The “Ill Kill'd” Deer: Poaching and Social Order in the Merry Wives of Windsor

The “ill kill’d” Deer: Poaching and Social Order in The Merry Wives of Windsor

Jeffrey Theis

Nicholas Rowe once asserted that the young Shakespeare was caught stealing a deer 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 ille- gitimate kin poaching thoroughly pervaded all social strata of early modern English culture. Close proximity to the Forest of Arden and nu- merous aristocratic deer parks and rabbit warrens would have steeped Shakespeare’s early life in the practices of hunting and poaching whether he engaged in them or only heard stories about them.1 While some Shakespeare criticism attends directly or indirectly to 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 poaching 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 deer killing was a socially and politically explosive issue well before 1611. Thus, the “ill kill’d deer” Justice Shallow refers to in Act One of The Merry Wives of Windsor situates the play within a socially resonant discourse where illegal deer killing brings to light cultural assumptions imbedded within the legal hunt. As a result, poaching 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 to poaching 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

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dense woodlands: they could include open fields, small towns, and other topographies. What defined a forest was a monarch’s desire to create a sanctuary for his own hunting pleasure. The first section of this essay maps out the central features of forest law, its enforcement, and how poaching accrued layers of cultural meaning. Within this section, analysis focuses on John Manwood’s Treatise and Discourse of the Laws of the Forrests (1598). In many ways, Manwood’s document is a synthesis of forest and game laws, but its significance lies less in what it says than in why and how he writes the document. Manwood responds to the pervasive abuse and neglect of royal forests by linguistically imposing boundaries on royal land. This document highlights the ways in which the boundaries of forestland were vulnerable to penetration by poachers. As the second section of this essay demonstrates, the permeability of forest boundaries that Manwood laments provokes quite the opposite response from Shake- speare. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare revels in illegality as poaching literally and metaphorically pervades the rambunctious comedy. Deer poaching comments upon control of the land, but Shakespeare also uses poaching as a metaphor for the usurpation of a person’s control over other forms of property, such as a husband’s control over his wife or a parent’s control over her or his children. Here poaching offers a model of transgression that reveals the shaky foundation upon which rests the arbitrariness of property. The spatial transgressions which poaching enacts suggest that outright control over space, land, and people is impossible; instead, the play presents a more fluid organization of space and social relations that are continually in flux and subject to communal revision.

Forest Law: Turning Hunters into Poachers

The history of hunting tells us that poaching is rarely about finding din- ner; rather, poaching is enmeshed in social privilege and control of the English landscape. Throughout the Middle Ages and early modern period the culture of poaching arose concurrently with the development of social and legal practices that turned hunting into an aristocratic sport. Over the centuries laws codified hunting within a legal framework that, in turn, gave rise to its illegal relative—poaching. And poaching served both to challenge and to replicate the practices of the legal hunt. Following the invasion of William the Conqueror, the Normans re- established continental land-use practices in England. William took vast portions of the English landscape under his control as royal forests, and he resurrected the game laws first instituted by Canute. The reimposition of these game laws overturned traditional land-use policies in which forests supported multiple uses and accommodated people’s needs from all walks of life. The laws were socially restrictive and limited those who

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could legally hunt to the king and those licensed by him. For offenses, penalties could range from beheadings to castration or branding depend- ing on the severity of the offense. Although severe punishments were infrequent in England, ﬁnes for hunting crimes became a proﬁtable source of income for the crown. Understandably, such forms of punishment inspired the resentment of all excluded peoples, from the many members of the aristocracy who did not receive royal licenses to com- moners.4 As Christopher Hill writes,

The game laws criminalized what most villagers regarded as traditional customary rights. The Bible was taken to conﬁrm custom. Genesis I:26–28 legitimated poachers’ belief that God intended animals and natural products for all men, not just for the rich who passed laws to give themselves a monopoly.5

So explosive was the issue of royal forests that quickly following the Magna Carta came the Charter of the Forest of 1217, which “mitigated the harshness of forest law and led to extensive disafforestations of royal forest.”6 But through the Middle Ages and into the seventeenth century, a succession of game laws reacted to outbreaks of social unrest by incrementally reinstating class and property restrictions to hunting. In particular, restrictions limited hunting rights to wealthy freeholders of land. Indeed, the Game Law of 1485 was, in part, a response to the idea that poachers were gathering together in outlaw gangs as modern-day Robin Hoods. As Roger Manning points out, the game laws were founded on the assumption that hunting was not a social practice for everyone but rel- egated to the monarchy and aristocracy. Thus, while the original forest laws set the monarch in direct opposition with all of his subjects, the later game laws created varying fault lines in English society. The monarchy and the aristocracy were quite often in alignment as they sought to ex- clude the lower classes. However, it should not be assumed that everyone in the aristocracy could hunt legally; aristocrats living within and on the outskirts of royal forests needed permission to hunt from the monarch. Hunting licenses became one more tool the monarch could use to solidify the allegiance of his subjects. The Jacobean Game Laws of 1603 and 1605 concurred with James’s philosophy on royal prerogative and created “stringent property qualiﬁcations” for hunting that excluded many small gentry. Even in the more permissive era of Elizabeth’s rule, not all aristocrats could hunt. In general, game laws not only divided landlords and peasants, they also divided peers, courtiers, and armigerous gentry against younger sons, gentlemen tenants, and servants.7 Hunting rights were restricted to men of the highest classes (and sometimes women of similar

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social position), but lower-class men (evidently not women) did partici- pate in these hunts as helpers. In this way, as hunting and nature were classified, hunting became a mode of social organization that could include people of various social ranks, but this organization reflected the attitudes of those who sought to preserve their power.8 The game laws fostered the development of complex hunting practices which further established that hunting was the domain of the aristocracy. Elaborate hunting rituals and corresponding terminology were developed in Tudor England to transform hunting into an aristocratic discourse. Such ritualization made hunting the hart (a male red deer with antlers of at least ten tines) the choice of royal sport. Elaborate practices culminated in hunting guides like George Gascoigne’s Noble Arte of Venerie or Hunting (1575), which was largely based on a French treatise, and Sir Thomas Cockaine’s Short Treatise of Hunting (1591).9 Filled with idiosyncratic tid- bits, The Noble Art of Venerie or Hunting presents a section entitled “Of the Race and Antiquitie of Hounds.” Here one finds instructions to feed a dog a brew of marrow and garlic so that it stands proud, as well as superstition- based instructions regarding the breeding of hounds. Even lowly deer excrement transforms into a material symbol of a deer’s size and strength, fit to present to the leader of the hunting party.10 Through codification and reification, hunting took on increasing resonance for early modern society. Roger Manning argues that hunting served many cultural functions:

it initiated adolescents into the manly world of the hunter, assisted in the assimilation of socially inferior persons who aspired to enter the landed gentry, and, as an imitation of war, it inculcated courage, loy- alty, and other values which attached to the code of honour of the English aristocracy and gentry.11

These uses of hunting find expression in the opening scene of The Merry Wives, and they become points of contention to which poaching reacts. Although hunting was legally restricted, all classes wanted to hunt game. Because of its popularity, monarchs took special enforcement mea- sures to ensure that only the privileged few actually hunted. The Forest Charter of 1217 instituted an elaborate bureaucratic hierarchy, which saw to the management of the forest’s resources. This hierarchy introduced foresters, keepers, and a forest court system separate from other courts in order to survey and enforce forest law.12 The bureaucracy of forest offices and courts was extensive. Foresters and keepers of higher offices held an honorable status and derived their positions through political patronage. They received substantial perqui- sites (such as access to an allotted number of deer per year, access to

