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societies accustomed to forthright, uncensored modes of expression. In today’s literature, cinema, and Internet entertainment, and in our print and electronic journalism, we expect bald, unmodulated frankness. Shakespeare’s contemporaries didn’t. Unlike our unbuttoned society, Elizabethans knew there were rules against the staging of the sacraments or treating with
the sanctity of wedlock through repeated banter about cuckoldry and horns, and Rosalind’s description of a wife’s unruly behavior (4.1.39–46). In 4.2 a deer is given a funeral – another sacrament slighted. All this is pure Marlowe. Shakespeare debunks blood sports with his description of the weeping deer (2.1.33–43), Duke Senior’s doubts about the legitimacy of hunting (2
Kalender” in the column “parties accused” for going “agaynst the bodely presence,” “Because the same [John] Edmundes sayde that hee was persuaded by this booke, readynge these woordes: that the Sacrament was made in the remembrance of Christ” (Foxe, Acts, 808).5 These persecuted Protestants, Foxe notes, were not “learned, being simple laborers and artificers, but as it pleased the Lord to worke in them knowledge and vnderstandyng, by readyng a few Englishe bookes, such as they could get in corners” (Foxe, Acts, 809), and they learned about the doctrine of