ABSTRACT
At the close of the Folio version of The Merry Wives of Windsor Falstaff is frightened, burned, pinched, and "publicly shamed" in Little Park, a game preserve adjacent to Windsor Castle, within the bounds of Windsor Forest, and thus the property of the English monarchy. This chapter explores the complexity of Falstaff's metamorphosis into a deer at the end of Merry Wives. It explains the case for the ideological and material primacy of the other non-human inhabitant of Shakespeare's Little Park that Merry Wives stages only in its closing scene, namely, Herne's Oak. For, as people shall see in the literature on early modern forest management, there can be no pleasure of the royal hunt if there are no royal trees. The chapter gives examples from the theatrical archive will help to clarify the early moderns' conflation of vert and wooden product.