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wood, and other forest resources). Competition and bidding made these offices quite lucrative to English monarchs. The forest courts included the Forest Eyre, Attachment, and Verderers’ Court. More substantial cases involving rival aristocratic families were heard in the Courts of Star Chamber. Enforcement varied from ruler to ruler. Elizabeth I tended to be lax in enforcement and usually considered poaching offenses to be misde- meanors. Indeed, even Elizabeth poached deer in 1572 to settle a point of honor against Lord Berkeley. With Leicester, she broke into Berkeley’s private deer park and slaughtered twenty-seven of his deer. James I, a more avid hunter than Elizabeth, took a stringent approach to enforcing game laws. He attempted to try game offenses rigorously and also sought to deny hunting privileges to minor gentry.13 Within this intricate historical context, what poaching meant to people depended upon who did the poaching and whose game was poached. But deer, although often the immediate target, were rarely the main prize. Research by historians reveals that illegal hunting continually was adapted by poachers to suit various social and topical circumstances. For example, poaching could be a tool for economic growth since venison commanded a high price on the black market.14 Poaching could also be a form of male bonding, or serve as a tool of rebellion to register a symbolic protest against abuses of agrarian land rights.15 Yet two uses of poaching are of particular relevance for analysis of The Merry Wives of Windsor. During the Tudor period, poaching became an instrument through which peers and gentry expressed rivalry within and between these two groups who often were more similar than different.16 In addition, poaching sometimes served the same social function as the symbolically laden skimmington through which communities registered their disapproval of threatening social behavior, such as adultery.17 In The Merry Wives, poaching initially serves as a marker that differentiates Falstaff from the other characters, yet at the same time, it also brings characters together as they share the meat of the killed deer. The multiple uses of poaching all indicate that it is a distinctly political behavior—one that comments upon authority, social hierarchies, and the socially constructed nature of communities. Quite obviously, hunting, poaching, and the patrolling of forests are strenuous bodily activities. These activities demonstrate how people physically try to control and appropriate natural spaces. But linguistic battles for control also took place. The intricacies of how forest laws use language to define and presumably control forest spaces are reflected and enacted in John Manwood’s Treatise and Discourse of the Laws of the Forrests, which was written some four hundred years after the Norman conquest and is roughly contemporaneous with Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of

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Windsor.18 Manwood, a lawyer and forest ofﬁcial during Elizabeth’s reign, might be thought of as a proto-environmentalist who sought to preserve the remaining royal forest lands from perceived threats, such as over- grazing and over-hunting.19 These threats were brought on partially by Elizabeth’s neglect of forest law, but they also arose from the forest itself. The forest topography, except for fenced deer parks, is necessarily open. Hence the landscape’s boundaries are permeable and vulnerable to all who inhabit or live near the forest. The difﬁculty in controlling physical and symbolic boundaries is precisely what Shakespeare’s play exploits with its use of poaching tropes. Manwood’s treatise, on the other hand, registers a profound anxiety over transgressed boundaries. Early in the treatise, Manwood discusses how one should under- stand the forest landscape. He writes that the forest

doth lie open and not enclosed, although perhaps there may be diverse inclosures within it, for this word Territory, as I take it, is derived from the Latin word Territorium, which is a Territory, of/or all the ﬁelds and country lying within the bounds and libertie of a Citie, which doth extend farre without the walls of a citie round about . . . And because a Forrest doth likewise lie open . . . this word Territorie, is used as a meet word for that purpose.20

Here Manwood asserts that while parts of a forest may have boundaries/ enclosures (for example, deer parks have fences), much of it is not enclosed. Manwood adds later that boundary markers are often streams, rocks, or roads, not walls. In fact, towns, homes, and pastures often lie within a royal forest, which greatly irritates farmers when deer are de- stroying crops, but forest law forbids killing them.21 During this period, the forest is the site of multiple land uses—such as hunting, grazing, semi-pasture, and logging.22 Each of these land uses construes the natural environment differently, and necessarily has different understandings of what functions forest borders should perform. The boundaries of forests and the sections within a forest are necessarily permeable to allow game animals to move freely from shelter to food sources. For this reason, a property owner could not fence out deer because deer were given the liberty of free passage throughout the forest.23 The openness of these boundaries means that transgressing them, if one is not caught, is quite simple; accordingly, reading and enforcing this “territory” is particularly problematic. Manwood responds to this problem when he writes “although that a forrest doth lie open, and not inclosed with hedge . . . or stone-wall, which some other inclosures have, yet, in the eie and consideration of the lawe, the same hath as strong an

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inclosure by those markes . . . as if there were a brick-wall to inviron the same.”24 Manwood’s and the monarch’s intentions are to create imaginative walls that forest occupants will internalize. But such fluid, permeable, and arbitrary definitions and borders led to frustration on the part of forest inhabitants, both rich and poor, against the forest law because it restricted their ability to hunt deer, cut timber trees at will, or keep browsing deer off of their farmlands. Land users inhabited this environment on a daily basis, identified with it, and felt that it was their own. To be reminded that there was no free use of nature was a con- stant irritant that occasionally erupted in violence.25 This permeable “brick-wall” often did not deter many forest transgressors; it merely criminalized their behavior and altered the significance of their actions. As his description of the forest demonstrates, Manwood relies on the power of language and analogy to control people’s minds and behavior. Manwood’s interpretation of the word “territory” offers a cunning legiti- mation of kingly authority over the natural environment. He understands the forest in terms of and as analogous to the city. Although Manwood gives specific descriptions and requirements for the natural characteristics of the forest elsewhere, it is important to him that nature be likened to the city. As a result, the forest is not a separate world but one that is epistemologically linked to human society. Human social systems are im- posed upon natural systems. The pairing of city/forest helps justify the king’s extension of his authority over nature: as the king is ruler and protector of the civil society, he is also the protector of a natural society. Thus, ironically, Manwood makes the rule of nature seem “natural” only by likening it to human institutions. There is a further implication of the “forest as city” analogy, though. The relationship between the two locations is not one-sided; the forest is not only to be seen as a type of city. The relationship can be reversed as the forest can become a surrogate or model for the city. Thus, according to Manwood’s definition of the forest, the use and management of the “natural” forest has an indirect bearing on the construction of the human- made town and city. For the purposes of this essay, Manwood’s use of metaphor and analogy to define forests provides a model for reading and defining human actions in the forest—such as poaching—metaphorically. Not only is Manwood’s treatise useful in understanding the role metaphoric language serves in defining forests, but his attitude toward the threatened forest provides a useful counterpoint to Shakespeare’s approach to the subject. Manwood hopes that centralized authority can protect the forest environment from local subjects by imposing the royal will on nature. His treatise registers a profound anxiety over the threats individuals pose to nature, whereas Shakespeare takes a radically different perspective on the issue.

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The Merry Wives of Windsor, Poaching, and Destabilizing Authority

Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor directly participates within the broader historical struggle to define England’s wooded regions. But where Manwood argues for the integral role of the monarch in defining these regions, Shakespeare uses literal and metaphorical poaching to de- centralize control over land and society. While only the final scene is set in Windsor Park (part of Windsor Forest), Falstaff’s own character is continually linked to poaching and hunting, and the opening scene itself is immersed in the discourse of poaching customs and hunting laws. In turn, the pervasiveness of poaching in the play’s opening and concluding scenes frames how one interprets the wives’ tricks, Falstaff’s thwarted career as a cuckolder, and the Pages’ attempt to marry off their daughter. As the opening scene demonstrates, but scholarship on Falstaff largely overlooks, Sir John first and foremost is a Robin Hood–like deer poacher. Shallow charges that Falstaff has “beaten my men, kill’d my deer, and broke open my lodge” (1.1.111–12).26 Falstaff, while gentry, acts in a man- ner typical of aristocratic poachers during the time by frankly accepting the label of poacher.27 Not only does Falstaff kill one of Shallow’s deer, a symbol of Shallow’s property, he invades the center of Shallow’s woodland property—the hunting lodge. Falstaff also collectively calls his own men, Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym, by the names “Scarlet” and “John” (1.1.173), which are shortened names for Will Scarlet and Little John— two of Robin Hood’s companions. Guilt by association would imply that Falstaff stands for the most famous poacher in English history, Robin Hood. Shakespeare presents Robin Hood differently in As You Like It, where Charles gives a gentrified account of the tradition in which the aristocracy merges with an idyllic, pastoral vision of the golden age. But Falstaff’s violence represents a rougher strain of the Robin Hood tradition. All the while that Falstaff looks to shore up his own financial position, his poaching directly challenges one of the foundations of the aristocracy—the right to hold and control land in the form of private property. Property and status are Shallow’s primary concerns in this scene, and his status is open to debate by Falstaff and the play’s critics. Shakespeare scholars wonder how, as Justice of the Peace, Shallow could own a deer park.28 One possible response is that Shallow isn’t a JP; rather, he is a justice of Windsor Forest, and here he defends the queen’s deer park. However, the play does not develop this possibility. More plausibly, Shakespeare is taking liberties with the fact that private deer parks lit- tered the English landscape, and he adds a fictional deer park to the outskirts of the town.

