Chapter 3 - Reading Virtues: Shakespeare’s Animals

Summary

In Shakespeare's As You Like It Orlando violently invades the Duke's camp in Act 2 to steal food for himself and his servant Adam. Calmed by the Duke's gracious generosity, Orlando climbs down from his rage-fuelled threats, and asks only that the party wait a little before sharing their bounty with him: ‘Then but forbear your food a little while, / Whiles like a doe I go to find my fawn, / And give it food’ (2.7.128–30). Orlando's ‘fawn’ is, of course, old Adam, his servant, left fainting from hunger under a bush. Like the foraging doe, Orlando has ventured afield while hiding his vulnerable infant from predators. Topsell mentions this practice in his History of Four-footed Beasts, noting that does ‘lodge [their young] in a stable fit for them of their own making, either in some rock, or other bushy inaccessible place; covering them’. Deer hide their young in this way especially during the two weeks after birth, when the fawn cannot run from predators, and they may continue to hide fawns for several months during summer. Anyone who has hiked or ridden in forests or fields has quite likely passed a resting fawn without seeing it – their camouflage is so effective and they are so preternaturally still unless accidentally flushed from the spot. Indeed, recent public service announcements from animal rescue groups and other organisations have repeatedly tried to inform Americans that they should never remove a fawn discovered in this fashion, since the doe will return to it; moving it will often guarantee it dies without its mother to nurse it.

Orlando's characterisation of Adam as his fawn and himself as a nurturing doe reflects his turn away from violence and towards virtue, which is here imagined as moral action leading to mutual support, or what in Shakespeare's world might be called friendship. That word could have a more capacious meaning for early moderns than perhaps it has in our own time: friendship establishes a kind of generalised kinship, a disposition of amity towards others, the embrace of accord or alliance.