![]() In medieval churches and cathedrals, leaf masks are carved into stonework as decorative motifs, stubborn leftovers from a pagan past. More benignly, green men and woodwoses (wild men of the woods) are key characters in the dramatis personae encountered in fields, woods and forests. “Heavily armed accompanied by a remarkably democratic mixture of friends, eager household servants, and people from the local village (sometimes including the vicar), men who had deer parks of their own, regularly broke into those of their neighbours, viciously assaulting keepers and killing more game than they could carry away.” Barton paints a vivid portrait of a group of poachers as a motley crew of unruly thrill-seekers united by blood-thirsty machismo. Popular tradition holds that Shakespeare, too, may have been a poacher in his youth. The gentry, and even nobility, engaged in poaching – either for fun or to pursue family vendettas. Poaching was widespread and, though illegal, was not regarded as socially disreputable. He even insisted on being lowered into the gaping bellies of dead stags in the belief that the blood would strengthen his ankles. Her successor James’ passion for the chase, writes Barton, “verged on the pathological”. Elizabeth I was a keen hunter, as well as being readily associated by poets in her courtly cult with Diana, virgin goddess of the hunt. Complex laws gave royalty rights and privileges to hunt deer and boar. Hunters, poachers and wild men of the woodsįorests were all about hunting – a pastime seen as preparation for warfare. Like the theatre itself, the forest is a place of transformation, growth and change. The origin of many of our current environmental anxieties can be found in the early modern period, and in the writings of Shakespeare and his contemporaries they too were concerned by deforestation and pollution. ![]() Shakespeare wrote for the ‘wooden O’, as the open-air, timber-framed Globe Theatre is described in the Prologue to Henry V. In his Description of England in 1587, William Harrison commented that both England and Wales “have sometimes been very well replenished with great woods and groves, although at this time the said commodity be not a little decayed in both”. Trees provided timber for house and ship building, fuel for cooking and heating. It was even said that a squirrel could jump from tree to tree right across the county of Warwickshire.īut this forest was already in decline in Shakespeare’s time. His birthplace, the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, was once surrounded by the ancient woodland of the Forest of Arden. The maiden name of Shakespeare’s mother Anne was Arden. The names of these forests and woods entered the lexicon. If Britain is wooded today, it was much more so in Shakespeare’s lifetime. We ‘touch wood’ to forestall ill fortune. We talk about ‘not being able to see the wood for the trees’ and ‘not being out of the woods yet’. The English language is rich with references to wood and woods. The opening chapter reminds us how big a part woodland plays in the story of the British Isles. The six chapters of The Shakespearean Forest set the playwright’s work within a historical, social and literary world of forests, as well as exploring the surviving evidence for the ways in which forests might have been staged in the early modern theatre. Woods and forests in the English language In an editor’s note, Lees-Jeffries describes Barton’s seminars, held in her beautiful rooms at Trinity College, as often intimidating but always with a sense of occasion. It has been prepared for publication by Dr Hester Lees-Jeffries, a former research assistant to Barton and now a Shakespeare scholar herself, and a University Lecturer in the Faculty of English. Now Cambridge University Press has published The Shakespearean Forest, Anne Barton’s final book, based in part on her Clark Lectures in 2003. She was vitally interested in performance and staging, and her work has substantially altered and enriched the ways in which Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists have been understood and performed. Her many published works included Essays, Mainly Shakespearean (1994) and Ben Jonson, Dramatist (1984), and she was also an influential editor of Shakespeare’s plays. When in Macbeth Birnam Wood does come to Dunsinane, Macbeth knows he is doomed.īarton, who died in 2013, was Professor of English and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. In As You Like It, the Forest of Arden is a place of freedom, transformation and love – but also hardship for the shepherds who work there. ![]() Shakespeare uses forest settings, sometimes magical, sometimes menacing, in many of his plays. Forests are where we get lost and meet wild men, where chaos rules and anything can happen. Fear and forests, writes Shakespeare scholar Professor Anne Barton, go hand in hand.
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