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What is more striking about this scene is the way in which Shallow takes Falstaff’s poaching as a personal challenge. He says “I will make a Star Chamber matter of it. If he were twenty Sir John Falstaffs, he shall not abuse Robert Shallow, esquire” (1.1.1–4). Later he adds “the Council shall hear it, it is a riot” (1.1.35). Herein lies the crux of the argument between Falstaff and Shallow. The Star Chamber heard poaching cases involving rivaling members of the aristocracy. Shallow’s choice to identify himself as “esquire” and Falstaff as “sir” indicates that Shallow is mad about Falstaff’s challenge to his social rank, and he is not worried about the slain deer. This point of contestation is not unique; Roger Manning’s study indicates that poaching at this time could serve as a symbolic sub- stitute for a duel.29 Poaching a rival’s deer was a direct challenge to his opponent’s status and ability to protect his own property. However, it is clear that Shallow’s argument before the Star Chamber would not focus on the challenge to his honor, an argument that “Sir” John might be able to slough off. He would argue that poaching is a threat to the social order, and he would focus instead on the violence and riot-like conditions of the poaching raid. Shallow is talked out of pursuing legal recourse and the meat of his “ill-kill’d” deer becomes, symbolically, that which creates alliances within the town of Windsor. Giorgio Melchiori argues that the characters do not further pursue the matter of this debate.30 Literally, Melchiori is correct, but thematically the matter doesn’t drop. The challenges to social order and physical property that Falstaff’s poaching highlights, diffuse through the rest of the play. The direct association between Falstaff and the culture of poaching signals to the audience to view the rest of the play under the taint of poaching. Indeed, in the opening scene Shallow’s discussion of the “ill kill’d” deer and Master Page’s attributes as a hunter carry the residue of poached deer and English game laws. Page thanks Shallow, a country justice, for providing him with venison. Shallow responds, “much good do it your good heart! I wish’d your venison better, it was ill kill’d. How doth good Mistress Page?—and I thank you always with my heart, la! with my heart” (1.1.81–85). The venison may have been killed unskillfully (“ill kill’d”), but the prominent role of poaching in the play suggests that the deer was got by poaching. Most likely the venison came from Shallow’s deer park or Windsor Park itself, and it could be the deer Shallow charges Falstaff with killing. If Shallow’s exchange with Falstaff reveals how poached deer can divide, here the opposite is true. Shallow’s gift of the deer capitalizes on venison’s prized status, and the deer’s unfortunate demise literally greases the network of social connections, as Shallow solidiﬁes his friendship with Page. Falstaff is not the only hunter in this scene, however. The talk of hunting continues as Slender compliments Page on his excellent greyhound.

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Although overlooked by Shakespeare editors, technically it was illegal for someone who lives within a royal forest to own a greyhound unless it was licensed, since greyhounds were raised for deer chasing and hunting. Tra- ditionally, hunting dogs kept near royal parks and forests must have a paw expediated (toes cut off), or “lawed” so that they would be unable to chase deer.31 John Manwood comments that within the class of hunting dogs, which includes mastiffs and spaniels, greyhounds are unique in that expediating them isn’t mentioned in forest law. He adds that the law is more strict against greyhounds, and they aren’t permitted within the forest at all unless the owner receives a grant from the monarch.32 Page lives within the bounds of Windsor Forest; therefore, unless he has received special license from the queen or the Justice of Forest Eyre, his dog is illegal. Manwood notes that forest law was often neglected during this period, and it is quite probable that, along with other forest law abuses, locals owned illegal greyhounds within forest bounds. The exchange between Page and Shallow establishes Page as a hunter of dubious legality. Yet the greyhound also establishes Page as a representative of the inﬂux of new hunters in the sixteenth century. Christopher Hill notes that “gentlemen living near forests strove to obtain royal authorization to hunt there, or hunted without license. Not until the late sixteenth century did there begin to appear a royal policy for the forests.” According to Manning, rising men like Page, who were without much freehold land, were a large source of riotous hunting.33 The opening scene is ambiguous as to whether or not Page has royal authorization to hunt, but this is a period when the crown was beginning to reassert its control over forests. As a rising middle-class man, he is taking on the airs of the aristocracy with his ownership of a greyhound, and metaphorically he is poaching a higher social position. Even if he hunts legally, within the codes of the ritualized late Tudor hunt, he is not truly legitimate because of his social status. Both Page and Falstaff are types of poachers then: one is an insider looking for increased status, the other is an outsider searching for money and other men’s wives. Such blurring of “inside” and “outside” is concurrent with recent work on thievery in Shakespeare.34 Within this opening sequence then, poaching serves multiple roles that reveal class tensions and an ambivalence between accepting and eschewing illegal behavior. These characters’ attempts to distinguish between different components of illegal hunting also forecast the rest of the play’s preoccupation with deﬁning socially acceptable behavior in a vari- ety of spaces. As Shallow attempts to control Falstaff’s invasion of forest space, the play’s shift to urban spaces replicates this behavior when Ford attempts to protect the domestic space of his house and the body of his wife from Falstaff. But as characters continually seek to protect spaces by creat- ing enforced boundaries, the profuseness of transgressions also indicates

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that enforcing these boundaries is both subjective and impossible (as illustrated by Shallow’s differing conduct towards Falstaff and Page). The distinction between insider and outsider thievery blurs further as poaching relates to the rest of the play. Poaching begins with the strong, material image of the “ill kill’d deer,” but it quickly infiltrates the play in more diffuse ways and comes to model the usurpation of one person’s property or interests by another character’s. Here, poaching rises to the level of a governing metaphor throughout the play, and as it destabilizes the “legitimate” hunt, it also destabilizes the small town’s social and marriage customs. The townspeople of Windsor have little problem with labeling the outsider Falstaff as a threat to legality and social stability. But when it becomes clear to the characters that insiders such as Anne Page also usurp or “poach” other people by subverting their intentions, the links that associate the outsider with illegality and the insider with legality are no longer tenable. The varied and complex fluidity between poacher and poached also requires a different enforcement mechanism than the one traditionally associated with poaching. Poaching is not corrected through the centralizing authority of the monarch’s forest court and Star Chamber; rather, punishment is at the local, informal level of social relations within Windsor. This displacement reflects the larger struggle of the characters not to determine what is “legally” acceptable, but what is socially acceptable. Falstaff’s deer killing makes him the primary emblem of the poacher in the play. But as his nefarious interests shift from hunting for deer to hunting for money and sex, we quickly come to see that poaching can operate in both literal and metaphoric ways. In The Winter’s Tale, the association between poaching and adultery is quite overt. During Leontes’s rage against cuckoldry he says, “And his pond fish’d by his next neighbor—by / Sir Smile, his neighbor” (1.2.195–96). Falstaff is only slightly more subtle than Leontes’s piscatorial poacher, but he too looks to poach a husband’s possessions. He plans to “make love to Ford’s wife” and quickly adds that “the report goes she has all the rule of her husband’s purse” (1.3.44, 52–53). Shortly thereafter, he says that he has the same plans for Mistress Page and her husband’s money. Falstaff associates sexuality with money—two of his lecherous desires.35 Through his shifting attention, Falstaff cues the audience to consider poaching more broadly as encompassing the usurpation of another person’s property, interests, and identity. This refocused vision first draws attention to how Page, and to some extent Ford, attempt to poach the aristocracy by adopting their man- ners and lifestyle. Then it focuses on how Anne’s suitors seek to poach her inheritance and her family’s relatively strong position within Windsor’s hierarchy, and finally, on how Anne poaches her parents’ intentions.

