THE ANIMAL IN ALLEGORY45not already owned. Spenser’s deer is free too in that she returns of her
own will, and she is not killed by the hunter but led away as a now
domesticated creature. The poem reworks the Petrarchan allegory to
undermine the straightforward narrative of the hunt, nicely suggested
by the ambiguity of the final line. That she is “goodly won with her own
will beguiled” suggests the possibility that her own will plays a role in
the mutual beguiling that is the nature of love. In other words, this deer
has some agency. That the climax of the hunt is thwarted (a hunter sets
out to kill his quarry not capture it)—and that it is a doe, not typical
quarry in an actual deer hunt (in Petrarch it is weirdly a doe with ant-
lers)—suggests that the deer is not valued for its flesh but for its beauty
and independence. This may be evidence of a similar admiration for the
actual animal. Deer can of course be admired for their grace and beauty
and thus thought an appropriate emblem for a woman being courted by
the male poet. This is not to argue that the poem represents any kind of
breakthrough for the representation of women or animals, but that the
allegorical status of the animal is more complex than it at first appears.
I am not offering a complete historical survey of allegorical animal
poems, but rather trying to reveal the complexity of early examples of
allegory to show that it is not always a way of repressing or ignoring the
reality of the animal. Allegory retains its deep ambiguity in relation to
the animal as writers continue to deploy it in English poetry in later
centuries. Margaret Cavendish’s poem “The Hunting of the Stag” (1653)
nicely shows the multiplicity of animal fable and how it comes to allow
for even explicit representation of concern for animals. Tobias Menely
has argued that the poem is an example of the georgic, a form he sug-
gests shows more interest in representing the animal literally.^24 Anne
Elizabeth Carson, on the other hand, reads the poem as an allegory
about the fall of Charles I in the larger context of sympathy for ani-
mals.^25 The poem’s narrative is structured as fable; the stag is punished
for committing several sins, including narcissism (the stag stares at him-
self admiringly in a stream), theft (he takes food from a farmer’s field
rather than from the forest), and general hubris (he falls asleep in enemy
territory). As in any fable, these sins apply to all humans, though Carson