Shakespeare the Angler
by Dr. John Day

Did Shakespeare go fishing, or did he not go fishing? — that is the question.

After his death, Shakespeare attracted dozens of biographers, but while he was alive he had none. And so, legions of scholars have had to analyse his plays and poems word by word to piece together Shakespeare the man, and to determine his likes and dislikes. As to whether Shakespeare enjoyed fishing, the scholars, as we shall see, are divided.

All in all, they've sifted from Shakespeare's works about 200 allusions to fish and fishing. Some of these 200 refer to sea fish like mackerel and herring, but they all smell of the dining-table or the fishmonger. Living inland, Shakespeare probably only once or twice visited the sea.

But Shakespeare also refers to freshwater fish — to salmon, trout, pike, dace, carp, tench, loach, gudgeon, eels and minnows, fish which he may once have caught. Moreover, he often uses "angling" and "bait" to describe how his characters behave and, as an angler might, he portrays streams and rivers with fondness. As Dr Johnson argued two centuries ago, a man who wants to understand Shakespeare mustn't only study him indoors, so to speak — "he must look for his meaning sometimes among the sports of the field."

Shakespeare was at heart a countryman, having grown up in Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, with the Forest of Arden and the River Avon on his doorstep. If he did fish in his youth, before he moved to London, he might have caught pike, bream, roach, chub, dace and carp from the Avon, and, though illegally, trout from the nearby River Dene.

Going by his references to salmon, it's doubtful that he knew much, if anything, about fishing for them. Fluellen claims in Henry V that "salmons" live in the River Wye at Monmouth. And in Othello, Iago says that Desdemona wasn't so unwise "To change the cod's head for the salmon's tail," which alludes only to a dish.

As for trout, in Twelfth Night the rogue Malvolio is called "the trout that must be caught with tickling." Catching trout like this was poaching, and one scholar thinks this image of Malvolio stands out so vividly that Shakespeare the boy may have been a poacher of trout.

Pike are mentioned in The Merry Wives of Windsor, whose characters discuss a coat of arms featuring "a dozen white luces," or adult pike. Shakespeare was punning on the name of his neighbour, Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, through whose park flowed the River Dene, which was loaded with pike.

Dace, and pike again, appear in the second part of Henry IV, when old Falstaff likens Justice Robert Shallow and himself to these two fish: "If the young dace be a bait for the old pike, I see no reason in the law of nature but I may snap at him." Pike will indeed snap at dace, and much else besides.

The carp surfaces in Hamlet, when Polonius — who has in mind the proverb, "Tell a lie and find a truth" — tells his servant: "Your bait of truth takes this carp of truth." People regarded the carp as cunning, and one book published a little before Shakespeare's time claimed that the carp even "holds seaweed in its mouth at the bottom of the water, so as to get over the net and escape." In All's Well That Ends Well a clown describes a rogue, cunning as a carp, it seems, who has

fallen into the unclean fishpond . . . and, as he says, is muddied withal. Pray you, sir, use the carp as you may.

Fish were in demand in Shakespeare's day, Elizabeth I and James I having issued proclamations that Fridays, Saturdays and Lent were fish-days. As a consequence, the big houses often had fishponds stocked with carp.

As for tench, in the first part of Henry IV a carrier waking up in a Rochester tavern swears he slept in "the most villainous house in all London road for fleas. I am stung like a tench." If Shakespeare's audience could understand this allusion to tench, it probably refers to their small scales, which resemble stings.

Still grumbling, the carrier then complains that the landlord wouldn't allow him and his fellows a chamber-pot, "and then we leak in your chimney, and your chamber-lye [urine] breeds flies like a loach." Was Shakespeare meaning that loaches are stuffed full of eggs? Or was he alluding to a recent translation of the Roman naturalist Pliny, who had claimed that "some fishes . . . breed flies and lice"? Nobody is sure.

The gudgeon was known to be easy to catch, "gudgeon" being a common name for a simpleton, and in The Merchant of Venice Graziano announces:

I'll tell thee more of this another time. But fish not with this melancholy bait For this fool gudgeon, this opinion. Lastly, eels and minnows swim without importance through a few of Shakespeare's plays, Pericles mentioning the belief that thunder will "awake the beds of eels" and no other fish.

As for the baits that Shakespeare knew about, we find our only clue in Hamlet's grave-digging scene, when Hamlet observes that

A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm. Shakespeare evidently knew only bottom-fishing, and one scholar is amazed by his "remarkable ignorance" of fly-fishing. But although artificial flies had been described as far back as 1496, in the Treatyse of Fysshynge With an Angle, in Shakespeare's day fly-fishing was still in its infancy and uncommon, and reels and running lines were fully developed only after his death.

We shouldn't expect Shakespeare to overload us with information about different baits or unusual fish or the techniques of angling. After all, he had to entertain his audience, and not bewilder them. Perhaps most of his allusions to freshwater fish were then common knowledge.