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Shakespeare weaves poaching throughout the play by the pervasive use of references to cuckolds and the use of horn imagery. If this were a typical play about wooing and seduction, one might expect that the wives would be the characters most often associated with the deer, since they are the object of Falstaff’s “hunt.” Rather, in a play filled with inversions, the myth of Diane and Actaeon is repeatedly invoked so that women poach men’s roles by becoming the hunters, men become the hunted, and the Petrarchan love-hunt is turned on its head. Accordingly, the men are likened to the deer through the symbolically charged image of the cuckold’s horns. Ford believes that Page will be turned into an Actaeon: a figure linked in the Renaissance to the horns of a cuckolded man (3.2.43). Later, as Ford has missed catching Falstaff with his wife, his suspicions over- come him, and he ends a long soliloquy by saying “though what I am I cannot avoid, yet to be what I would not shall not make me tame. If I have horns to make one mad, let the proverb go with me: I’ll be horn-mad” (3.5.149–52). Falstaff is also casually linked to the deer when he goes out in the “buck-washing” the first time he is duped by the wives (3.3). Falstaff more directly refers to the cuckold’s horn when he calls Ford “the peaking cornuto” (3.5.70). Literally cornuto means “horned creature,” and in Italian comic novellas like Il Pecorone, the cornuto was the name of the cuckolded old man or professor.36 This linguistic coupling serves to fore- shadow Falstaff’s final association with the deer where he finds that he was the prey all along and his plan has been usurped. Indeed, the horns of the cuckold are synonymous with the dubious spoils of the hunt. The origin of the word cuckold and the association of horns with the cuckold are not clear, but as Jeanne Addison Roberts ob- serves, the deer in Shakespeare are often associated with courtship, cuckoldry, and victimization.37 For Shakespeare, the horns of the cuckold are apt for depicting dynamic inversions, as they symbolize the animal- like lust of the cuckolder and also the victimized husband. In Merry Wives, horns typically refer to the cuckold, but Falstaff’s disguise in the final scene straddles associations of horns with both cuckolder and cuckold. The dynamic transformation from cuckolder and cuckold corresponds to a spatial shift from private to public. As the play opens with the transgression of space through the practice of poaching, the significance of space, in the form of property and control over it, increases throughout the play until it reaches its apex in Windsor Park. As Patricia Parker convincingly argues, the play demonstrates

concern with women as moveable property—as crossing boundaries from a father’s to a husband’s house and hence as dangerously open to the ‘translation’ of adultery—invokes anxieties about property not

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ons, by

Map of Windsor

Figure 1. Figure Castle and Envir John Norden, 1607; By John Norden, Permission of the British Library, Harl. MS. 3749, Library, Map III.

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only as a threat that might usurp or build on a husband’s proper ground but that such translation could destroy the integrity of a house.38

This link between moveable property and women is ironized, compli- cated and developed through the spatial shift of the arenas of Falstaff’s punishment from private space of the home to the more public space of the Little Park of Windsor Forest. The first two times that Falstaff is duped take place largely within the confines of Mistress Ford’s home. This forum of punishment is symbolically appropriate, for the act of cuckolding takes place in private and primarily affects the private sphere of marriage. In addition, the invasion of privacy underscores Falstaff’s status as an outsider. But throughout the play categories of insider and outsider blur, and Falstaff’s assaults upon the private sphere are made public. The correction of Falstaff’s attempted transgressions follows a conventionally pastoral motif, a move from an infected urban world to a supposedly more innocent, rural space. The place of correction, too often accepted unquestioningly by literary critics, is the Little Park adjoining Windsor Castle. This place is a deer park within Windsor Forest’s legal jurisdiction. It lies on the margins of the town, which is neither completely private nor public in the social sense of these terms (see Figure 1). The park is a liminal space: one that is outside of the town proper, yet populated by social custom, such as the folkloric Herne the hunter. Additionally, this space is part of the larger forest, which C. L. Barber notes, is a communal site of ceremony and release from norms that govern the village.39 Jeanne Addison Roberts adds that “even in Shakespeare’s day Windsor Forest was more of a park than a forest—a fitting place to mediate between the town and the wild woods. This very fact tends to neutralize the effect of terrors and evil enchantments evoked by the Pages.”40 But Little Park has a distinctive topography that ought not be conflated with either all English forests or the whole of Windsor Forest. This park is one of Elizabeth I’s royal deer parks, and John Norden’s 1607 survey of the region reveals that the park adjoins Windsor Castle, the site of the Royal Garter ceremony for which a version of the play was probably composed.41 In her analysis of the differences between the 1602 Quarto and the first Folio, Leah Marcus argues that the Folio provides many more specific references to Windsor’s geography. For example, the Folio text includes Mistress Quickly’s reference to Windsor Castle and the Order of the Garter, which reminds the audience that the park is in close proximity to the castle. According to Marcus, the Quarto text is similar to city comedies, and the Folio version is more steeped in rural life.42 The castle’s presence would be inescapable to the play’s characters, for it lies

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directly between the town of Windsor and the park itself. Herne’s oak is thought to be a real tree that “stood about half a mile southeast of the Castle.”43 Herne is also semantically linked with a real Tudor poacher. In the ﬁrst Quarto of the play, “Horne” stands in for “Herne,” and it is possible that Horne is Richard Horne, a confessed poacher who invaded Henry VIII’s forests.44 But for all the historical and material immediacy of the landscape of The Merry Wives, it deploys pastoral tropes in order to frame sylvan and urban locales. Speaking of a scene early in the play, Camille Wells Slights argues that Sir Hugh Evans’s quotation of Marlowe’s pastoral song “The Passionate Shepherd to his Love” evokes a pastoral of peace and safety— two qualities Evans desires as he awaits his duel with Doctor Caius. Slights goes on to propose that Evans’s desire for a pastoral world is ironic for the town of Windsor itself is a pastoral, “harmonious world,” and he has nothing to fear regarding the duel. It is Falstaff himself, the symbol of civilization’s corruption, who is opposed to and corrected by the unlikely pastoral community of Windsor. The community often shares Falstaff’s vices of money, sex, and prestige, but its pastoral moderation keeps these vices in check.45 Thus, pastoral and its parodies shape the play. However, by focusing on the pastoral opposition between the town and the rural setting of the deer park, a more dynamic, less harmonious, version of pastoral comes to the fore. The movement to the Little Park shares with A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It’s contrast between court and country, or, in this case, between town and country. And like these two plays, the pastoral scene in Little Park does not harmonize the characters with nature. Instead, the scene continually establishes boundaries that attempt to impose harmonic order on situations, yet these boundaries disintegrate. The end result is not a pastoral harmony, but a pastoral that embraces discord. As a royal deer park within the broader territory of a royal forest, the Little Park is legally external to common law, and its function, as illumi- nated by John Manwood, is to serve as the sanctuary for deer from the type of people in the play who end up invading the park. In addition, as Manwood’s treatise makes clear, the larger forest’s boundaries are permeable, and it is really the force of law that creates imaginary walls around it. But a deer park is necessarily enclosed, and its enclosure makes abso- lutely clear whose land it is and whose deer reside there—Elizabeth’s. Shakespeare’s use of the Windsor topography and the possible linguistic link between Herne and Richard Horne would remind his audience that this ﬁnal scene occurs on Queen Elizabeth’s property—literally within the shadow of her castle. Thus, this space provides an alternative to the household spaces in the town of Windsor, but it does not create a simple opposition between the social constraints of the town and the open free-

