Our Official Herne the Hunter Watch
We here at The Wild Hunt are big fans of Herne the Hunter, so we were all very pleased to hear that a revival of Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor” is currently playing at the historic Globe Theater. According to The Times, it’s a great 21st century adaptation of a 17th century comedy.
Falstaff dons the horns of Herne.
“[Christopher] Benjamin’s Falstaff is an irresistibly lovable rogue, whose hilarious vanity in imagining he can seduce these two loyal wives is undercut by his own wry admissions of his girth. Got up in stag’s antlers for his appearance in the guise of the mythical Herne the Hunter, he is, he remarks, “the fattest stag in the forest”. That scene features a climactic sequence of masked medieval mummery bursting with a grotesque glee worthy of The Wicker Man.”
Sounds like a fun production to me! “Merry Wives” is the earliest written account of the legend of Herne the Hunter, a figure of English folklore that has become incredibly popular among modern Pagans, and is often equated with the horned Celtic god Cernunnos.
Sometime a keeper here in Windsor Forest,
Doth all the winter-time, at still midnight,
Walk round about an oak, with great ragg’d horns;
And there he blasts the tree, and takes the cattle,
And makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chain
In a most hideous and dreadful manner.
You have heard of such a spirit, and well you know
The superstitious idle-headed eld
Receiv’d, and did deliver to our age,
This tale of Herne the Hunter for a truth.
— William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor
Things had been rough showbiz-wise for Herne lately, what with him being excised from the movie version of Susan Cooper’s “The Dark is Rising”, so its nice to see a revival of his “first appearance” (albeit a mock first appearance). Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go revisit my “Robin of Sherwood” DVDs (especially since I’m not in the UK and able to watch this new production of Shakespeare’s play).