At any rate, he seemed to have fishing lodged in his mind. He uses "angling" repeatedly in the sense of catching people. Hamlet imagines that his step-father has "Thrown out his angle for my proper life." In All's Well That Ends Well, Bertram recalls that his wife Helena "knew her distance and did angle for me." Similarly, in The Winter's Tale, Polixenes fears that Perdita is attracting his son by "the angle that plucks him thither."

A striking allusion, again from The Winter's Tale, is given by Leontes in describing the freedom he allows his wife with another man:

I am angling now, Though you perceive me not how I give line. Go to, go to! Even a scholar who is sceptical that Shakespeare enjoyed fishing admits that "the necessity of giving way to the rush of a large fish when first struck seems to be alluded to" — evidence perhaps that Shakespeare could handle a rod.

In Much Ado About Nothing, Ursula is about to fool an eavesdropper, a practice she likens to fishing:

The pleasant'st angling is to see the fish

Cut with her golden oars the silver stream

And greedily devour the treacherous bait.

So angle we for Beatrice, who even now<

Is couchèd in the woodbine coverture.

For one Victorian writer, these lines proved that Shakespeare never fished, because if you see the fish, it sees you and escapes. Unless, he said, "British fish were in a comparatively primitive state of mind, . . . when man had not yet found out so many inventions for their destruction." Primitive or not, fish do get caught like this. A fishing scene is described by the wooer in The Two Noble Kinsmen:

As I late was angling

In the great lake that lies behind the palace,

From the far shore, thick set with reeds and sedges

And a better known one appears in Antony and Cleopatra, when Cleopatra commands her maid:

Give me mine angle. We'll to th' river. There,

My music playing far off, I will betray

Tawny-skinned fishes. My bended hook shall pierce

Their slimy jaws, and as I draw them up

I'll think every one of them an Antony,

And say, "Ah ha, you're caught!"

The maid replies, jogging Cleopatra's memory:

'Twas merry when

You wagered on your angling, when your diver

Did hang a salt fish on his hook, which he

With fervency drew up.

According to the Greek historian Plutarch, Cleopatra really did play this practical joke, after Antony had boasted of his skill at fishing. (One scholar reckons that Shakespeare's use of this tale marks him as an angler, because only anglers fully appreciate this joke.)

Poaching appears in The Winter's Tale, Leontes comparing it to adultery:

And many a man there is, even at this present,

Now, while I speak this, holds his wife by th'arm,

That little thinks she has been sluiced in's absence,

And his pond fished by his next neighbour

Just as Shakespeare liked to use the idea of angling, so he often used the idea of baits. "Bait the hook well. This fish will bite" says Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing, about Don Pedro, who is being gulled. In The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare writes that Lucrece, faithful while her husband was away, "touched no unknown baits nor feared no hooks." Thinking of the devil tempting saints by appearing as a beautiful and virtuous woman, Angelo exclaims in Measure for Measure:

O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint,

With saints dost bait thy hook!

And The Passionate Pilgrim, poems which Shakespeare may have written, has "young Adonis" turning down Cytherea:

But smile and jest at every gentle offer.

Perhaps these uses of "angling" and "bait" don't require much technical knowledge, but they were images that came readily to Shakespeare's mind. Likewise, Shakespeare often recalled streams and rivers.

He refers about a dozen times to English rivers — the Trent, the Wye, the Severn, and most often to the Thames, though he never mentions the Avon, at least not by name. What he did offer, however, were loving descriptions of unnamed rivers and, especially, streams — "The rank of osiers by the murmuring stream" in As You Like It, for example, and in his Sonnets the sun "Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy." In the poem Venus and Adonis, Adonis is bathing, and

When he beheld his shadow in the brook,

The fishes spread on it their golden gills.

The first part of Henry IV gives this simile:

The beads of sweat have stood upon thy brow

Like bubbles in a late disturbèd stream.

A beautiful picture appears in Hamlet of the stream that Ophelia drowned in:

There is a willow grows aslant a brook

That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.

Finally in this selection, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Julia, begging her maid to let her follow her true love, compares herself to a stream:

The current that with gentle murmur glides,

Thou know'st, being stopped, impatiently doth rage.

But when his fair course is not hinderèd

He makes sweet music with th'enamelled stones,

Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge

He overtaketh in his pilgrimage.

And so by many winding nooks he strays

With willing sport to the wild ocean.

This love of flowing water makes a good qualification for an angler. And yet, among Shakespearean scholars, T. R. Henn, A. Forbes Sieveking and Caroline Spurgeon doubt that Shakespeare was an angler. They reckon that his images from angling are so much weaker than his images from hunting, say, and Caroline Spurgeon thinks that Shakespeare was too impulsive to tolerate waiting for a fish to bite. In the opposite corner, the Reverend Henry Ellacombe and Clifford Cordley — two anglers — think that Shakespeare was an angler, because he loved Nature and had a placid temperament.

So did Shakespeare go fishing, judging by his allusions to freshwater fish, to bait and to angling, and to streams? I'll leave it up to you, the reader, to cast your vote. As the first part of Henry VI says, in another context,

The quarrel toucheth none but us alone:

Betwitxt ourselves let us decide it then.