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dom of the forest. Rather, this is a space Elizabeth defines and presumably controls within a legal framework external to that which governs Windsor. One could argue then that Elizabeth’s authority over this space qui- etly governs the play’s conclusion much as the moon, one of Elizabethan England’s symbols for the queen, monitors the forest scenes in A Mid- summer Night’s Dream. Certainly the addition to the Folio of Mistress Quickly’s command to her “elves” suggests as much: “Search Windsor Castle . . . / Strew good luck . . . / That it may stand till the perpetual doom / In state as wholesome as in state ’tis fit, / Worthy the owner, and the owner it” (5.5.56–60). This invocation, and the enclosed royal park itself, could imply that Elizabeth is a silent judge of the proceedings. Her royal authority controls and organizes the park space, and with this space, she offers a relief valve for the tensions within Windsor. In this view, Elizabeth offers an outside space that is not neutral, but it affords the play’s characters the space, both physically and psychologically, wherein they can gain perspective on the social networks in conflict within the town itself. But while the topography reminds the audience of Elizabeth’s power as guardian of royal parks and forests, that reminder does not mean she controls the play’s conclusion.46 Indeed, the landscape is intended to signify Elizabeth’s power and presence, but the characters’ actions diminish her control. The final scene is part poaching raid on the queen’s own land and part skimmington. The intended target is not the queen’s authority per se, but the parodic and pervasive references to poaching (e.g., “brib’d-buck” and “night-dogs”) demonstrate that Elizabeth has little control over her trespassers. In this scene, Falstaff and the townspeople of Windsor enact precisely what John Manwood laments: various people continually transgress the boundaries of Elizabeth’s forestlands. Little Park certainly provides the space where characters work out their conflicts with each other, but they metaphorically poach Elizabeth’s authority, symbolized in and enacted through forest law, by redefining the space as a safe haven in which no one character has absolute control over the landscape. The location and organization of this space may invite the audience to think that centralized authority has the power to control behavior within the region, but as I will elaborate in the conclusion, the play is concerned with destabilizing authority so that no person has absolute mastery over someone else. The conclusion in Little Park weaves together many of the play’s central issues by removing the action from the home and back to the world of hunting in which the play opened but with a crucial difference. In the opening, Falstaff was the poacher, and now his subject position becomes the deer. Falstaff has agreed to meet the wives for an orgy at Herne the hunter’s oak between twelve and one at night. Falstaff, overflowing with lust, cries “O powerful love, that in some respects makes a beast a man; in

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some other, a man a beast” (5.5.4–6). Here distinctions between man and animal collapse as lust makes transgression possible. He revels in his sexuality, although, as François Laroque argues, Falstaff’s choice of imagery is unfortunate. Falstaff sees his metamorphosis as akin to Jove’s turning into animals to couple with women, but his choice of the deer, while appropriate to the forest landscape, is reminiscent of Actaeon’s tragic transformation.47 Here Falstaff’s prior talk of horns and cuckoldry take their material form. His language is frankly sexualized through its animal imagery, and Mistress Ford calls him her “male deer” (5.5.17) much as Venus tells Adonis:

“Fondling,” she saith, “since I have hemm’d thee here Within the circuit of this ivory pale, I’ll be a park, and though shalt be my deer: Feed where thou wilt, on mountain, or in dale; Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry, Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.” (229–34)

In both of these Shakespearean works the play on venery as hunting and venery as lust are conflated, but in the earlier work, Venus spatially defines the deer park as a safely contained female body, and in the play the deer park is not clearly gendered. Falstaff sees the park as an ungendered space in which men and women are equally free to pursue their lusts. Both works, Venus and Adonis explicitly and Merry Wives implicitly, also trope the pastoral function Manwood makes so clear in his treatise: parks and forests serve as sanctuaries from external threats. The invocation of an erotic deer park further situates this space within pastoral. In Falstaff’s mind, the park offers a discreet place where he can enact the pastoral eroticism expressed in “The Passionate Shep- herd to his Love.” The pales that fence in the park echo the tradition of erotic, enclosed gardens where the female body is kept pure for sanctified sexuality.48 But the permeability of boundaries that Manwood seeks to end also serve to turn Falstaff’s version of pastoral protection into a parody. The enclosed Little Park is somewhere in between the realm of the garden, where art governs nature, and the wild wood, where nature challenges human power. Falstaff assumes that he can have the best of two pastoral worlds. The first pastoral world is one where nature is fully shaped by human art, and hence, not threatening. The other is like the wild wood, which invokes the opposition between country and city. This second version offers Falstaff the promise that this space is outside the realm of community, where social customs like monogamy reside. Then Falstaff, who throughout the play has thought of himself as the poacher, unleashes a wonderfully suggestive command. He commands

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the wives to “divide me like a brib’d-buck, each a haunch. I will keep my sides to myself, my shoulders for the fellow of this walk—and my horns I bequeath your husbands. Am I a woodman, ha? Speak I like Herne the hunter?” (5.5.24–28). Though the horns refer to fertility and cuckoldry, Falstaff’s use of hunting tropes makes this statement much more richly complex. First of all, Falstaff uses the language of the hunt, and the dividing of the buck is a ritualized process—called “breaking the stag”—performed by cutting apart the deer and giving the choicest parts to those of highest rank. This hunting custom underscores that the hunt has codes of propriety (even as Falstaff is engaging in an illegal act), and more importantly, it is a communal process in which participants are given rewards commensurate with their social rank and involvement in the hunt.49 Falstaff’s actions parody and mock the legitimate hunt’s emphasis on decorum and community, yet as we know, his impending correction is ironically a ritualized, communal event. Moreover, he is a “brib’d-buck.” Falstaff is a poached deer whose shoulders will be offered as a bribe to buy off the keeper of the park. Thus, this term emphasizes the corruptibility of the law. Finally, and most importantly, this passage illustrates Falstaff’s fluid and confused multiple subjectivity. First he sees himself as the poached deer, and then he compares himself to a woodman (a hunter). Falstaff’s association with the hunter, both a literal hunter and the Petrarchan hunter of love, underscores his sense of masculine power, which captures his female prey and controls the symbolic distribution of her body to an imaginary community. With this persona, Falstaff makes use of hunting customs to articulate utmost confidence and certainty in his ability to control his identity, but his simultaneous association with the prey undercuts and renders problematic this certainty. His self-identification with the deer puts him in the position of the hunted, or, in terms of the Petrarchan love hunt, the woman. In this case, Falstaff’s identity reveals his own lack of self-knowledge. His bestial identification both represents a confidence in his animalistic virility, and his ability to shift subject positions at will, yet there may be a subterranean, Actaeon-like fear of female sexual power. Here he would anticipate the denouement and exhibit the fear of female power that disabled Master Ford throughout the play.50 As the scene plays out, it turns out that Falstaff is the poached and not the poacher. And, as is typical in Ovidian metamorphoses, fluidity is a physical process that ends ironically in freezing a person’s identity into the form most appropriate to it. In this scene, Falstaff ironically reenacts the play’s opening. As the play began, the deer he “ill kill’d” became, in Jeanne Addison Robert’s words the “hot venison pasty” with which Master Page ameliorated the fight between Shallow and Falstaff.51 At that time, Falstaff’s illegal reward

