Shakespeare's Dog by Leon Rooke

First published: 1983

Type of work: Comic fantasy

Time of work: 1585, the year William Shakespeare left Stratford-upon-Avon

Locale: Stratford-upon-Avon and its vicinity

Principal Characters:

• Hooker, the protagonist-narrator, William Shakespeare’s dog
• William Shakespeare, known as
• Will, the playwright, poet, and actor, who is twenty-one years old
• Anne (nee Hathaway), his wife
• John Shakespeare, his father
• Marr, Hooker’s steady bitch
• Wolfsleach, his amatory rival
• Terry, Hooker’s sister
• Black Shag, one of the Forest Regarders, who hunt down poachers

The Novel

The current action of Shakespeare’s Dog, a novel narrated in a robust simulated Elizabethan idiom by Hooker, William Shakespeare’s dog, takes place on a single day, the day Hooker and his master are forced to flee their home in Stratford-upon-Avon, pursued by Forest Regarders. Before the novel begins, Hooker has killed one of Sir Thomas Lucy’s prize deer at Chalfont Wood, near Stratford. The Regarders, in particular Black Shag, are tracking him down, intending to punish him either by crippling or by killing him. Early in the novel, Hooker learns of their intention and spends a most uncomfortable day avoiding the Regarders.

On this day as well, as Hooker relates, his master’s constant squabbling with his wife, Anne, over his obsessive wish to leave Stratford for London, where he hopes to realize his artistic dreams, comes to a head. Anne wants him to stay in Stratford and take up gainful employment. Shakespeare, however, has never behaved responsibly as husband and father. An artist oblivious to mundane problems, he locks himself in his “shuttered scribbler’s room” writing poems. He leaves domestic problems to his wife and his father, John, in whose crowded home he and his family live. Over the years, his vision of an artistic life in London has constantly receded, first because of his hasty marriage and then because of the births of his three children. He believes that he must act now and resolves to leave Stratford despite his wife’s railing.

At the end of the novel, Hooker is awakened in the middle of the night by an anxious Shakespeare household, who expect Black Shag and the Regarders to come after Hooker at any time. Hooker and his master sneak away from their Henley Street home with hushed good wishes from neighbors and family members, including Anne, who has come to accept the inevitable. She joins the family in wishing them well: “If thou must, William! As the stars script it, William and Hooker! Do it, love! Go, you and Hooker. Go and make us proud!”

A major part of the novel consists of Hooker’s recollection of past incidents which have led to the current plight of dog and master. These help somewhat to enrich a narrative that is essentially thin, and deliberately so, for Leon Rooke is less concerned with narrative intricacy than with creating the language, voice, and emotional and intellectual experiences of his protagonists and the feel of Stratford in the late sixteenth century. Hooker tells of the marriage of John Shakespeare to Mary Arden, of John’s growing family and shrinking fortune, of Will’s education at Stratford’s free grammar school, of Anne Hathaway’s family, of Will’s wooing her, a woman eight hears his senior, of their wedding and early days of married life. Hooker recalls as well incidents from his own early life, focusing on two touching experiences: his and his sister Terry’s grief over the death of his mother, Old Mam, and his warm meeting with a dog whom he thinks most likely is his father, though, sadly, he will never know for certain. Hooker also provides an extended account of his first meeting with Will in Arden Wood, where the two are drawn to each other, and a dramatic depiction of how close the world came to losing the Bard of Avon one evening when Will fell into the Avon and had to be saved from drowning by Hooker.

Rooke includes many accounts of activities and incidents in and around Will’s home on Henley Street and in and around Stratford. These, some based on historical evidence, some imagined, have little or no connection with the narrative and are introduced essentially to authenticate the historical setting. The reader learns, for example, of the beggars and orphans who infest the woods and highways, of the crowded taverns, of the brutal treatment of individuals, such as Moll Braxton, suspected of witchcraft, of the Queen’s visit to Leicester, where she is entertained by bearbaiting, and of the inadvertent burial alive of a child assumed dead in Stratford’s churchyard.

The Characters

Rooke’s Hooker is convincingly a dog but is, at the same time, much more than a dog. The author has evidently observed dogs closely, as is shown by the graphic particulars of Hooker’s behavior whether fighting, rutting, feeding, howling, barking, or gallivanting. Rooke’s conjectural accounts of Hooker’s canine perception of particular people and places are persuasive enough. Hooker’s conversations with other dogs about such topics as poaching and pendulous scrotums are equally plausible. One of the more convincing portrayals of Hooker’s canine world is that of his early days with his mother and sister.

