Which is he that killed the deer?
Which of you killed the deer?
Who killed the deer?
who killed it
Sir, it was I.
It was I, sir.
I did, sir.
i did
Let’s present him to the Duke, like a Roman conqueror, and it would do
well to set the deer’s horns upon his head for a branch of victory.
Have you no song, forester, for this purpose?
Let's present him to the Duke like a Roman conqueror, and it would be good to put the deer's horns on his head as a trophy of victory. Do you have a song for this occasion, forester?
Let's take him to the Duke like he's a Roman general, and put the deer's horns on his head as a prize. You got a song for this, forester?
let's make a ceremony put horns on his head sing something
Yes, sir.
Yes, sir, I do.
Yes, sir.
yes
Cuckoldry — the state of being a man whose wife has been sexually unfaithful — was one of the Elizabethan era's most obsessive comic anxieties. The cuckold was invariably depicted as wearing invisible horns on his head, usually without knowing it: a man publicly shamed by something he couldn't see and couldn't control. The joke is about male vulnerability to female desire, and it turns up everywhere in Shakespeare: in Othello (catastrophically), in The Merry Wives of Windsor (as farce), in Much Ado About Nothing (as threat), and here in As You Like It (as pure comedy).
Why horns? The most common explanation involves the supposed behavior of stags: when a dominant stag is displaced by a rival, the rival takes both the herd and the territory, leaving the original stag with only his antlers — the physical sign of his defeat. The visual image of an antlered man became the shorthand for sexual displacement.
Jaques' genius move in this scene is to reframe the shame as honor. The song doesn't mock the hypothetical cuckold; it tells him to relax. 'Take thou no scorn to wear the horn.' Your father's father wore it. It's ancestral, it's universal, it's not worth the embarrassment. The logic is completely spurious — 'everyone does it' is not a comfort — but it's delivered with the communal warmth of a group who are all in on the joke together.
In the context of a play full of romantic idealizing (Orlando pinning terrible love poems to trees, Silvius suffering exquisitely for Phebe), the hunting song is a deliberate puncture. It reminds us that behind all the pastoral romance, there is a rather more practical and earthy world — and Jaques, who has refused to be taken in by Arden's magic, is its spokesman.
Sing it. ’Tis no matter how it be in tune, so it make noise enough.
SONG
Sing it. It does not matter how it sounds, as long as it makes plenty of noise.
Go ahead and sing. It doesn't matter if it's good, just make it loud.
sing it it doesn't have to be good just loud
What shall he have that killed the deer?
His leather skin and horns to wear.
Then sing him home:
What will the hunter get for killing the deer? His leather skin and horns to wear. Then sing him home with joy.
What's the reward for killing the deer? The deer's hide and horns to wear. Now sing his victory song.
reward: leather and horns sing him home
Act 4, Scene 2 of As You Like It is twelve lines and a song. Nothing of plot consequence happens. Rosalind doesn't appear. Orlando doesn't appear. It could be cut without any narrative loss.
So why is it there?
Structurally, it sits between two of the play's most emotionally demanding scenes. In 4-1, Rosalind and Orlando have their most extended, most romantic, and most unsettling exchange: the mock-wedding, the 'say a day without the ever,' the 'men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them — but not for love' speech. It's the scene where we're most uncertain whether Rosalind's game is protecting her or costing her. And immediately after 4-2 comes 4-3: Oliver arriving in the forest, the story of the serpent and the lioness, Orlando's blood-soaked handkerchief, and Rosalind actually fainting — breaking character completely for the first time.
The hunting song gives the audience oxygen. It's a scene of pure, uncomplicated comic pleasure — ribald, communal, low-stakes — before the play asks for real emotional attention again. Shakespeare understood pacing as a physical phenomenon: comedy before crisis raises the stakes of the crisis by contrast.
There is also something thematically resonant about the scene's subject matter. A successful hunt in Arden is an act of survival — Duke Senior's men killing to eat, making themselves at home in the forest's economy. The song that celebrates it is raucous and earthbound. After four acts of elevated romantic debate, this twelve-line scene insists: these people also live. They eat. They sing dirty songs. The pastoral is not all poetry.
The Reckoning
Twelve lines and a song. Shakespeare uses this scene as a structural breath — a burst of earthy, communal laughter wedged between the emotional weight of 4-1 (Rosalind and Orlando's mock-wedding, Orlando leaving for the real court) and the high drama of 4-3 (Oliver arrives, serpent, lioness, blood). The hunting song is a sustained pun: the deer's horns become the cuckold's horns, and the joke is that everyone in Arden might be wearing them. Jaques orchestrates it with the bored enjoyment of a man who finds the whole world's pretensions absurd, which is to say: perfectly in character.
If this happened today…
A group of guys comes back from a camping trip where one of them actually caught something. As a joke, someone suggests they give the successful hunter a wreath made of antlers and parade him around like a Roman general returning from conquest. Before anyone can object, somebody with a guitar has turned it into a song with a recurring hook about how wearing antlers is a long family tradition — and the subtext about infidelity builds with every verse until everyone's laughing at something they can't quite explain to the people who weren't there. It's the kind of joke that bonds the group. Jaques is the person who suggested the antlers.