The "ill kill'd" Deer: Poaching and Social Order in The Merry Wives of Windsor

Abstract

Nicholas Rowe once asserted that the young Shakespeare was caught stealing a from Sir Thomas Lucy's park at Charlecote. The anecdote's truth-value is clearly false, yet the narrative's plausibility resonates from the local social customs in Shakespeare's Warwickshire region. As the social historian Roger Manning convincingly argues, hunting and its illegitimate kin thoroughly pervaded all social strata of early modern English culture. Close proximity the Forest of Arden and numerous aristocratic parks and rabbit warrens would have steeped Shakespeare's early life in the practices of hunting and whether he engaged in them or only heard stories about them.1 While some Shakespeare criticism attends directly or indirectly the importance of hunting in the comedies, remarkably, there has been no sustained analysis of poaching's importance in these plays.2 In part, the reason for the oversight might be lexicographical. The word poaching never occurs in any of Shakespeare's works, and the first instance in which means to take game or fish illegally is in 1611 a decade after Shakespeare composed his comedies.3 Yet while the word was not coined for another few years, Roger Manning proves that illegal killing was a socially and politically explosive issue well before 1611. Thus, the ill kill'd deer Justice Shallow refers in Act One of The Merry Wives of Windsor situates the play within a socially resonant discourse where illegal killing brings light cultural assumptions imbedded within the legal hunt. As a result, operates as a trope through which the play's audience can analyze and critique class hierarchies, gender roles, and intergenerational conflicts that are often predicated directly or indirectly upon land-use practices. An analysis of the pervasive references in The Merry Wives of Windsor intersects with the complex history of forest laws in England. As is common knowledge, English forests were not merely