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

Abstract

Nicholas Rowe once asserted that the young Shakespeare was caught stealing a 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

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