Hooker, however, is as much human as canine, and as such, he becomes a fantasy portrait. His canine companions observe that he occasionally is partly human in appearance. When a drunk addresses him as his son and holds him erect on his hind legs, Hooker feels “grand” standing as a Two Foot, his term for man. It is Hooker’s thoughts, however, that set him apart from the canine world and impart to him his human personality. He is philosophical and learned. He is acquainted with Aristotle’s works. He believes in the immortality of the soul and is capable of defending his position against Will. He laments the lot of beggars and orphans and criticizes Will for ignoring them and rejecting egalitarianism.

Hooker is cantankerous, aggressive, and foul-mouthed, but he has much humane understanding and tolerance of man and dog. He is most considerate of his sister Terry’s grief on the death of Old Mam. He steals from the butcher to feed starving children. He rescues an old woman accused of witchcraft by a vicious mob. He empathizes with Anne’s deep feelings of abandonment by Will. He is also sensitive to the pricks of a guilty conscience. In the opening scene, he fights his rival Wolfsleach almost to the point of Wolfsleach’s death, but soon after he regrets his viciousness and wishes him well even though Wolfsleach runs off with his sister. He kills a deer but is haunted by visions of the dead creature. At the end of the novel, he has mellowed. He acquires an all-embracing, accommodating vision of life which he seeks to instill in his callow master, the budding playwright.

Rooke’s portrait of young Shakespeare is that of an inexperienced youth in need of a mentor, a role Hooker fulfills. Will is impractical, irresponsible, and writing about life without living it. He is “minting rhyme,” as Hooker says, about “Love this and Flower that and other such juvenile twaddle.” It is an achievement on the author’s part that he manages to make Shakespeare (and many of the other historical characters) come credibly alive, though they are presented through the voice of an idiosyncratic dog. Anne is particularly well rendered. A bit of a shrew who henpecks her younger husband, she loves him yet cares little for his artistic aspirations, which would take him away from her. At the end of the novel, as she bares her soul and tries to accept Will’s yearning for London, the reader shares Hooker’s sympathetic perception of her.

Critical Context

Many critics consider Shakespeare’s Dog to be one of the finest pieces of fiction by Leon Rooke, who has written eight volumes of stories and three other novels—Vault (1973), Fat Woman (1980), and The Magician In Love (1981). Shakespeare’s Dog won for him the Canadian Governor-General’s Award in 1985. He was one of the finalists for this prize for Fat Woman in 1981, the year he won the Canada-Australia Prize.

Rooke’s first collection of short stories, Last One Home Sleeps In the Yellow Bed (1968), employs traditional plots and narrative techniques. Since then, he has experimented with various new devices, playing down cause-and-effect narrative and emphasizing an astonishing range of voices, tones, and points of view. His narrators, for whom he shows unhesitating sympathy, include neurotics, foreigners, magicians, psychopaths, and, in Shakespeare’s Dog, an idiosyncratic dog, the most unusual of them all. He experiments with language, trying to capture the nuances and cadences of the different narrators’ voices.

Rooke’s fiction covers a wide spectrum of human experiences, but he tends to treat recurringly the inability of people, even those in intimate contact, to know one another really well, as indicated in his analysis of Will and Anne’s relationship. He is also absorbed with examining the nature of art and the artist, as in his portrayal of Will and Hookcr as different components of the writer’s psyche. Rooke’s fictional world combines the bizarre with the normal, the real with the supernatural, the vulgar with the polished, the comic with the tragic.

Shakespeare’s Dog has done much for Leon Rooke’s burgeoning reputation as a writer of fiction. (He has also written four plays.) One or two critics found the work gimmicky but most gave it a fine reception, such as the reviewer who praised it as “a sculpted novel with a largeness of imagination and wit, a book for literate dogs like ourselves.”

Bibliography

Antioch Review. XLI, Fall, 1983, p. 509.

Charyn, Jerome. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVIII (May 29, 1983), p. 11.

Hancock, Geoff. “The Hi-Tech World of Leon Rooke,” in Canadian Fiction Magazine. XXXVIII (1981), pp. 135-145.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. July 10, 1983, p. 4.

Maclean’s. XCVI, May 16, 1983, p. 44.

The New Yorker. LIX, June 13, 1983, p. 131.

Publishers Weekly. Review. CCXXIII (March 11, 1983), p. 79.

Rooke, Leon. “Voices,” in Making It New, 1982. Edited by John Metcalf.

Schaire, Jeffrey. Review in Harper’s Magazine. CCLXVI (May, 1983), p. 92.

Schoenbaum, Samuel. “To Woof or Not to Woof,” in The Washington Post Book World. XIII (May 22, 1983), pp. 5-6.

Virginia Quarterly Review. LIX, Autumn, 1983, p. 126.

Williamson, Michael. Review in Library Journal. CVIII (May 1, 1983), p. 921.