakespeare follow The Riverside Shakespeare (1997), 2nd ed., eds. G.
1. 
Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin.
2. 
The twentieth-century philosopher and celebrant of venery, José Ortega y Gasset, considers
whether hunting animals is anything short of “assassination,” whether animals are aliens
who live beyond the polis or neighbor species whose animal existence we do not transcend.
Death, he writes, “is enigmatic enough when it comes of itself … But it is much more so when
it does not come spontaneously but instead is produced by another being. Assassination is
the most disconcerting event that exists in the universe, and the assassin is the man that we
never understand” (1985, 88–89).
3. 
On the role of the monasteries of the Ardennes in the regulation of hunting, see Arnold
(2012, 132–39, 204–9).
4. 
According to their website, the chapters of the International Order of St. Hubertus across
Europe and North America exist to “promote sportsmanlike conduct in hunting and fishing”
(International Order of St. Hubertus 2017). The Saint Hubert Club of Great Britain contributed
152   R. WAKEMAN

to the reform of deer management in England by advocating for the replacement of efficient
but indiscriminate and inhumane “shotgun drives” with more surgical methods of culling
herds (Saint Hubert Club of Great Britain 2015).
5.  A heterotroph is an organism “which requires an external supply of energy contained in
complex organic compounds to maintain its existence.” OED, “heterotroph, n.”
6.  Although my emphasis here is on how hunters respond to crises of conscience, and not
on the ontological statuses of human and animal, it is worth noting that, for Ortega, these
moments of hesitation are crucial to distinguishing humans from other animals. According
to Ortega, the spectacular interspecies combat of the hunt “occurs through almost the entire
zoological scale” (1985, 46). But it is the capacity to pause and reflect on moral ambiguity
which separates human from nonhuman hunters. While I agree with Tobias Menely that “the
very imperative to sanction [animal] exploitation as lawful reflects not only the insecurity
of the human self-definition but also, more enigmatically, the force of a claim to which the
assertion of rightful dominion must be seen as a reaction” (2015, 8), the hunters I discuss here
perform “humanity” through doubt and deliberation. Instead of the “acts of violence and of
differential allocation of care” identified by Karl Steel (2011, 14) as the demarcators of human
and animal, it is these hunters’ expressions of conscience, rather than the reiterative tyrannical
display of power, that warrants the distinct category of human and justifies human sovereignty.
7.  On the class tensions of early modern venery, see Manning (1993, 57–64) and Berry (2001,
133–58).
8.  Gillian Austen says that Gascoigne’s self-presentation as an inept hunter is a “thoroughly
disingenuous pose given the expertise he displayed in the Noble Arte [commissioned and
published two years later]” (2008: 66).
9.  All citations from “Gascoigne’s Woodmanship” are from The Anchor Anthology of Sixteenth-
Century Verse, ed., Richard S. Sylvester (Gascoigne 1983). Citations refer to the lines in the
poem and appear parenthetically in the body of the essay.
10. On Gascoigne’s nimble manipulation of rhetorical situations, see also, Hedley (1981, 154–56).
11. Many scholars understand this scene primarily in terms of anthropomorphic sentimentalism.
The suitability of the scene for allegorization, or what Duke Senior calls moralizing, is apparent
enough, but I am asking why it should be that hunting scenes should beg for moralization.
For discussions of the velvet, fat, bankrupt deer as zoomorphic representations of humans,
see Daley (1986, 155); Fitter (1999, 200–5); Egan (2006, 101–2).
12. Bruce Boehrer largely agrees, arguing that it is “suspicious,” “sentimental,” even “particularly
noxious” “to think of nonhuman animals as subjects.” Such thinking requires fantastic,
unfounded leaps that endow animals “with the mental and emotional furniture of human
experience” (2010, 2–3).
13. OED, “unweeting, adj.”
14. Anthropomorphism has its fair share of defenders. See Borlik (2011, 182); Estok (2007, 68);
Ingold (1988, 84–99); Raber (2013, 19–22).
15. On Montaigne and the unknowability of animals, see, for example Watson (2006, 68); Willis
(1988, 66–71).
16. In “Of Cruelty,” Michel de Montaigne invokes the sight of a sobbing dear as he describes his
own unease with hunting: “As for me, I could never so much as endure, without remorse and
griefe, to see a poore, sillie, and innocent beast pursued and killed, which is harmelesse and
voide of defence, and of whom we receive no offence at all. And as it commonly hapneth,
that when the Stag begins to be embost, and finds his strength to faile-him, having no other
remedie left him, doth yeeld and bequeath himselfe vnto vs that pursue him, with teares suing
to vs for mercie” (1603, 239–40). Deer were widely believed to weep at their own deaths due
to their moist and melancholy nature. In the thirteenth song of Poly-Olbion, Michael Drayton
describes the death of a hart in a Warwickshire hunt in similar terms: “He who the Mourner
is to his owne dying Corse, / Vpon the ruthlesse earth his precious teares lets fall” (1612,
217). Gascoigne writes about the “tears” of deer in “The Wofull wordes of the Hart to the
Hunter” (1575, 137). These tears are actually an eye discharge that could be made into a gum
believed to have medicinal properties. The tear-like appearance of this discharge probably
 EXEMPLARIA   153

