ABSTRACT
The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare’s only play that pictures contemporary, middle-class English life, weaves several references to fraudulent conveyancing through a plot that involves many legal themes: Justice Shallow’s suit against Falstaff for poaching his deer, Falstaff’s attempts to escape debts, the moral response of the wives of Windsor to Falstaff’s sexual advances, the rules of the duel, the theft of horses. There is even a hint of the issue of same sex marriage at the end of the play when the two bumbling suitors, Abraham Slender and Dr. Caius, find they have carried away boys instead of Anne Page, who has managed to elope with her courtly lover Fenton. Each situation features some kind of ethical dilemma not dissimilar to the underlying issue raised by fraudulent conveyancing, which pits the plight of the powerless against society at large and the instrument of society, the law.