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temporarily reconciled him with Windsor’s inhabitants. Now as the play ends, he linguistically breaks himself apart like a poached deer as a communal sacrifice that brings the community together again. If poaching serves to rein in the excesses of Falstaff, the final reference in the play to poaching expands the focus from Falstaff to the Pages and their friends. As textual differences between the 1602 Quarto and the Folio affect how one interprets references to topography in the play, likewise they alter how one views poaching. In the Quarto, Falstaff says “What hunting at this time at night? / Ile lay my life the mad Prince of Wales / Is stealing his fathers Deare.”52 Here Shakespeare casts poaching within the context of aristocratic rivalry that Roger Manning analyzes. The reference to Prince Hal invokes the criminal games of the Henriad, and it raises the issue of parent/child rivalry that the Anne/Fenton sub- plot brings to conclusion. But although Falstaff intends for the reference to comment on the townspeople’s thwarting his plans, the reference to Hal also draws attention away from the townspeople and toward the machinations of the court. With the Folio version, the reference to poaching erases the monarchy, and it redirects attention onto Windsor’s citizens. Anne and Fenton’s elopement is cast specifically in terms of poaching.53 Upon learning about the young lovers, Falstaff says to everyone “I am glad, though you have ta’en a special stand to strike at me, that your arrow hath glanc’d” and he adds that “when night-dogs run, all sorts of deer are chas’d” (5.5.234–35, 238). Night hunting is one of the ways in which poachers attempt to avoid capture. But night hunting is also dangerous for it is quite difficult to see one’s prey, and while the wives and townsmen bag Falstaff, they also find out that their quarry in the form of Anne has eluded them. Perhaps just as significant to the play, Falstaff calls the townspeople illegal hunters. These are the same people who saw themselves as upholders of the law in the face of Falstaff’s lecherous assaults. The changes from the Quarto to the Folio broaden the participants of poaching from royalty and courtiers to everyone in Windsor. Falstaff’s choice of analogy indicates that intergenerational conflict is closely aligned with class and gender conflicts, and the play links them all to the social practices of poaching. As these issues weave together it becomes clear to characters and audience alike that subject positions, just like the definition of natural space itself, are not stable, for each character shifts at one time or another from quarry to hunter and back again. As these shifts illustrate, Shakespeare creates multiple inversions between public and private through the attempts to steal and cuckold, between gender roles as the women take control over the men, and between hunter and hunted. The threat of collapsing distinctions and

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boundaries, while pervasive, never reaches the point where the audience feels that the social order will disintegrate. In an unexpected way, the dangerous threat to individual identity that Falstaff’s fluid shift from poacher to poached illustrates is offset by an alternative fluidity as expressed in Windsor’s penchant for informal social coercion. Camille Wells Slights notes that the play is filled with examples of groups of people coming together informally to dispense justice and defuse tensions.54 While Shallow opens the play by calling for Falstaff to be judged and pun- ished by the Star Chamber, it is only through informal peer pressure that correction takes place. The group’s metaphorical poaching of Falstaff in Act Five also demonstrates Barbara Hanawalt’s point that poaching, like hunting, is a social enterprise that strengthens social connections, but contrary to Hanawalt’s analysis of literal poaching, women too are involved in the figurative in- carnations of this social game. Neither Falstaff nor the other townspeople rely upon “legal” means of getting what they want; however, the townspeople are certainly concerned with upholding an informal code of social ethics. Slights views Falstaff’s punishment as rehabilitative, not punitive, and the informal mode of correction does not stifle individualism. Cer- tainly this play upholds individualism and acceptance, but I would add that such a group can easily turn into a mob and “contain” those they see as threats much more violently and decisively than formal state appara- tuses do. Indeed, poaching raids sometimes became riots, and the pinching of Falstaff could turn more violent if the crowd were not in a charitable mood and had Falstaff indeed committed adultery with one of the wives. The multiple roles that poaching plays in The Merry Wives of Windsor provide a unique lens to examine not only the play itself, but how current scholarship understands early modern England as well. If, as Patricia Parker convincingly argues, language in this play is always subject to corruption and altered meaning, in a comparable way the geography of Windsor and its environs are subject physically and metaphorically to re-appropriation through acts of poaching.55 In one sense, poaching is a socially corrective tool that reaffirms traditional social relations and power.56 For example, the wives initially appear transgressive as they use female initiative and power to poach Falstaff’s plans.57 But that power is directed toward traditional values. Anne Parten notes that the wives’ power is similar to the skimmington, a ritual of inversion, in which a male who is made weak (from a beating or cuckolding) by his wife, is humili- ated before the townspeople in order to make public the dominance the wife has over her husband.58 Communal poaching raids serve a function similar to skimmingtons. They are often community-based protests of what townspeople perceive as abuses to traditional values. But by merging the

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skimmington’s focus on the domestic sphere with poaching’s focus on property, Shakespeare strengthens the link between domestic gender roles and the land. The result is that the wives’ potentially transgressive actions end by upholding traditional views of sexuality and the power of husbands to govern their wives. The wives’ use of power to support traditional gender roles is quite similar to the function of skimmingtons, and this episode appears on the surface to uphold other traditional class distinctions as well. Aristocrats sometimes poached in order to assert older distinctions within the upper classes of society.59 It could likewise be argued that Fenton poaches Anne in order to shore up financially his social position. In this scenario, Falstaff is the scapegoat who distracts the town from the real threat that Fenton poses. Like Falstaff, Fenton is a bankrupt courtier. His title indicates his high social status, but his position is worthless without an influx of money. Thus while his marriage to Anne could indicate that he is marry- ing down in social status, Anne’s dowry would provide the resources he needs to secure his high social position. The history of poaching, the actions of the wives in this play, and Fenton’s triumph, thus, could super- ficially support the early new historicist model of transgression as a tool used by society to reinforce traditional social hierarchies and the distribution of power.60 Yet as poaching’s uses and meanings are multiple, power and transgression are more complex than they first appear. While poaching is reactionary in its treatment of some outside threats to a community, poaching done by a community’s inhabitants against their fellow “insiders” presents a different scenario. Anne’s metaphorical poaching of her parents’ plans, and her parents’ subsequent acceptance of her actions, proves that not all forms of poaching are equal. Anne Page’s poaching directly reflects the early modern period’s shifting views on marriage. Patriarchal ideology taught that it was the parents’, namely the father’s, obligation to dispose of their children well through marriage. But, as Keith Wrightson has argued, beneath the veneer of this ideology, young couples had more choice than historians first supposed. Among the upper class, sons had more of a say than daughters, but even daughters had more freedom to choose than did their continental counterparts.61 Anne’s decision to choose her own husband falls within a culture where personal choice in marriage slowly was gaining validity among the middle and upper realms of society. Anne’s behavior presents one model of how transgression of traditional ideology could become acceptable. Her actions also present a final example of how distinctions between insiders and outsiders blur in the play, for her transgression is not displaced on external scapegoats.62

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In circumstances such as Anne’s choosing her own husband and her father’s adoption of aristocratic hunting customs, transgression is an accepted means to change or alter established social codes. The acceptance of such dubious actions implies a certain comfort or willingness of this society to live in a world where illegality continually and subtly changes social customs. This acquiescence exists even when, especially in the case of Master and Mistress Page’s losing control of their daughter, such transgressions come at the expense of those ostensibly in power. A critic might argue that in the case of Anne and Fenton’s romantic love winning out over an arranged marriage is a convention of romantic comedy and, therefore, is not a radical, nor threatening challenge to the status quo (its literary conventionality robs it of any larger power to alter society). But brought on by the uses of poaching, the play’s protean qualities reinvest a clichéd plot convention with immediacy and force.63 Anne and the wives’ machinations clearly represent one of the ways in which, according to Pierre Bourdieu, women attain a level of power by flexibly avoiding offi- cial channels of power in favor of unofficial modes of social control.64 In this sylvan pastoral world, the relative acceptance of transgression in the play is particularly based upon destabilizing both property ownership and the very notion of property itself. As Patricia Parker and Charles Stanley Ross cogently argue, the play continually circles around the issue of fraudulent conveyance in relation to adultery. Master Ford’s comment that his love is “like a fair house built on another man’s ground” (2.2.215– 16) and Falstaff’s conveyance via the buck-basket indicate that material property, like love, is transferable. But the shift from urban to rural space and the concomitant redefinition of Little Park’s pastoral space suggest even more striking implications than either Parker or Ross indicate. In discussing the bankside topography where Falstaff is dumped in the wash, and Falstaff’s statement “to build upon a foolish woman’s promise” (3.5.41–42) Ross connects adultery with riparian (riverside) rights: “Land is stable, but a riverbank can shift in flood, and such angry course of a stream may eliminate one’s property interest.”65 The ability to trans- fer property or to erode property presupposes that property itself is a clearly defined material substance. But poaching and the scene in Little Park illuminate how property may retain its material characteristics yet undergo symbolic transformation and appropriation based upon human perception. In short, property is as much a social construct as it is a material possession. The forest law that John Manwood so anxiously desires to clarify and reimpose on England, and that Elizabeth I uses to control her forests and deer parks, serves as a model for how hierarchical power seeks to aggre- gate control over people through the ability to define the landscape as

