Dear Me,

  Huzzah!  Here is another  chapter in Part One of Shakespeare: The Biography.

Shakespeare: The Biography

by

Peter Ackroyd

Part One

Chapter 14:  Of Such a Mery Nible Stiring Spirit

Shakespeare was fifteen  in the year of 1579.  He was entering that period of life when, according to the shepherd in The Winter's Tale there was nothing to do "but getting wenches with childe, wronging the Aunceientry, stealing, fighting" (1313-14).  He committed at least one of these offences, though we may prefer to see him as "a good companion, pliant, courteous, discreet, and able to forget and forgive an injury."

It is possible that his father paid the £5 for his son to continue his education after the age of fourteen, It would be only after this age that he would have learned the "lesse Greeke" of which Ben Jonson accused him of.  The age of fourteen was also that hard year when boys became apprentices.  The young Shakespeare may have started working for his father in some capacity.  

It has also been suggested that Shakespeare worked as a lawyer's clerk, or found employment as a schoolmaster in the country.  He may have been called up for military service - a duty for which he would have qualified after the age of sixteen.  His apparent knowledge of the technical terms of seamanship - right down to the detail ship's biscuits - has convinced some that he served in the English navy.  You can never overestimate his powers of assimilation and empathy.
In the absence of certainty, there have been many legends concerning Shakespeare's early years.  The story concerns his encroachment upon the estate of the local dignitary, It's been written in contemporary accounts that

by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company...engag'd him with them more than once in robbing a park that belong'd to Sir Thomas Lucy of Cherlecote, near Stratford.  For this he was prosecuted by the Gentleman, a he thought somewhat too severely; and in order to revenge that ill usage he made a ballad upon him.  And tho' this, probably the first essay of his poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter, that it redoubled the persecution against him to that degree , the he was oblig'd to leave this business and family in Warwickshire and shelter himself in London

The ballad itself was "stuck upon the park gate, which exasperated the knight to apply to a lawyer at Warwick to proceed against him."  And then, at a later date, two versions of the ballad itself were fortuitously discovered, one of them ringing in the changes on the consonance of "Lucy" and "lowsie".  It might be all dismissed as  minor literary speculation, even fabrication, except that, the same story was repeated by a clergyman in the late seventeenth century.  Richard Davis told the antiquarian Anthony à Wood that Shakespeare :"was much given to all unluckinesse in Stealing venison and rabbits from Sir Lucy who had him oft whipt and sometimes imprisoned and at last made him fly his native country.  \Shakespeare does indeed make the allusive connection between "Lucy" and "lowsie" through the happy medium of Justice Shallow in The Merry Wives of Windsor.  But the target of his humour is much more likely to have been a bailiff of Southwark, William Gardiner, a notorious theatre who had threatened Shakespeare with arrest.  In any event Shakespeare refers with great respect to one of Sir Thomas Lucy's ancestors, William Lucy, in the first part of Henry VI.

In Warwickshire too, Catholicism was the faith of the gentry and what has been called a "seigneurial" religion in which clients and retainers and clients adopted the old faith as a mater of duty as well as piety.  That is why the high politics of the county can be analysed in religious terms, with reforming families like the Lucy and the Dudleys and the Grevilles pitted against such propnents of the old faith as the Ardens and the Catebys and the Somervilles.

There is another authentic note: the many allusions in his poetry and drama to poaching.  "Chasing the deer." as it was called, was a normal pursuit for young men of the period.  In Shakespeare's work the chase is a consistent theme, whether in the form of a metaphor, simile or allusion.  He has many references to the bow and the crossbow and knows that the noise of the cross bow will scare the herd.

The allusions to hunting also carry a different significance in late sixteenth-century England, where it was still considered to be a primarily an aristocratic pursuit.  It was a mimic war and an exercise for nobility for gentlemen.

There are many other references to outdoor pursuits that suggest that the presence of personal experience.  He could have played bows and the language of falconry becomes almost his private possessions.  He alludes to the hunting of hares and foxes on several occasions.  It was the practice of countrymen to hunt hares on foot with nets.  Shakespeare notes how the quarry "outruns the wind".  In this text he uses the very specific term of "musit" for a round hole in a hedge or fence through the hare escapes.  He could not have learned this from any book.

There is another legend of this period, confirming Shakespeare's status as a rustic cavalier of free and manly dispositions.  It concerns his drinking, that English token of virile and unaffected behaviour.  The story goes that he visited the neighbouring village of Bidford, whose male inhabitants were supposed to be "deep drinkers and merry fellows", he wanted to "take a cup" with them but was told that they were absent.  Instead he was invited to join "the Bidford sippers" and became so drunk in their company that he had to sleep beneath a tree.  The story has the advantage of being entirely unprovable.  But it also has an inherent significance.  It displays an instinctive tendency to identify Shakespeare with his native soil.  This is not itself unwelcome, as long as it does not ignore all the sophistication and wit that Shakespeare brought to his unmistakable rural inheritance.