‘The Hunt is Up’: Death, Dismemberment, and Feasting in Shakespeare’s Roman Tragedies

Abstract

Critics have noted the prominence in Shakespeare’s Roman tragedies of the related discourses of hunting, sacrifice, and ceremonialism. The emphasis on ritualism and aberrant feasting in these plays finds its echo in the par force hunting, which evokes in order to deny the subjectivity of the noble quarry, casting the deer as both worthy adversary and aestheticized corpse. Early modern hunting manuals describe the ritualism at the conclusion of the aristocratic hunt, formalised ceremonies which enacted an elaborately ceremonial dissection and distribution of the body of the slain quarry, drawing their symbolic charge from the inherent violence of the hunt and its sacrificial emphasis on the dead animal’s physical dismemberment. Exploring the interactions between hunting, ritualism, and sacrifice in Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, and Coriolanus, this article excavates the contemporary significance of the deer as animal, as lordly game, and as symbol. This article suggests that in these plays, the animal corpse becomes a useful metaphor for communal conflict and division, resonances which the aristocratic sport easily evoked given the discourses of exclusion and elitism which surrounded it and its importance in the construction of noble male identity.