If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.
Twelfth Night, Act 3, Scene 4
In the above quote from Twelfth Night, Fabian acknowledges that not everything that happens in Shakespeare’s world is always realistic. This chapter follows his lead. It is all about the slightly ridiculous, perhaps unbelievable, deaths that you would have thought the product of a very fertile imagination. But sometimes fact is stranger than fiction.
Shakespeare certainly loved the fantastical and theatrical. From a writer who included fairies, living statues and a man with an ass’s head in his plays, surreal and strange goings-on are to be expected, and deaths are no exception. However, what seems implausible or strange for today’s theatre-goers would not always appear in the same light for Shakespeare’s audiences.
* * *
On a sliding scale of silliness, the deaths of two characters burnt to a crisp by a bolt of lightning seems a pretty ludicrous end, more suited to a comedy than a tragedy. It is almost a cartoon death where a Looney Tunes character is struck by lightning and instantly reduced to a pile of ash. People certainly are killed by lightning, but it is such a rare and unusual event that it seems strange to include it in a play. In fact, Shakespeare was following the events described in the source for his play, book eight of the Confessio Amantis by John Gower.
In Pericles, the eponymous hero travels to Antioch, in the very south of modern-day Turkey, to ask King Antiochus for his daughter’s hand in marriage. The King agrees, but first Pericles must solve a riddle. If he can’t find the answer, the punishment is death. Pericles accepts the challenge, but it is a trap. The riddle reads,
I am no viper, yet I feed
On mother’s flesh which did me breed.
I sought a husband, in which labour
I found that kindness in a father:
He’s father, son, and husband mild;
I mother, wife, and yet his child.
How they may be, and yet in two,
As you will live, resolve it you.
The answer to the riddle is that the King is having an incestuous relationship with his daughter. To reveal this would also mean death for Pericles. He manages to escape with his life and goes on the run. But he doesn’t have to worry long. In the second act news is brought to Pericles that Antiochus and his daughter have been killed: ‘When he was seated in a chariot / Of an inestimable value, and his daughter with him, / A fire from heaven came and shrivell’d up / Their bodies, even to loathing’.
Lightning appears to have not only killed the King and his daughter but badly burnt their bodies in the process. This might be what would be expected from a lightning strike, but it is rarely what happens. It might suggest that Shakespeare was not familiar with the effects of lightning on a body and was writing what his audience would expect to hear in such cases.
Lightning storms are relatively common near the equator, but not so much in more northern climes such as England. Deaths from lightning strikes in England are consequently rare, but not unheard of. It seems unlikely that Shakespeare would have witnessed the results of a fatal lightning strike personally. However, their rarity could have increased interest when they did occur. News and gossip about such events would have spread rapidly.
Lightning has been seen as a punishment or weapon of the gods since ancient times. It is hardly surprising that this natural phenomenon could inspire such dread. The awesome sight and tremendous power of lightning storms have thrilled and terrified for millennia. In many respects it is right to be fearful.
A bolt of lightning can carry 150,000 amps, tens of millions of volts, and incredible heat (28,000°C, hotter than the surface of the sun). It is no wonder that so much energy concentrated into a ray just 2–5cm (1–2in) across can cause a lot of damage. Lightning can rip trees apart and demolish buildings. There is certainly enough destructive energy to kill a person, even several people. It can kill via a direct strike or by a ‘side flash’, where the lightning strikes another object and then jumps to the victim, or by conduction through an object. What is perhaps most surprising about lightning strikes is that the majority of those who are struck survive.
Pulses of lightning are incredibly short-lived, existing for only milliseconds, so there is less time for damage to occur than from, for example, touching high-voltage cables. Lightning follows the path of least resistance to the ground and our skin offers a lot of resistance. Human beings are therefore not very good conductors of electricity. Sweat or rain-soaked clothes, however, are far better at conducting electricity and offer an easier pathway for the lightning. The energy from the lightning as it passes through can superheat the water into steam, causing clothes to be ripped off as though there has been an explosion. The skin can be burned, often severely, by the steam or by the energy of the electrical current forcing its way through a resistive material.
Though burns can be fatal, this is not usually what kills in the case of a lightning strike. The real danger is if the electricity can penetrate the skin and enter the body. Wet skin, from rain or sweat, has a much lower resistance than dry skin. But once inside the body, tissues full of water and electrolytes offer very little resistance to the flow of electricity. The nervous system, which normally operates on electrical signals less than a tenth of a volt, can be thrown into chaos. Lightning will take the shortest path through the body to the ground. If that path is through the brain or heart, you are in real trouble.