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royal property. This attempt to centralize power finds its local habitation in the Little Park adjoining Windsor Castle and its parallel in Master and Mistress Page’s attempts to arrange Anne’s marriage. But these modes of power are short-circuited. Michel Foucault notes that the use of geography is a significant factor in how power controls people. Regional interests often compete with national forces, and in this play the region of Windsor overruns the centralizing ideology of forest law.66 But Foucault’s argument, while suggestive, does not recognize that regional interests themselves are unstable: poaching makes this instability apparent. Poaching, both literal and metaphorical, protests the terms in which English culture defines property. The townspeople redefine Little Park as a space for many com- peting individual and community interests, and they ignore the power of one person, like the monarch, to control that space. Thus, poaching is not a simple act of theft in which property transfers from one party to another; instead, the poacher’s intentions begin to redefine what that property is. This redefinition of property plays out most strikingly when Master and Mistress Page attempt to mix their parental duty to find a good husband for their daughter with their own interest in cementing their social bonds with other townspeople. Anne’s elopement challenges their assumptions as she defines herself as an erotic, romantic being subject to her own will and desire. The play’s final scene underscores what cultural anthropologists, environmental critics, and philosophers have been slow to realize.67 Re- definition of space, and the social customs predicated upon property, often does not arise through abstract theories but through physical actions like the practice of walking. Michel de Certeau argues that walking is an “appropriation of the topographical system” in which the choices an individual walker makes can subvert and redefine a landscape originally intended by its designer for a different use. Poaching is one incarnation of the subversive walker as Falstaff invades and appropriates Shallow’s property. Another example is Mistress Anne and Fenton’s “walking,” or escape in the park. Here they transgress the choreographed steps in the park that Anne’s parents have dictated to her (as she was supposed to leave with either Caius or Slender in the pinching scene).68 Their walking out of the park together serves as a very physical example of how the forest topography makes it difficult for people to control land use and the ideologies imbedded within land use. And, just as important, the villagers’ acceptance of the lovers’ elopement implicitly acknowledges both the transformative power of pastoral spaces and the impossibility of controlling every walker through the local landscape.

University of Wisconsin Madison, Wisconsin

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NOTES Heather Dubrow deserves many thanks for her thorough feedback and tire- less support of this essay. This article also beneﬁted from incisive critiques by Robert Darcy, Braden Hosch, Rebecca Lemon, readers from the journal, and Clark Hulse who initially encouraged my interest in this subject. Research for this essay was aided by a short-term fellowship from the Newberry Library. 1. Nicholas Rowe, Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespeare (1709; reprint 1948) p.v. For modern debunkings of this biographical account see T. W. Craik’s introduction to the Oxford edition of The Merry Wives of Windsor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 6–8; Mark Eccles, Shakespeare in Warwickshire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961); and Roger Manning, Hunters and Poachers: A Social and Cultural History of Unlawful Hunting in England, 1485–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 182–83. 2. See Anthony Dent, “Game and the Poacher in Shakespeare’s England,” His- tory Today 25 (1975): 782–86. Although the only concerted focus on poaching in Shakespeare, Dent is concerned more with culling references to poaching than with interpreting how poaching illuminates central tensions in The Merry Wives of Windsor. As for editions of the play, only the recent Arden edition contains more than a cursory reference to hunting: The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series, ed. Giorgio Melchiori (Walton-on-Thames, Surrey: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 2000). Richard Wilson, “Like the Old Robin Hood: As You Like It and the Enclosure Riots,” in Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Author- ity (Wayne State University Press, 1993), 74–75; and Jeanne Addison Roberts, Shakespeare’s English Comedy: The Merry Wives of Windsor in Context, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 129, also allude to poaching in the play; however, neither author addresses the pervasive signiﬁcance of poaching. The following recent works consider the role of hunting, but not illegal hunting in The Merry Wives of Windsor or in Shakespeare more generally: A. Stuart Daley, “The Idea of Hunting in As You Like It,” Shakespeare Studies 21 (1993): 72–95; Frederick B. Jonassen, “The Stag Hunt in The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Bestia: Year- book of the Beast Fable Society (1991), 87–101; and Roberts, The Shakespearean Wild: Geography, Genus, and Gender (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991). 3. Marvin Spevak, A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare, 9 vols. (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1969–80); “Poaching” OED, def. III.9, 2nd ed. 1989. 4. Manning, Hunters and Poachers, 58–59. 5. Christopher Hill, Liberty Against the Law: Some Seventeenth-Century Contro- versies (London: Penguin, 1997), 97. Availability of game animals to all shares similarities with medieval land use, which dictated that commons and wastes be made available to everyone. As Manning points out, common access to the “fruits” of the land as well as the land itself blur together during enclosure riots of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Hunters and Poachers, 207–8). 6. Manning, Hunters and Poachers, 59. 7. Manning, Hunters and Poachers, 38, 57–58, 60, 63–64. 8. See Desiderius Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly in The Praise of Folly and Other Writings, trans. and ed. R. M. Adams (New York: Norton, 1989), 40, for an early modern satire of the aristocrat’s hunting rituals.

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9. Matt Cartmill, A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature Through History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 62–64; George Gascoingne, The Noble Arte of Venerie or Hunting (1575; reprint, Oxford: 1908). Gascoingne’s book once was attributed to George Turberville. Sir Thomas Cockaine, A Short Treatise of Hunting (London: 1591; reprint, London: Nichols, 1897). 10. Nicholas Cox, The Gentleman’s Recreation: In Four Parts, 3rd ed. (London: 1686), 67. Cox’s text compiles earlier hunting texts by Cockaine, Gascoingne, Manwood, and others. 11. Manning, Hunters and Poachers, 5. 12. Charles Chenevix Trench, The Poacher and the Squire: A History of Poaching and Game Preservation in England (London: Longmans, 1967), 44–51; Manning, Hunters and Poachers, 57–82. Barbara Hanawalt argues that enforcing forest law instituted new policing practices when officials patrolled an area to prevent crimes from occurring, “Men’s Games, King’s Deer: Poaching in Medieval England,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 18 (1988): 175–93; 176. 13. For Elizabeth I’s poaching and court factionalism, see Trench, Poacher and the Squire, 93–94, and Manning, Hunters and Poachers, 136–43. For James I’s policies, see Manning, Hunters and Poachers, 28, 64–68. 14. Hill, Liberty Against the Law, 103. 15. Hanawalt, “Men’s Games”; E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (London: Allen Lane, 1975), 64. 16. According to J. A. Sharpe, the landed orders were often difficult to differen- tiate, Early Modern England: A Social History 1550–1760, 2nd ed. (London: Arnold, 1997), 157–58. 17. Manning, Hunters and Poachers, 1–3, 17, 42–43. 18. John Manwood, A Treatise and Discourse of the Laws of the Forrests (London: 1598). A shorter edition was first published for a smaller audience in 1592. 19. While the English early modern forest was most often embodied in literature as the site of hunting rituals, the forest was not so much threatened by illegal hunting but by economic concerns. Conflicting uses of the forest for industry, grazing, and shipbuilding led to the perception, but not the fact, that forests were in decline (cf. Oliver Rackham’s Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape, rev. ed. [London: J. M. Dent, 1990]; Chapter Four in particular). Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) suggests that Manwood’s legal treatise is not meant to uphold monarchical power so much as to legitimate a proto-environmental agenda. See Rackham, Trench, and Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Knopf, 1995) regarding economic issues related to deforestation of English forests and responses to such deforestation. 20. Manwood, Treatise and Discourse, 1 (italics added). 21. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters, 30. 22. Manning, Hunters and Poachers, 110–ff. 23. Trench, Poacher and the Squire, 100. 24. Manwood, Treatise and Discourse, A3v. 25. See Manning and Thompson’s social histories of poaching as a response to controversies regarding land use and the forest economy. See also Richard

