There were several pamphlets published during Shakespeare's lifetime featuring a menacing giant rabbit, sometimes even wielding a sword and looking very scary. It would be easy to think this character the pamphlet calls a “cony catcher” was invented for marketing purposes, except that we see the phrase “cony catcher” come up several times throughout Shakespeare’s plays including Merry Wives of Windsor, Taming of the Shrew, and even in Henry VI Part 3. We can see from the passing references Shakespeare’s writes that a cony is a word for a rabbit, and it follows then that a catcher of conies is one who catches rabbits, but then why is the rabbit being used in early modern England as a fierce sword wielding villain? There are so many cultural questions to unpack with this symbol and that’s why today our guest and author of a new book about the Cony Catcher and other Shakespearean criminals and malcontents, Ari Friedlander, is here to take us through what we should understand when we discover rabbits running rampant in Shakespeare’s plays.  

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