Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Diary of Master William Silence: A Study of Shakespeare and of Elizabethan Sport
The hounds were of necessity Master Robert Shallow's, and the tale was naturally told by Master William Silence, the lettered member of the family group.
Thus attracted to the study of Elizabethan sport, and gaining some knowledge of what Ben Jonson calls' the hawking language, ' I proceeded to conduct my Gloucester shire friends, with certain additions to their number, through a variety of scenes, in the company of William Silence. Who records his experiences in a diary, and who finally collects certain notes, the loss of which I endeavour to supply in a chapter entitled The Horse in Shakespeare. Every lover of the horse who is a student of Shakespeare must have been struck by the number and appropriateness of his references to horses and to horsemanship; and I found that some pas sages which once seemed obscure became clear, and that others gained a new significance, in the light of such knowledge of the old-world phraseology of the manage as may be acquired from the copious sources of information set forth in a note entitled The Book of Sport.
Thus, little by little, in successive vacations and spare moments of time, and in varying scenes, the book grew, and with it my amazement at Shakespeare's knowledge of the most intimate secrets of woodcraft and falconry, and, above all, of the nature and disposition of the horse. In his use of this knowledge for the illustration of human character, thought, and action, he stands alone. To understand the lessons which he would thus teach us, it is necessary to know the language in which they are conveyed, and to most readers the languages of ancient woodcraft, of the manage.
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