Over-stimulation of the brainstem, and in particular the medullary respiratory centre of the brain that controls breathing, can kill quickly. Respiratory arrest can also occur when the passage of current through the thorax causes the intercostal muscles and diaphragm to go into spasm or become paralysed. But these are rare occurrences and, if the victim can be reached in time, breathing can be supported artificially and they may survive. The majority of deaths from lightning strikes are thought to be due to electrical stimulation of the heart causing fibrillation (very rapid beating of the heart). Without correction from a defibrillator, fibrillation can lead to cardiac arrest and death. Before effective methods of cardiopulmonary resuscitation had been developed, individuals had little chance of recovering from such effects. They were unlucky.
For every person killed by lightning there are 10 or 20 more who survive. Some emerge from the experience relatively unscathed, but for others it can cause serious injury and lasting health problems, from deteriorating sight to tinnitus, depression, dizziness and fatigue. Why individuals have such different outcomes is not known.
In the play, if the King of Antioch and his daughter were sitting in their carriage when they were hit, their heads would have been the highest point and probably where the lightning struck. Both the brain and the heart would be in the direct path as the lightning moved down through the body to the ground. Most likely they were killed very quickly.
The damage to the bodies, ‘shrivell’d up’, is unusual. It is well known that injury from lightning is capricious and unpredictable. Two people can stand side by side during a flash and one may be mutilated and killed while the other is unharmed. The degree of damage to tissues is proportional to the actual quantity of electricity flowing through them. Even in fatal cases, the physical damage can range from virtually nothing to gross burning. Feather, or fern-like, patterns on the skin (sometimes called Lichtenburg figures) are well known but not as common as textbooks might suggest and usually disappear after a few days. Irregular red marks may follow skin creases, especially if they are damp from sweating. Metal objects close to the skin may leave burns and blistering or charring are also present in some cases, but deep burns are relatively uncommon.
Shakespeare adds an unusual little detail about the bodies: ‘for they so stunk, / That all those eyes adored them ere their fall / Scorn now their hand should give them burial’. It seems a strange thing to mention but it serves an artistic purpose, and may also show that he knew more about the effects of lightning strikes than it first appears.
The stink may well be artistic licence to highlight the corruption of the pair’s sin. But there may also be some truth behind it. In cases of death by lightning there is often a smell of singeing or burning about the body and its clothing. If burning is more extensive it will be far worse. The smell of a burnt body is both difficult to describe and unmistakable. It is a combination of burnt flesh, an unforgettable and awful stench, and burnt hair, an unpleasant sulphurous smell. Many firefighters testify that once smelled, it is impossible to forget.
And it may not be just the burning that makes the bodies in Pericles smell so bad. The body of a man killed by lightning in May 1666 was said to give off an appalling stench when surgeons came to dissect it. And given the conditions regularly encountered in seventeenth-century dissections, the smell must have been staggeringly bad to be worthy of comment. They carried on regardless and found burning to the skin but no damage to the internal organs. Another possibility for the bad odours is illustrated by a more recent case. It was theorised that lightning had struck a man on his belt buckle, where it had entered the body and ruptured his intestines through rapid expansion of the gases inside.
In a few short lines Shakespeare could convey an incredibly dramatic event far better than if he tried to depict it on the stage. Thunder and lightning storms could be mimicked in a theatre using sound effects and pyrotechnics, but showing a lightning bolt hitting two characters onstage would be difficult. It is much easier to have it described by someone else and also gives the opportunity to go into a little gross detail. To have the shrivelled, badly burnt bodies shown onstage would require special props to be made – not impossible, but expensive and hardly worth it when the audience can produce something far more macabre in their minds from the description.
The deaths of King Antiochus and his daughter may be seen as just punishment owing to the severity of their crimes. On this occasion it was divine retribution rather than a court of law that brought about their execution. Other Shakespearean characters willingly offer themselves up for strange deaths for more noble reasons.
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In The Merchant of Venice one character is willing to risk his life in the most unusual way in order to help a friend. Antonio offers to stand guarantor for a loan from Shylock. If the debt cannot be paid on time he agrees Shylock can take a pound of flesh from his body. He must have been aware that such a procedure could kill him. But the proposal is so outlandish, almost as unbelievable as being unable to pay the debt in time, that he agrees.
