Playing the Murderer

The hunting scene in Love’s Labour’s Lost makes use of many complex associations, as Farah Karim-Cooper explains.

In the fourth Act of Love’s Labour’s Lost, the Princess and her entourage appear with the accoutrements of the hunt, ready to deliver the final blow to the deer being driven towards them by the King and his friends.

The spectacle of female hunting would have carried two very specific connotations for Shakespeare’s audience. Firstly, it would have invoked the Roman goddess Diana (or the Greek Artemis). She was the goddess of hunting and wild places, who roamed the countryside with nymphs as companions. As the brutal myth of Diana and Actaeon suggests, the virgin goddess resented the tactless masculine intrusion into her domain. Actaeon, while out hunting, stumbles upon her as she is bathing. In her fury, she changes him into a stag, whereupon he is chased and torn apart by his own hunting dogs.

Secondly, the huntresses in Shakespeare’s play may have also referred to Queen Elizabeth I herself. Often named ‘Diana’ in the poetry which praised her, the Virgin Queen was described as a model of ideal womanhood who shared at least two other important qualities with the goddess: both encouraged an idea of feminine power and both loved the hunt. Many Elizabethan courtiers participated in the tradition of praising their Queen as though they were lovers subject to the whims of a mistress. But just as courtiers are subject to their queen, and lovers to their mistress, so are deer to their hunters. It is likely that Shakespeare is drawing our attention to this dynamic when he dramatises the eloquent Princess and her ladies hunting in the woods.

A contemporary treatise on hunting demonstrates the relationship between the Queen and this popular sport. The Noble Arte of Venerie (1576) by the courtier, soldier and pioneering dramatist George Gascoigne, while providing instruction about the rituals and practices of hunting, contributes to this tradition of courtly praise. Gascoigne praises the Queen by using hunting as a metaphor and suggests that Elizabeth’s courtiers are like subservient lovers.

Gascoigne’s book also illustrates praise of an altogether more visceral kind. According to tradition, after a hart (or male deer) was killed the huntsman or ‘forester’ would kneel and hand a hunting knife to the monarch, who would stab the carcass of the animal. A woodcut from the book depicts this practice, showing the forester giving the knife to the Queen to make the first cut into the slain hart. This ritual was a form of flattery, suggesting the Queen’s position as ruler not just of the social and courtly worlds but of the natural world, too. At the same time it symbolised her right to exercise the violence occasionally expected of a monarch.

Shakespeare’s word-play in the hunting scene of Love’s Labours Lost draws subtly on all these associations to suggest the violence implicit within sexual pursuit. In fact, in common with much of the play, the word-play is so elaborate that words become almost detached from their meanings, allowing hunting and courtship to be interchanged and showing the parallels between these two favourite Elizabethan pastimes. When the Princess says –
Then, forester, my friend, where is the bush
That we must stand and play the murderer in?
– she acknowledges the brutality of the sport in which she is about to participate. But the sport involved is not just hunting, it is wooing, too. The Princess and her ladies play ‘murderers’ in the sport of love and the bow and arrow of the hunt become conflated with the bow and arrow of Cupid himself.

However, these attitudes are not necessarily constant or straightforward. The Princess’s slight distaste for hunting, clear in the lines, ‘As I for praise alone now seek to spill / The poor deer’s blood, that my heart means no ill’, may also suggest her reluctance to engage in sexual warfare with the King. Like Diana and her band of nymphs, the Princess and her ladies choose to reside in an Elysian landscape, outside the world of the court, reinforcing their bond with nature and simplicity.

These complex correspondences between hunting and courtship have a further parallel in the characters’ attitude towards language. Although it would seem that traditionally the male lover is in the position of the hunter and the mistress in the position of the hunted, in Love’s Labour’s Lost it is the women who hit their marks. While the men over-decorate their speeches with clichés, rhetorical devices and puns, it is the Princess and her ladies who possess the greater command of their weapons (their tongues) in the verbal games of courtship.

According to Baldesare Castiglione’s The Courtier, the famous Renaissance handbook of courtly life, hunting required ‘a great deal of manly exertion’, and many writers of the period emphasised the masculine nature of hunting. But hunting also had very specific associations with female power – and it is these associations that Shakespeare may be asking us to contemplate in this play.

Dr. Farah Karim-Cooper is Lecturer, Globe Education and Visiting Research Fellow of King’s College, London.

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