In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville noted in Democracy in America that as he traveled through America, “there is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare,” adding that he first read “the feudal drama of Henry V” in a log cabin. While what could be called the natural habitat of the plays of William Shakespeare is a theatre in a city, it is worth remembering that his words have entertained people on wild frontiers. One of the more vivid presentations of that historical fact occurs in a film from 1993, Tombstone, where to a rowdy crowd in early 1880s Arizona a traveling actor named Mr. Fabian, played by Billy Zane, delivers the Saint Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V.

Of course, Shakespeare himself spent many years in a big city, and a classic biography of him is Marchette Chute’s Shakespeare of London. Still, he grew up in a small town set amid the fields and forests of Warwickshire, and if early stories about him poaching deer are true, he was quite the hunter. Not enough historical imagination goes towards reconstructing the hours Shakespeare spent learning how to use a sword and a bow and arrow.

As for how his rural upbringing left its mark on his writings, scholars and others amuse themselves by poring over Shakespeare’s works to find his references to various trees and flowers. He knew their names and their uses, such as Ophelia’s “there’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance,” in Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 5, and he knew about their decay, as in Sonnet 94, when he says, “lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.” Shakespeare also knew one bird from another, and in his Autobiography, Theodore Roosevelt, a lover of birds, wrote, “I know the lark of Shakespeare . . . [and] the nightingale of Milton.”

As the narrator of Louis Auchincloss’ novel, The House of Five Talents (1960), explained, Theodore Roosevelt showed that “it was possible for one human being to do all things: to ride and write, to read and hunt, to be a student of natural history and President of the
United States.” When hunting, Roosevelt took books with him, and he wrote magazine articles about his hunting trips, articles he then published as chapters in books.

After his term as President, Roosevelt went on safari in eastern Africa, mostly in what is now Kenya. Lasting from 1909 to 1910, it was a scientific expedition, funded by Andrew Carnegie and sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution. Roosevelt and his party were to shoot
and kill specimens for the museum to study and then display. Among his hunting gear Roosevelt packed what he called his “pigskin library.” It consisted of some sixty small volumes bound in pigskin, a leather chosen for its ability to mellow and become more supple as it absorbed sweat, blood, and gun oil.

In 1910, Roosevelt published an account of this safari, African Game Trails. In an appendix he wrote about his “pigskin library” and listed the books that made it up. Unhelpfully for adepts of the Bard, in that catalogue of books he simply listed “Shakespeare.” Fortunately, in
another book, A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open (1916), he included an article he wrote about the books he packed in his bags on his trips hunting and exploring.

There he noted that he carried with him books that he liked, the sort of books he would read back home. He shrugged about his tastes, saying of some books, “I do not like them, any more than I like prunes or bananas.” And so, his preferences influenced his choice of volumes of Shakespeare, and he stated, “In the same way, I read and re-read Macbeth and Othello; but not King Lear or Hamlet.” He added, “I know perfectly well that the latter are as wonderful as the former—I wouldn’t venture to admit my shortcomings regarding them if I couldn’t proudly express my admiration of the other two!”

It can be easy to imagine Roosevelt, as a naturalist and as a soldier, delighting in Macbeth. Its pivotal action combines nature and tactics, so that Malcom’s men disguise themselves as the trees of Birnam Wood and march on Macbeth’s castle at Dunsinane. It is a less obvious scenario, however, picturing Roosevelt re-reading Othello.

Yet, in his tent under the African stars, Roosevelt’s choice of Othello makes sense. Until the late 1930s, when Paul Robeson assumed the role, actors portrayed Othello the Moor as a kind of sultan or sheikh. In 1904 Roosevelt locked horns with Mulai Ahmed er Raisuli, a Berber chieftain in Morocco who kidnapped an American citizen and his British stepson. That diplomatic incident became the basis for a film by John Milius, The Wind and the Lion (1975), where the kidnapped American, in reality an elderly lawyer, becomes a feisty young widow with two young children. A formidable opponent, Raisuli was unlikely to be manipulated into murder-suicide by the likes of Iago.

In his commentary for the 1958 Dell paperback edition of Othello, John Houseman described that tragedy as “the conflict between good and evil, nobility and corruption.” It was how Roosevelt saw himself, as a force for good against evil, nobly fighting against corruption.
As he put it in a political speech in 1912, “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”

His bombastic campaign rhetoric aside, Roosevelt’s reading list for his travels calls to mind the old parlor game of naming the books (usually limited to three) one would take to a desert island. These days publishers turn out thousands of paperback copies of Shakespeare’s plays, making pigskin binding a thing of the past. Of course, some people today could claim that even paperbacks are obsolete, but they work just fine without electronic charging or signals.

If the customs officials restricting one’s stay on a hypothetical desert island insist on three books and no more, one each of Shakespeare’s comedies, histories, and tragedies could suffice.  While awaiting rescue from that exile, a reader can take solace from how Shakespeare draws us into another world. “We may be drawn in swiftly or slowly—in most cases swiftly,” wrote Mark Van Doren in his Shakespeare, “but once we are there, we are enclosed.” All well and good, but what remains now unknown is the big question of which books Shakespeare took with him when he went hunting.