Claiming your ‘pound of flesh’ is a phrase that has entered into everyday usage and is commonly understood as a ruthless demand for what is rightfully yours, regardless of the consequences to the other person. It has even appeared in films and TV series as a particularly cruel way of killing someone. But where Shakespeare got his idea from is a mystery.
Where this pound of flesh is to be taken from isn’t specified in the contract. If taken from a well-nourished thigh or buttock, Antonio might live, but it is implied it will be taken from the chest, near the heart. What is clear from the play is that the procedure is expected to kill Antonio. It is only at the last minute, and thanks to Portia’s intervention, that he escapes having to pay his forfeit.
Surgical procedures were basic in Elizabethan England but not necessarily fatal. Limbs were removed and surgery performed on tumours or ‘a disease that must be cut away’ (Coriolanus), but surgeons were rarely brave enough to delve inside the torso. The risks from blood loss and infection were too great. One exception was Caesarean section, performed in only the most dire of circumstances, which was almost universally fatal for the mother. In Macbeth when Macduff ‘was from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripp’d’ it would only have been done to save the child when there was no hope for the mother.
Regardless of the operation, the pain would have been excruciating as there were no anaesthetics available. Only basic pain relief could be obtained from opium and other plant extracts such as mandrakes (see Chapter 2).
Antonio is lucky not to have to go through with his procedure. Other characters are not so fortunate. In Titus Andronicus, two characters have body parts removed without the skill of a surgeon or any kind of pain relief.
* * *
Titus Andronicus is a revenge tragedy Shakespeare wrote with George Peele. The play takes a lot of inspiration from the Roman writer Seneca’s most famous tragedy, Thyestes. As is often the case in revenge, it is not simply an eye for an eye. As Atreus puts it in Thyestes, ‘You do not avenge crimes unless you surpass them’. Shakespeare and Peele’s play begins with a dismemberment and doesn’t let up for two blood-soaked hours.
At the start of the play Titus returns to Rome victorious from war with the Goths. He has brought with him Tamora, Queen of the Goths, and her three sons, Alarbus, Chiron and Demetrius, as captives. Despite Tamora’s protests, Titus sacrifices Alarbus by having his body dismembered and burnt. It is the start of a cycle of bloody revenge between the two families.
To avenge Alarbus’s death, his brothers, Chiron and Demetrius, kill Bassianus, who is betrothed to Titus’s daughter, Lavinia. They then rape Lavinia and cut off her hands and tongue so she can’t reveal what has happened. Lavinia’s assault isn’t shown. The aftermath of her walking onstage, mouth and stumps bleeding, is horrific enough.
The two brothers also frame Titus’s sons, Martius and Quintus, for the murder of Bassianus. Martius and Quintus are arrested and sentenced to be executed for the murder but Titus is tricked into thinking he can save them by sending his severed hand to the emperor. Titus readily agrees to save his sons and his hand is cut off onstage with an axe.
Both Lavinia and Titus survive having parts of their bodies cut off. And though there is no mention of it, both would have needed treatment afterwards to survive. Stemming the loss of blood is vital. Immediate action could be taken with tourniquets or bandages. Wounds could be cauterised with hot irons and blood vessels could be tied up with threads. It was rudimentary but largely effective. Sophisticated stitching techniques and life-saving blood transfusions had simply not yet been invented. No one would have even considered sterilising anything before proceeding. It is a wonder they, or anyone else operated on before the nineteenth century, survived. The risks were well known, as Menenius hints at in Coriolanus, ‘a limb that has but a disease; / Mortal, to cut it off; to cure it, easy.’
What is worse, Titus cuts off his hand for nothing. A messenger soon arrives returning his hand along with the severed heads of his sons. The body parts are collected up by the survivors; Titus takes one head, Marcus another and Lavinia carries away her father’s hand in her mouth.
All of this is just a warm-up for the really gory bit. Every body part that has so far been lopped off is but a teaser before the main event. Titus now seeks revenge for the rape of his daughter and deaths of his sons.
First he meets with the culprits, Chiron and Demetrius, and has them bound and gagged so he can confront them with the list of their crimes. Then, like a true stage villain, he spells out what he is going to do to them: ‘This one hand yet is left to cut your throats, / Whilst that Lavinia ’tween her stumps doth hold / The basin that receives your guilty blood.’
