Shakespeare and the Hunt is the first book-length study of Shakespeare's works in relation to the culture of the hunt in Elizabethan and Jacobean society. Situating Shakespeare's works in this rich cultural context, Berry illuminates the plays from fresh angles. He explores, for example, the role of poaching in The Merry Wives of Windsor; the paradox of pastoral hunting in As You Like It; the intertwining of hunting and politics in The Tempest; and the gendered language of falconry in The Taming of the Shrew.

Shakespeare and the Hunt is the first book-length study of Shakespeare's works in relation to the culture of the hunt in Elizabethan and Jacobean society. Situating Shakespeare's works in this rich cultural context, Berry illuminates the plays from fresh angles. He explores, for example, the role of poaching in The Merry Wives of Windsor; the paradox of pastoral hunting in As You Like It; the intertwining of hunting and politics in The Tempest; and the gendered language of falconry in The Taming of the Shrew.

This 1984 book is an original attempt to combine social history and anthropology with literary criticism. Professor Berry relates Shakespeare's romantic comedies to Elizabethan social customs and to rites of initiation, courtship and marriage. He offers an alternative interpretation of a major Shakespearean genre, examining a wide range of Elizabethan conventional attitudes, all of which converge upon the progression from adolescence to adulthood and from courtship to marriage, which many details have become available. By relating Shakespeare's comedies to these traditions and to the broader...