The Stag's Funeral

Cyparissus and Actaeon from Ovid's Metamorphosis

Cyparissus (c. 1625) by Jacopo Vignali: the boy mourns his pet deer (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg) (pic: Wikimedia Commons).

It was perhaps inevitable, after a trip through The Aeneid, that I decided to tackle Ovid’s Metamorphosis: a complement to the more sombre myth-making of Virgil, though the two are naturally part of the same world.¹ This long poem is reputed to have been Shakespeare’s favourite work, so I started reading it partly to find synergies between the two writers, but if you have an interest in visual art and literature more generally, you will get a lot out of it. I was inspired to record a few thoughts about the Cyparissus episode from Book 10, which I really enjoyed.

To give you a brief outline of the story: the boy Cyparissus is loved by Apollo, who gives him a tame stag. As well as being adored by Cyparissus, the stag is sacred to the nymphs of the Carthaean plains, and it spends a lot of time being draped with bling and living its best life in fertile pastures:

… The horns were brilliantly tipped with gold;

and over the shoulder, around the smooth neck, they had hung

a collar studded with jewels. On its forehead there dangled a silver

amulet held by the lightest of thongs; while - no less fetchingly -

pendants of pearls gleamed down from its two ears next to the temples.

But disaster is around the corner because Cyparissus, being a young hunstman-in-training, throws a spear and accidentally kills the animal. Apollo tries to console him, but Cyparissus is inconsolable. Finally the grief-striken boy requests - as a final favour from Apollo - if he can mourn until the end of time. And here comes the metamorphosis:

He wept and he wailed till his blood drained out and the whole of his body

started to turn the colour of green. The hair that was hanging

over his creamy forehead was changed to a shaggy profusion,

which stiffened and rose to the starry sky in a slender point.

I love that description. Many will be aware that cypress trees have cultural associations with grief and sorrow, and can be seen frequently in Italian cemeteries (readers of this Substack will know that I hung around a Venetian graveyard and I can confirm that it was full of cypresses). The association comes from the sap of the cypress, which forms tear-like droplets on its trunk.

William Hodges, Jacques and the Wounded Stag (Wikimedia Commons).

All of this got me thinking about Shakespeare, particularly that scene with Jacques and the stag in Act II, Scene 1 of As You Like It. Shakespeare makes playful references to pastoral in this play: a form that is full of contraditions, being about nature but also highly unnatural (stylised). This contradition is given a comic treatment in Jacques’ sorrow for the wounded stag, which we get second-hand from one of Duke Senior’s men. Firstly, the Duke sets out the central problem:

Come, shall we go and kill us venison?

And yet it irks me the poor dappled fools,

Being native burghers of this desert city,

Should in their own confines with forked heads

Have their round haunches gor’d.

He’s right - while they enjoy the liberty of nature, their behaviour tyrannises the other animals. This has also occurred to Jacques. According to the Duke’s man, the melancholy lord has been lying under an oak tree (a typical pastoral pose) soliloquising about the injured animal. Unlike the Cyparissus story, I think the effect is intended to verge on the ridiculous:

The wretched animal heav’d forth such groans

That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat

Almost to bursting, and the big round tears

Cours’d one another down his innocent nose

In piteous chase; and thus the hairy fool,

Much marked of the melancholy Jaques,

Stood on th’extremest verge of the swift brook,

Augmenting it with tears.

No only does the deer shed tears, but Jacques himself is left ‘weeping and commenting upon the sobbing deer’.

The idea of crying deer was a commonplace in Elizabethan literature, and it was often used as a metaphor for a dying man. In Michael Drayton’s Polyolbion we have the following description of a dying deer:

He who the mourner is to his own dying corse,

Upon the ruthless earth his precious tears lets fall.²

In Sidney’s Arcadia (a classic of the pastoral genre), the stag offers himself up to the hunters like a dying man:

… and they having performed all dueties, as well

for the Stagges funeral, as the hounds triumph

In addition to As You Like It, Shakespeare uses the image in several different plays. Hamlet exclaims ‘Why let the stricken deer go weep’, while Falstaff comically offers his body up to his hunters, Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, in The Merry Wives of Windsor:

Divide me like a bribe buck, each a haunch: I will keep my sides to myself, my shoulders for the fellow of this walk, and my horns I bequeath to your husbands.

---

While we don’t get a crying stag in Ovid’s tale of Cyparissus, the merging of weeping man and deer is quite literal in another story from the Metamorphosis: that of Actaeon in Book 3. Here, while our hero is out hunting, he stumbles across the virgin goddess, Diana, bathing in a pool with her nymphs. The fact that the intrusion was accidental does nothing to quell the goddess’s fury, and - to stop Actaeon from telling tales about her nakedness - she turns him into a stag. Poor Actaeon then suffers the grisly fate of being torn to pieces by his own dogs. Note how Ovid skilfully blends together all the elements of the stag’s funeral in these lines:

But when [Acteon] came to a pool and set eyes on his head and antlers,

‘Oh, dear god’ he was going to say; but no words followed.

All the sound he produced was a moan, as the tears streamed over his strange new face.

1. I’m reading (and quoting from) the Penguin Classics edition, translated by David Raeburn.

2. I’ve taken these examples from P. J. Franks, ‘The Testament of the Deer in Shakespeare’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, vol. 59, no. 2 (1958), pp. 65-8.