The basin is a wise precaution. Cutting the throat will result in massive blood loss as the neck contains some very large blood vessels. Closest to the surface are the jugular veins, which drain blood from the brain to the heart. Deeper within the neck are the carotid arteries, which normally take oxygenated blood up from the heart to the brain. Blood loss from arteries is more rapid than from an equivalent-sized vein because the blood is under pressure. Even if the knife doesn’t cut deep enough to hit the arteries, blood loss will be significant. Unconsciousness will be rapid, within minutes, followed by death soon after.
All of this happens onstage and seeing it acted out can be quite the spectacle – some productions have caused multiple faintings. Shakespeare’s audiences would have been more hardened to such sights because of their familiarity with the slaughterhouses dotted around the city and with public executions. Getting hold of large volumes of blood would not have been difficult but controlling it onstage would have been important. Scenes followed on one from another without a pause – there would have been no opportunity to clear up. Lavinia’s bowl is needed to catch any blood to stop actors slipping and sliding in the mess in subsequent scenes.
However, it doesn’t have to be that gory. Just seeing Titus with the knife and Lavinia with the bowl, we know that this is going to be very bloody – we don’t have to see it. The actors playing Chiron and Demetrius can be turned away to shield the audience’s eyes from the worst. In an Elizabethan theatre this was more difficult, as spectators were allowed on the galleried area above the back of the stage at the Globe and on the stage itself at the Blackfriars Theatre. Alternatively, depictions of the mutilations and deaths don’t have to be realistic to have an impact. Several modern productions have used red ribbons in place of blood to astonishingly good effect.
But in the play Titus isn’t finished yet. What he does next is even more distasteful to modern eyes – ‘Hark, villains! I will grind your bones to dust / And with your blood and it I’ll make a paste, / And of the paste a coffin I will rear / And make two pasties of your shameful heads’.
Chiron and Demetrius’s remains are baked into a pie and served to their mother at a banquet. The idea probably came from Shakespeare’s source, Thyestes, which sees the eponymous hero seducing his brother Atreus’s wife and stealing his kingdom. Atreus gets his own back by tricking Thyestes into eating a banquet prepared from the flesh of his own sons.
Cannibalism is considered taboo, but there have been exceptions.1 Up until the nineteenth century body parts were often used in medicine. Blood, extracts of Egyptian mummies and other body bits were swallowed or worn as talismans against ill health – to no physical benefit, it might be added. Although people weren’t serving up human flesh at their sixteenth-century dinner table, this is not true of all cultures in all times.
Evidence from crushed skulls suggests that humans living half a million years ago ate human brains, and the practice of eating humans has continued among various peoples until very recently.2 Cannibalism can be seen as an act of remembrance, combining the bodies of dead relatives with the living, or an act of dominance. Eating the heart of an enemy shows complete power over them. Others have been forced into cannibalism because of circumstances. Those stranded at sea or isolated in remote parts of the world have often turned to each other for food, some more reluctantly than others.
Starvation or revenge can be a powerful motivator. Eating human flesh because of a preference or craving for the taste is very rare indeed. Such flesh usually comes from murder victims. Peter Stumpp was one such person who had a taste for human flesh. When he was captured near Cologne, Germany, in 1589, he confessed to having killed and eaten at least 16 people. He was executed as a werewolf.
Another tale from Shakespeare’s day is that of Alexander ‘Sawney’ Bean, the head of a Scottish clan said to have killed and eaten over 1,000 people. Sawney and his wife, Agnes Douglas, who was also said to be a witch, are supposed to have started their cannibalistic life when they attacked and killed a passer-by. It became too risky to sell on the victim’s valuables for food so instead they ate him. The couple withdrew to live a reclusive life in a cave on the east coast of Galloway where they raised a large family of cannibals. Their home was so hidden that few locals seem to have realised the family was living there. They also apparently failed to notice the disappearance of hundreds of people, as the family needed to feed the parents, 14 children and 32 grandchildren. When they had had their fill, the remaining flesh was salted, dried and pickled. They were only discovered when one of their victims escaped.
Though the tale of the Sawney clan would have been a rich source of inspiration for Shakespeare, there is considerable doubt that they ever existed. The story first appeared in The Newgate Calendar in the nineteenth century. Sixteenth-century ballads and broadsheets fail to mention the family or the disappearance of their victims.
