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 indi- rectly 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 Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 43, No. 1, Spring 2001 © 2001 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713–7819 03 TSLL 43/1 Theis 46 3/13/01, 3:57 PM Poaching and Social Order 47 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 sec- tion 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 com- edy. 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 pe- riod 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 for- ests supported multiple uses and accommodated people’s needs from all walks of life. The laws were socially restrictive and limited those who 03 TSLL 43/1 Theis 47 3/13/01, 3:57 PM 48 Jeffrey Theis 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 punish- ment 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 tradi- tional customary rights. The Bible was taken to confirm custom. Genesis I:26–28 legitimated poachers’ belief that God intended ani- mals 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 aristo- crats 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 re- stricted to men of the highest classes (and sometimes women of similar 03 TSLL 43/1 Theis 48 3/13/01, 3:57 PM Poaching and Social Order 49 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 in- clude 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.