Back to the Boar

In a blog that I have already posted I wrote about the boar in Shakespeare's work. However as I continue on this journey I find that as I try to move away from the boar it pulls me back in. The boar seemed like a good starting point for some analysis of some of Shakespeare's work especially in relation to the poem "Venus and Adonis" but the boar is everywhere in Shakespeare's work. Appearing in "Venus and Adonis", "Antony and Cleopatra", "As You Like It", "A Midsummer Night's Dream". These few works are the ones I have read thus far, also these examples are works that actually use the word Boar. If I were to expand my search to Boar characteristics I would find much more of the boar. It would appear in "King Lear" and "Pericles" and surely many more which I have yet to read.

The Boar characteristics are interesting because they are somewhat analogous to the certain baser male attributes. I would seem that more often than not that male characters in Shakespeare who get jealous, angry, violent, and stubborn are likened to a boar. In most instances this is not explicit but non the less the correlation between these male attitudes and the behavior of the wild boar have certain parallels. Another thing is that quite often when male characters are exhibiting these boar characteristics they are also putting themselves in harms way, because they become blind like a dumb beast, and like the boar they go fighting to there death. And ironically enough Adonis's behavior ends up getting him killed by an actual boar. Another interesting boar behavior coupled with the actual boar is a scene in "Antony and Cleopatra" where men Manent Enobarbus, Agrippa, Maeccenas gloat about the feast they had. Eight whole boars feasted on by twelve people. The men in there "Boar" mode actually consume boars.

While exploring plays that we will not be reading in this class I came upon a wonderful example of the boar. I watched the film version of Richard the III with Ian Mckellen and there was a line in there mentioning, you guessed it, the boar. I found the line later in the actual play and it goes as follows:

Richard the III Act V Scene 2

Henry, Earl of Richmond:

Fellows in arms, and my most loving friends,
Bruis'd underneath the yoke of tyranny,
Thus far into the bowels of the land
Have we march'd on without impediment;
And here receive we from our father Stanley
Lines of fair comfort and encouragement.
The wretched, bloody, and usurping boar,
That spoil'd your summer fields and fruitful vines,
Swills your warm blood like wash and makes his trough
In your embowell'd bosoms --this foul swine
Is now even in the centry of this isle,
Near to the town of Leicester, as we learn.
From Tamworth thither is but one day's march.
In God's name the harvest of perpetual peace
By this one bloody trial of sharp war.

Sounds like a good war time speech to me. The idea of killing that most foul swine the boar is a "beautiful" image for soldiers. The boar that drinks your blood and feasts on your disemboweled bodies in it's trough.

The Boar ladies and gentlemen, the Boar, one of the many manifestations of mans grotesque and unsightly underbelly. The boar is the dark and primitive animal side of men. If there ever was a beast that were a sensualist it is the boar. If you took Fyodor Karamazov from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and transformed him into his spirit animal he would without a doubt be a Boar. This aspect of the Boar and man my speak to a universal notion that a little Boar dwells within every man whether he releases it or not.