The ill kill'd deer: poaching and social order in 'The Merry Wives of Windsor'.(Renaissance Review: Wyatt, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Heywood)(Critical Essay)

Publication: Texas Studies in Literature and Language

Publication Date: 22-MAR-01

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COPYRIGHT 2001 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)

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 illegitimate kin poaching thoroughly pervaded all social strata of early modern English culture. Close proximity to the Forest of Arden and numerous 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? 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 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 Shakespeare. 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 dinner; 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 reestablished 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 could legally hunt to the king and those licensed by him. For offenses, penalties could range from beheadings to castration or branding depending 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 commoners. (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 relegated 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 exclude 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 social position), but lower-class men (evidently not women) did participate 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 tidbits, 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,

loyalty, 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 measures 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 perquisites (such as access to an allotted number of deer per year, access to 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 misdemeanors. 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....

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