Even if he was a dedicated meat eater, there were presumably alternative food sources available to Peter Stumpp, and even the Sawney clan could have presumably fed on game and wildfowl. Can the taste of human flesh really be so wonderful that it would drive people to kill for it? Some have claimed that human flesh has a particularly desirable flavour. In the 1880s, Alfred Packer, a prospector who turned to the bodies of his five companions for food when provisions ran out, told a reporter that the breasts of men were ‘the sweetest meat’ he had ever tasted.
The flavour of any meat does of course depend on where the cuts are taken from and how they are prepared. One commonly known cannibal myth is that human meat tastes like pork, hence the name ‘long pigs’ for cannibals’ victims. However, in 1878, a sailor on a drifting schooner described the flesh of one of the dead crewmen as being ‘as good as any beefsteak’ he ever ate. William Seabrook, the twentieth-century occultist, traveller and cannibal, agreed. He had written about cannibalism from his travels in West Africa and said the meat he saw looked like beef, but he later admitted the cannibals had not let him partake in their rituals. Instead he travelled to Paris and with the help of a hospital he acquired a chunk of human meat from a recently deceased person. He cooked and prepared it and reported that, ‘in colour, texture, smell as well as taste … veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable.’ And according to the anthropologist Stanley Garn, the lean–fat ratio of human flesh does indeed make it similar to veal.
The flavour and appearance might vary but perhaps it wouldn’t taste so very different to other meats commonly eaten. In Titus Andronicus, there are even hints of a recipe: ‘Receive the blood: and when that they are dead, / Let me go grind their bones to powder small / And with this hateful liquor temper it; / And in that paste let their vile heads be baked.’ It seems he is preparing a kind of blood pastry to cover the meat. Tamora is unlikely to have been alerted to unusual ingredients in the pie from the taste and Titus gets his revenge.
Violent extremes are more associated with sudden flares of temper and lashing out in the heat of the moment. But Titus’s plans are cold and calculating. He has his family with him to support him and conspire with him. Tamora also has her lover Aaron plotting with her and manipulating events. Titus Andronicus shows how groups of people can egg each other on to ever more violent extremes. Another play, Julius Caesar, also has groups of people coercing each other into ever greater acts of violence.
* * *
The group of conspirators that killed Caesar would be unlikely to act in the way they do as individuals, but together eight of them inflict 33 stab wounds on the Emperor. One vicious attack leads to another. The citizens of Rome are enraged by Caesar’s murder. When a group of people come across a man called Cinna, they immediately assume he is the Cinna who took part in Caesar’s murder. They want revenge and of course it must be a more bloody murder than Caesar’s. The mob doesn’t even care that they have the wrong Cinna. One citizen shouts, ‘Tear him, tear him!’ The man desperately tries to explain, ‘I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet’, but the crowd is out for blood: ‘It is no matter, his name’s Cinna; pluck but his name out of his heart, and turn him going.’ He is literally torn apart.
Mob violence can undoubtedly result in fatalities but pulling a body apart is difficult. We know this because in medieval times people were torn apart as a form of execution – and it required the help of horses. Even then it was not always enough and an axe was needed. The death of Cinna the poet may seem improbable but Shakespeare hadn’t invented this macabre death for artistic reasons; he was depicting real events from history.
From the audience’s point of view, seeing a man being torn apart is potentially even more unpleasant than the horrific goings-on in Titus Andronicus, but it probably wouldn’t worry an Elizabethan crowd used to seeing dogs and bears torn apart for sport. It would need a lot of blood, flesh and props to look convincing and would create one hell of a mess to clear up before the next scene. Shakespeare spares everyone the trouble and has Cinna bundled offstage to his fate, giving the audience the opportunity to imagine far worse than could ever be depicted onstage.
Seeing fake limbs and blood being thrown about could also easily descend from the macabre to the ridiculous and invite laughter from the audience – not the mood you are looking for in a tragedy. Such a reaction might not be all that unusual from an Elizabethan audience that watched animals fight to the death for entertainment. Blood sports were hugely popular at the time and among every class, from the poorest even to royalty. These events have been described by recent critics as a ‘carnival of cruelty’ where ‘again and again the audience was pleased by what it saw, cheered it on and laughed at it’. A whole menagerie of animals were set against each other or beaten in public, but the most popular by far was bear- and bull-baiting.
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Bear-baiting and theatre were closely linked in Elizabethan London. They often shared the same venues and one playhouse was specifically designed with a removable stage to make way for the animals on the days plays weren’t performed.3 Playwrights frequently borrowed the language and style of bear-baiting events for their dramas. Cinna the poet is just one example of a character put in the place of a bear trapped among a vicious pack about to tear him apart. Ben Jonson took advantage of the bear-baiting that also took place in the Hope Theatre to add an extra dimension to his play Bartholomew Fair.
