Complete. From Dowden’s “Shakespeare,” London 1879.

THE IMMEDIATE cause of Shakespeare’s departure from Stratford is thus told circumstantially by Rowe, his first biographer: “He had, by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company; and amongst them some that made a frequent practice of deer-stealing engaged him more than once in robbing a park that belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy, of Charlcote, near Stratford. For this he was prosecuted by that gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and in order to revenge the ill usage, he made a ballad upon him. And though this, probably the first essay of his poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter that it redoubled the prosecution against him to that degree that he was obliged to leave his business and family in Warwickshire for some time, and shelter himself in London.” Some of the details of this story are undoubtedly incorrect, but there is good reason to believe that a foundation of truth underlies the tradition. Sir T. Lucy was an important person in the neighborhood—a member of parliament, one of the Puritan party (with which our dramatist could never have been in sympathy), and about the time of this alleged deer-stealing frolic was concerned in framing a bill in parliament for the preservation of game. Although he did not possess what is properly a park at Charlcote, he had deer; Shakespeare and his companions may have had a struggle with Sir T. Lucy’s men. A verse of the ballad ascribed to the young poacher has been traditionally handed down, and in it the writer puns upon the name Lucy—“O lowsie Lucy”—in a way sufficiently insulting. It is noteworthy that in the first scene of the “Merry Wives of Windsor,” Justice Shallow is introduced as highly incensed against Sir John Falstaff, who has beaten his men, killed his deer, and broken open his lodge; the Shallows, like Shakespeare’s old antagonist, have “luces” in their coat of arms, and the Welsh parson admirably misunderstands the word—“the dozen white louses do become an old coat well.” It can hardly be doubted that when this scene was written Shakespeare had some grudge against the Lucy family, and in making them ridiculous before the Queen he may have had an amused sense that he was now obtaining a success for his boyish lampoon, little dreamed of when it was originally put into circulation among the good folk of Stratford.