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Wilson’s analysis of enclosure riots where the combatants were the poor versus local landowners, and monarchs were more distantly removed (esp. 63–82). 26. The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997); all references to Shakespeare’s works are from this edition and appear within the text. 27. See Manning for more on the boasting nature of aristocratic poachers (Hunters and Poachers, 42–43). 28. Melchiori, ed., Merry Wives of Windsor, 43. 29. Manning, Hunters and Poachers, 43. 30. Melchiori, ed., Merry Wives of Windsor, 43. 31. Manning, Hunters and Poachers, 26; Thompson, Whigs and Hunters, 31; Trench, Poacher and the Squire, 24. 32. Manwood, Treatise and Discourse, D3v. 33. Hill, Liberty Against the Law, 92–93; Manning, Hunters and Poachers, 60. 34. Heather Dubrow, Shakespeare and Domestic Loss: Forms of Deprivation, Mourn- ing, and Recuperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. 40 and Chapter Two passim. R. S. White, among others, correctly points out that some outsiders are accepted into the Windsor community; thus, being an outsider is not contingent upon one’s place of birth, but whether or not one accepts the “insider’s” ideology; Twayne’s New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare: The Merry Wives of Windsor (Boston: Twayne, 1991), 8. 35. The discourse of poaching operates similarly to Patricia Parker’s analysis of the relationship between translation and property in the play; see Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), see esp. 120–24. 36. Melchiori, ed., Merry Wives of Windsor, 14–16. 37. See notes on cuckoldry and horns in The Complete Works of John Webster, ed. F. L. Lucas, vol. 1 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927), 204–7. See Roberts, Shakespeare’s English Comedy, for symbolic sexual connotations of deer, 127–29. 38. Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, 121. 39. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 36–57. 40. Roberts, Shakespeare’s English Comedy, 111. 41. John Norden, Description of the Honor of Windsor (London: 1607). For discussion of Merry Wives as a Garter play, see William Green, Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962). For a current overview of the debate concerning the play’s composition, see Giorgio Melchiori’s introduction to the Arden edition. Green prints a copy of Norden’s map to demonstrate that the play’s topography is real, not imagined, but Green does not interpret the literal and figurative spatial significance of Little Park to the play. 42. Leah Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (Lon- don: Routledge, 1996), 84–88. 43. Olwen Hedley, Windsor Castle (London: Hale, 1967), 93. 44. Hedley, Windsor Castle, 93. 45. Camille Wells Slights, “Pastoral and Parody in The Merry Wives of Windsor,” English Studies in Canada 11 (1985): 12–25; see esp. 12–15, 24–25.

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46. Although Elizabeth does not control this pastoral space, pastoral literature by other poets does support her power over the land. See Louis Montrose’s in- formative essays: “‘Of Gentlemen and Shepherds’: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form,” ELH 50 (1983): 415–59; “‘Eliza, Queene of Shepheardes,’ and the Pastoral of Power,” ELR 10 (1980): 153–82. 47. François Laroque, Shakespeare’s Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Enter- tainment and the Professional Stage, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991; orig. pub. as Shakespeare et la fête, 1988), 266–67. 48. For more on enclosed gardens, see Stanley Stewart, The Enclosed Garden: The Tradition and the Image in Seventeenth-Century Poetry (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966). 49. See Cartmill’s analysis of this ritual of “breaking the stag.” 50. For an analysis of male fears of women in the play, see Nancy Cotton, “Castrating (W)itches: Impotence and Magic in The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 321–26. 51. Roberts, Shakespeare’s English Comedy, 129. Roberts briefly notes that the deer in Scene One serves to reconcile Shallow and Falstaff, but she does not con- nect it to Falstaff later in the play. 52. The appendix to the Arden edition helpfully reprints the entire text of the 1602 Quarto. See page 320. 53. One could argue that Fenton escapes unchecked, but his conversion comes prior to the play when his intentions regarding Anne shift from monetary to romantic. 54. Slights, “Pastoral and Parody,” 16. 55. Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, Chapter Four passim. 56. See Martin Ingram, “Ridings, Rough Music and the ‘Reform of Popular Culture’ in Early Modern England,” Past and Present 105 (November 1984), 79– 113. Ingram argues that charivaris were closely aligned with more formalized punishments and, hence, support the government’s interests, 92. 57. See Roberts, Shakespearean Wild, 47. 58. Anne Parten, “Falstaff’s Horns: Masculine Inadequacy and Feminine Mirth in The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Studies in Philology 82 (1985): 184–99; see esp. 185–87. Manning finds connections between charivaris and poaching (Hunters and Poachers, 2). For more on the skimmington and other charivari-like customs, see Ingram. 59. Manning, Hunters and Poachers, 64–68. 60. For examples of this early form of new historicism in relation to Shakespeare’s comedies, see Stephen Greenblatt, “Fiction and Friction,” in Re- constructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought. Ed. Thomas C. Heller, et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 30–52. Greenblatt and others have more recently qualified this model, but Richard Wilson’s 1993 analysis of As You Like It’s Forest of Arden still follows this approach. Although not particularly new historicist, R. S. White makes a similar claim, 8. 61. Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680 (London: Hutchinson, 1982), 70–79.

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62. See also Theodore B. Leinwand’s critique of the binarism of some new historicist and cultural materialist critiques. We both see paradigms for change where others ﬁnd a totalizing subversion/containment model. Leinwand argues that scenes of negotiation model change, but I argue that subversion can facilitate change if it forces people to reassess and modify their own positions on social issues. See “Negotiation and New Historicism,” PMLA 105 (1990): 477–90. 63. Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Com- edy and Romance, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 73. 64. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977; 1st pub. in France 1972), 41. 65. Charles Stanley Ross, “Shakespeare’s Merry Wives and the Law of Fraudu- lent Conveyance,” Renaissance Drama 25 (1994): 145–69; esp. 155. Ross argues that conveyance was a generally accepted form of fraud during the period, and that the play’s legal and mercantile language indicates England’s shifting economy toward mercantilism, 156–57, 159. This attitude toward conveyance during the period echoes my claim that the play’s characters are largely comfort- able with illegal behavior so long as it doesn’t reach the level of adultery. 66. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 74–75. See especially Chapter Four, “Questions on Geography.” 67. For helpful introductions to the topic in cultural anthropology, see Margaret C. Rodman, “Empowering Place: Multilocality and Multivocality,” American Anthropologist 94 (Sept. 1992), 640–56; Eric Hirsch and Michael O’Hanlon, eds., The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). For environmental studies focusing on early modern literature, see Jeffrey S. Theis, “The Environmental Ethics of Paradise Lost: Milton’s Exegesis of Genesis I–III,” Milton Studies 34 (1996): 61–81; Diane Kelsey McColley, A Gust for Paradise: Milton’s Eden and the Visual Arts (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993). 68. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); 97–98. For an overview of the or- ganizing force of spatiality, see also Sara Blair, “Cultural Geography and the Place of the Literary,” ALH 10 (1998), 544–67. Blair argues that spatiality, as opposed to temporality, organizes the post-modern world, but I believe that early modern England and other cultures also organized aspects of their world spatially.

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