Bartholomew Fair was a real annual event that was put on every summer from 1133 until 1855, when it was suppressed for debauchery. It took place over several days at Smithfield, to the north-west of the city walls. The fair was originally for cloth-trading but by Jonson’s day there was much more on offer. Smithfield had by then established itself as a livestock market and was also known as the site of many executions. At the fair, among the puppet shows and food stalls there were also acrobats and wild animals on display. At the Hope Theatre, food sellers walked through the crowd just as they would at the real fair, and the venue would retain the animal stench from the bear-baiting events of the previous day, adding considerably to the atmosphere of the performance.
In Britain bears were hunted to extinction around 500 ad, but they were a common sight on the streets of sixteenth-century London thanks to imports from continental Europe. The bears were made to perform on street corners so they could be laughed at by passers-by. They were considered supremely ugly animals and so to dress them up and make them dance was hilarious to the average Elizabethan. What was even more fun was to see them physically attacked with whips and dogs.4
A bear would be chained to a post and English mastiffs would be set on him. The bear would fend off the attacks, severely injuring the dogs, but they would only return to attack the bear again until they were killed. Sometimes the owners would intervene before a dog was fatally injured but sometimes it happened so quickly that fresh dogs had to be brought out to continue the entertainment lest the audience feel they had been short-changed. The bears, however, were expensive commodities and owners went to some lengths to look after them and patch them up again ready for another fight.
Part of the attraction of these blood sports was what it revealed about the animals. English mastiffs were highly regarded because they would never give up the fight. Bulls that fought off the attacks from dogs with their horns were admired for their cunning. Bears were seen as ‘artfully’ keeping the dogs at bay. Other combinations of animals were tried with varying degrees of success. Horses with a monkey on their backs were popular because the monkey shrieked when it was bitten by the dogs that chased it. Lions on the other hand were a disappointment. Despite their fierce reputation, when faced with a pack of dogs they retreated to their den and refused to fight.
Blood sports weren’t popular with everyone, however. Puritans disliked bear-baiting because it was carried out on a Sunday. Others found the whole spectacle distasteful and risky. Thomas Nashe in his Anatomie of Abuses describes the sport: ‘besides that it is a filthy, stinking and loathsome game, is it not a dangerous and perilous exercise wherein a man is in danger of his life every minute of an hour?’ The animals certainly presented a risk but Nashe may also have been referring to the dangers from the shoddy construction of the arenas where bear-baitings were held (see Chapter 2).
Shakespeare also took advantage of the audience’s familiarity with the violence associated with bears and bear-baiting. He referenced the sport to highlight underlying violence or threat in parts of his plays. For example, in Macbeth: ‘They have tied me to a stake; I cannot fly, / But, bear-like, I must fight the course.’ The use of bear-baiting references in plays also reveals a lot about the characters. Twelfth Night contains numerous references to bear-baiting. Sir Andrew Aguecheek is a keen fan; he, Sir Toby and Fabian all refer to the blood-sport directly. The name ‘Duke Orsino’ is a play on the word ‘ursine’ meaning bear-like (from the Latin for bear, ursus). Furthermore, Malvolio’s treatment at the hands of Sir Toby and his coevals is framed as a bear being baited. He is placed in a dark room and taunted. At the very end of the play Malvolio promises to ‘be revenged on the whole pack of you’. Similar behaviour is acted out towards Gloucester when he is blinded in King Lear, perhaps in reference to the popular practice of taunting blinded bears with whips.
Some bears became well-known local ‘characters’. They were given names and acquired personalities. There was Ned Whiting, George Store and Harry Hunks (one of the blinded bears that was tormented with whips). One female bear, known as Old Nell of Middlewich, was taken into ale houses for a drink. But perhaps the most famous of all the bears was Sackerson, immortalised by his inclusion in a Shakespeare play. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Slender brags of his encounters with the famous bear: ‘I have seen Sackerson loose twenty times, and have taken him by the chain; but, I warrant you, the women have so cried and shrieked at it, that it passed: but women, indeed, cannot abide ’em; they are very ill-favoured rough things.’
