ABSTRACT
In all, there are mentions of deer-hunting and cony-catching in eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays and two in his narrative poems: The Comedy Of Errors, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, King Henry VI, As You Like It, Love's Labour's Lost, Coriolanus, Mac/i Ado About Nothing, 77ie Merry Wives O f Windsor, Anthony And Cleopatra, Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, 77*e Taming O f The Shrew, Twelth Night, Troilus And Cressida,
Andronicus, Romeo And Juliet, Venus And Adonis, and 77ie Rape O / Lucrece. If interpreted correctly, these references can make a significant contribution to Shakespeare biography. A passage from 77ze Winter's Tale enables us to estimate the approximate date that Shake speare was involved in the poaching incident. The old shepherd, hearing his sons hunting, laments:
“I would there no age betweene ten and three and twenty, or that youth would sleep out the reste; for there is nothing (in the betweene) but getting wenches with childe, wronging the Auncientry, stealing, fighting, hearke you now: would any but these boylde-braines of nineteene, and two and twenty hunt this weather?” 1
Shakespeare was born approximately in April 1564 and his younger brother, Gilbert, in October 1566. In the summer of 1586, William would have been twenty-two, and his brother nineteen; the shepherd tells us that the wildness of youth ends at the age of twenty-three. Although purely speculative, if this passage were read to apply to Shakespeare, this would give a date of 1587 for the year he was caught poaching Lucy’s deer. Echoes of the relationship between the shepherd and his two sons are found in the relationship between Belarius and his two adopted sons Guiderius and Arviragus, in Cymberline. Arviragus laments his impoverished and narrow provincial circumstances:
“What thing is’t, that I neuer/ Did see man dye, scarse euer look’d on blood,/ But that of Coward Hares, hot G oats, and Venison?/ Neuer bestrid a Horse saue one, that had/ A Rider like my selfe, who ne’er wore Rowell/ Nor Iron on his heele? I am asham’d/ To looke vpon the holy Sunne, to haue/ The benefit of his blest Beames, remaining/ So long a poore vnknowne.”2