strengthened the cultural association of stags with melancholics. See also, Schleiner (1980,
176–77) and Cartmill (1993, 76–91). On the connection between Jaques and Montaigne, see
Fudge (2006, 74–79).
17. Cf. Elizabeth Costello’s description of Ted Hughes’ poetry in J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of
Animals: “In these poems we know the jaguar not from the way he seems but from the way
he moves. The body is as the body moves, or as the currents of life move within it. The poems
ask us to imagine our way into that way of moving, to inhabit that body. With Hughes it is
a matter — I emphasize — not of inhabiting another mind but of inhabiting another body”
(1999: 51). The language used by Jaques and, especially, the First Lord similarly invites the
audience to inhabit the body of the dying stag.
18. The “cabage” is the “crown of a deer's head which bears the pedicels, from which the antlers
arise.” OED, “cabbage, n.1, II4. “Tuell” refers to the “anus; the rectum, or lower bowel: now
chiefly of animals, esp. horses.” It can also refer to the vent on a pie crust or pasty. OED,
“Tuel, n.”
19. “The wofull wordes of the hart to the hunter” is a loose translation of Guillaume Bouchet’s
“Complainte dv Cerf, A Monsivr dv Fovillovx,” included in Fouilloux’s La Vénerie. The other
complaint poems are Gascoigne’s originals.
20. Writing about the poetics of sensibility in the eighteenth century, Tobias Menely’s The Animal
Claim provides a stirring examination of the ways in which “human beings are always in
communication with other animals” (2015, 13). Menely traces a direct line from responsivity
to expressive animals in the poetry of Alexander Pope, James Thomson, Christopher Smart,
and William Cowper to animal welfare legislation at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
21. As Paul Willis points out, Duke Senior’s “sermons in stones” aligns him to an exegetical Book
of Nature tradition, where the forest can be read as a text (1988, 65–67). Todd Borlik builds
extensively on this line of argument by examining how the republican language of As You
Like It encourages a rethinking of human tyranny over nature (2011, 165–204).
22. Thomas Lodge also envisions the avian “Citizens of Wood” (1592, L4v) as a community where
sympathy extends across species lines and Philip Sidney depicts the “wood” seeming “to
conspire with [Kalender’s hunting party] against his own citizens” (1590, 40). The tradition
of political idiom continues today, as seen in lamentations for the death of “The Emperor of
Exmoor,” a hart largely regarded as the largest in the United Kingdom, killed by poachers in
2010, much to the dismay of many of his human subjects (Jones 2010). A similar fate befell
the 350 lb., 16-year-old “Monarch of New Forest” in 2014 (Salkeld 2014).
23. On the relationship between personification and the recognition of rights and protections,
see Johnson (1998, esp. 571–73).
24. Some objectors did decry hunting as immoral per se. Agrippa, in Of the Vanitie and
Uncertaintie of Artes and Sciences, and Thomas More, in Utopia, denounce hunting as a
repugnant pastime. However, their criticism is based not on consideration for animals, but
on hunting’s animalization of humans. See Berry (2001, 24–26); Uhlig (1970, 94–95n46).
25. Charles Bergman offers a different view, speculating that Gascoigne’s bloody experiences with
the mass slaughter of deer in the parks of his various prospective patrons (as at Kenilworth in
1575), led him to entertain “fundamental question[s]” about animals’ “presumed inferiority
to humans” and the decency of hunting. The complaint poems, in Bergman’s view, represent
Gascoigne’s inability to “contain these ethical and metaphysical doubts” (2007, 72). Gillian
Austen, however, has persuasively shown that The Noble Arte of Venerie was completed before
the Kenilworth hunts (2008, 105–9).

Acknowledgments
This essay benefited dearly from the generosity of Ted Leinwand, Theresa Coletti, and Kristin Allukian,
as well as the anonymous readers for Exemplaria.
154   R. WAKEMAN

Notes on contributor
Rob Wakeman is Assistant Professor of English at Mount Saint Mary College in New York. His cur-
rent book project centers on the cultural and ecological values associated with methods of turning
animals into meat in Tudor and Stuart England. His published or forthcoming research includes
essays on living nativity scenes, soil ecology in medieval biblical drama, and Arthurian children’s
literature and the medical humanities.

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