Bears might have been hilarious fun when they were chained to a post but the mood rapidly changed if they got loose, as they evidently did on occasion – as Fabian comments on Cesario’s fear in Twelfth Night, ‘he pants and looks pale, as if a bear were at his heels’.
When a bear suddenly appears onstage in The Winter’s Tale it was almost certainly less incongruous to Shakespeare’s audience than it seems today. The moment in the middle of Act 3, Scene 3 is perhaps Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction [Exit, pursued by a bear]. The character being pursued is Antigonus, who has just landed on the coast of Bohemia.
Shakespeare’s acting company could presumably have borrowed a bear. Even though their home theatre, the Globe, did not host blood sports, there were at least five bear-baiting arenas nearby. But the actors who would have to share the stage with the animal might not have been so enthusiastic. There might also have been considerable enthusiasm among the cast to play the bear themselves. There is no surviving list of props for Shakespeare’s company but their rivals, the Lord Admiral’s Men, are known to have had ‘i bears head’ and ‘i bears skin’ as well as various other animal parts, including heads of a Cerberus, a bull’s head, one lion’s skin and two lion’s heads.
How realistic an actor in a bear costume would be is hardly relevant. Factual details and realism have nothing to do with The Winter’s Tale. The title of the play indicates that this is a story and any facts that might work their way into the plot are just a bonus. For example, Bohemia, a region roughly equating to the modern-day Czech Republic, might not have a coast for Antigonus to land on but it does have bears to chase him.
The Eurasian brown bear is common in central Europe but in its natural habitat it is relatively shy of humans. Encounters with these bears are rare and attacks on humans rarer still. When they do occur it is usually because a bear, often a female with her cubs, has been disturbed. Shakespeare’s experience of bears would have been very different. Bears chained to posts and tormented and abused regularly are likely to act differently from those left to their own devices in the wild.
Clearly Antigonus disturbed the bear, which let out ‘A savage clamour!’ He then does the worst thing possible and runs. Running away from a bear is only likely to encourage it to follow, exactly as it does in The Winter’s Tale. The chase is the last we see of both the bear and Antigonus. What happens next is reported by a clown who happened to witness the attack and sensibly kept out of it.
The clown tells ‘how the poor gentleman roared and the bear mocked him, both roaring louder than the sea or weather’, and ‘how he cried to me for help and said his name was Antigonus, a nobleman’. The fight between the two is an unfair one. Eurasian brown bears are much bigger and heavier than humans and come equipped with 42 teeth, including some very big ones for biting prey, and claws that can grow up to 10 centimetres (4in) long. It is no surprise that ‘the bear tore out his shoulder-bone’.
The few bear attacks on humans that occur in Europe today are not usually fatal. Croatia saw its last bear-related death over 65 years ago. Sweden has gone over a century without having a human killed by a bear. While the damage to Antigonus’s shoulder might not be fatal today, it almost certainly would have been over 400 years ago. And the attack doesn’t stop there: ‘the bear half dined on the gentleman’. The clown leaves the animal to its dinner and only later returns to ‘see if the bear be gone from the gentleman and how much he hath eaten: they are never curst but when they are hungry: if there be any of him left, I’ll bury it.’
Humans are an unusual meal for wild Eurasian brown bears. Their diet has changed dramatically over time. In ancient times their diet was approximately 80 per cent carnivorous, but by the Middle Ages this had diminished to 40 per cent. Today it is around 5–10 per cent and their preferred meat is either found carcasses of animals that have died a natural death or animals that are very easy to kill, mostly sheep.
Several Shakespearean deaths may seem absurd or unrealistic to modern audiences, but he was writing in a world very different from the one we live in now. People eaten by bears or baked into pies would not have raised nearly so many eyebrows when they were first shown onstage in Renaissance London.
Notes
1 One possible current exception in the West is eating the placenta after a birth, which is thought to ward off post-partem depression, though women are usually eating their own. Recipes are available online and have even been included on a TV cooking show in the UK in 1998 – though it received several complaints and a rebuke from the Broadcasting Standards Commission (now Ofcom).
2 The Korowai in Indonesian New Guinea are thought to be the only group of people still practising cannibalism, but they do not see it as eating humans. They eat khakhua, beings who come disguised as a relative or friend of a person they want to kill.
3 Of all the London theatres in the late sixteenth century the Globe was special, not just because it was the home of Shakespeare’s theatrical company, but because it was the only theatre to be used exclusively for the performance of plays.
4 Bear-baiting also happened on the continent but it was considered an English speciality.