Consider Hooker, the divine creation of one prodigiously talented
Canadian scribe Leon Rooke (1934-), given life in the pages of his recklessly,
wantonly creative novel, “Shakespeare’s Dog (1981). With the Trumps and
Clintons and Sanders and Carsons vying for our attention in sound bites that
would cause our literary hound of hounds to cringe, if only a baying Hooker were alive
today. Or in the best of all possible worlds, go viral! Herein is a taste, with
bard, and his love Anne Hathaway playing their parts. The named “Marr” is
Hooker’s comely bitch ...
“She wasn’t class, my Marr. She knelled I had a soft spot
for her, and how to work it up. It was her very commonness that yanked my
dogger hard – to which Will would say, “I know what you mean, Hooker, for in
these woods man and dog are one.” I liked her coarse features, her hair a russet
stain deeper than fox yet not quite the same mud hue. Her stink. “Oh, there’s a
firebox that burns our king of log as we burn to fill it up,” is what Will
would say. Or quote me more aptly yet the print-brand he meant to put on his
Hathaway, as earlier in a Shottery time she had put her witch on him:
‘Graze on my lips; and if those
hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant
fountains lie.
. . . be my deer, since I am such a
park;
No dog shall rouse thee, though a
thousand bark.’”
Next: Running for
Your Life: On the Road Again
