CHARLCOTE: the name is familiar to every reader of Shakspere; but it is not presented to the world under the influence of pleasant associations with the world's poet. The story, which was first told by Rowe, must be here repeated: "An extravagance that he was guilty of forced him both out of his country, and that way of living which he had taken up; and though it seemed at first to be a blemish upon his good manners, and a misfortune to him, yet it afterwards happily proved the occasion of exerting one of the greatest geniuses that ever was known in dramatic poetry. 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 that 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 Warwick shire for some time, and shelter himself in London." * The good old gossip Aubrey is wholly silent about the deer-stealing and the flight to London, merely saying, "This William, being inclined naturally to poetry and acting, came to London, I guess about eighteen." But there were other antiquarian gossips of Aubrey's age, who have left us their testimony upon this subject. The Reverend William Fulman, a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, who died in 1688, bequeathed his papers to the Reverend Richard Davies of Sandford, Oxfordshire; and on the death of Mr. Davies, in 1708, these papers were deposited in the library of Corpus Christi. Fulman appears to have made some collections for the biography of our English poets, and under the name Shakspere he gives the dates of his birth and death. But Davies, who added notes to his friend's manuscripts, affords us the following piece of information: "Much given to all unluckiness, in stealing venison and rabbits; particularly from Sir Lucy, who had him oft whipped, and sometimes imprisoned, and at last made him fly his native country, to his great advancement. But his revenge was so great, that he is his Justice Clodpate and calls him a great man, and that, in allusion to his name, bore three louses rampant for his arms.' The accuracy of this chronicler, as to events supposed to have happened a hundred years before he wrote, may be inferred from his correctness in what was accessible to him. Justice Clodpate is a new character; and the three louses rampant have diminished strangely from the "dozen white luces" of Master Slender. In Mr. Davies's account we have no mention of the ballad-through which, according to Rowe, the young poet revenged his "ill usage." But Capell, the editor of Shakspere, found a new testimony to that fact: "The writer of his 'Life,' the first modern, [Rowe] speaks of a 'lost ballad,' which added fuel, he says, to the knight's beforeconceived anger, and 'redoubled the prosecution;' and calls the ballad 'the first essay of Shakespeare's poetry:' one stanza of it, which has the appearance of genuine, was put into the editor's hands many years ago by an ingenious gentleman (grandson of its preserver), with this account of the way in which it descended to him: Mr. Thomas Jones, who dwelt at Tarbick, a village in Worcestershire, a few miles from Stratford-on-Avon, and died in the year 1703, aged upwards of ninety, remembered to have heard from several old people at Stratford the story of Shakespeare's robbing Sir Thomas Lucy's park; and their account of it agreed with Mr. Rowe's, with this addition—that the ballad written against Sir Thomas by Shakespeare was stuck upon his park-gate, which exasperated the knight to apply to a lawyer at Warwick to proceed against him. Mr. Jones had put down in writing the first stanza of the ballad, which was all he remembered of it, and Mr. Thomas Wilkes (my grandfather) transmitted it to my father by memory, who also took it in writing." The first stanza of the ballad which Mr. Jones put down in writing as all he remembered of it, has been so often reprinted, that we can scarcely be justified in omitting it. It is as follows : But the tradition sprang up in another quarter. Mr. Oldys, the respectable anti * "Some Account of the Life of William Shakespear, written by Mr. Rowe." "There was a quarian, has also preserved this stanza, with the following remarks:very aged gentleman living in the neighbourhood of Stratford (where he died fifty years since), who had not only heard from several old people in that town of Shakspeare's transgression, but could remember the first stanza of that bitter ballad, which, repeating to one of his acquaintance, he preserved it in writing, and here it is, neither better nor worse, but faithfully transcribed from the copy, which his relation very courteously communicated to me.”* The copy preserved by Oldys corresponds word by word with that printed by Capell; and it is therefore pretty evident that each was derived from the same source, the person who wrote down the verses from the memory of the one old gentleman. In truth, the whole matter looks rather more like an exercise of invention than of memory. Mr. De Quincey has expressed a very strong opinion "that these lines were a production of Charles II's reign, and applied to a Sir Thomas Lucy, not very far removed, if at all, from the age of him who first picked up the precious filth: the phrase 'parliament member' we believe to be quite unknown in the colloquial use of Queen Elizabeth." But he has overlooked a stronger point against the authenticity of the ballad. He says that "the scurrilous rondeau has been imputed to Shakspeare ever since the days of the credulous Rowe." This is a mistake. Rowe expressly says the ballad is "lost." It was not till the time of Oldys and Capell, nearly half a century after Rowe, that the single stanza was found. It was not published till seventy years after Rowe's "Life of Shakspeare." We have little doubt that the regret of Rowe that the ballad was lost was productive not only of the discovery, but of the creation, of the delicious fragment. By and by more was discovered, and the entire song 'was found in a chest of drawers that formerly belonged to Mrs. Dorothy Tyler, of Shottery, near Stratford, who died in 1778, at the age of 80." This is Malone's account, who inserts the entire song in the Appendix to his posthumous "Life of Shakspeare," with the expression of his persuasion "that one part of this ballad is just as genuine as the other; that is, that the whole is a forgery." We believe, however, that the first stanza is an old forgery, and the remaining stanzas a modern one. If the ballad is held to be all of one piece, it is a self-evident forgery. But in the "entire song " the new stanzas have not even the merit of imitating the versification of the first attempt to degrade Shakspere to the character of a brutal doggrel-monger. This, then, is the entire evidence as to the deer-stealing tradition. According to Rowe, the young Shakspere was engaged more than once in robbing a park, for which he was prosecuted by Sir Thomas Lucy; he made a ballad upon his prosecutor, and then, being more severely pursued, fled to London. According to Davies, he was much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits; for which he was often whipped, sometimes imprisoned, and at last forced to fly the country. According to Jones, the tradition of Rowe was correct as to robbing the park; and the obnoxious ballad being stuck upon the park-gate, a lawyer of Warwick was authorised to prosecute the offender. The tradition is thus full of contradictions upon the face of it. It necessarily would be so, for each of the witnesses speaks of circumstances that must have happened a hundred years before his time. We must examine the credibility of the tradition, therefore, by inquiring what was the state of the law as to the offence for which William Shakspere is said to have been prosecuted; what was the state of public opinion as to the offence; and what was the position of Sir Thomas Lucy as regarded his immediate neighbours. The law in operation at the period in question was the 5th of Elizabeth, chapter 21. The ancient forest-laws had regard only to the possessions of the Crown; and therefore in the 32nd of Henry VIII. an Act was passed for the protection of "every inheritor and possessor of manors, land, and tenements," which made the killing of * MS. Notes upon Langbaine, from which Steevens published the lines in 1778. deer, and the taking of rabbits and hawks, felony. This Act was repealed in the 1st of Edward VI.; but it was quickly re-enacted in the 3rd and 4th of Edward VI. (1549 and 1550), it being alleged that unlawful hunting prevailed to such an extent throughout the realm, in the royal and private parks, that in one of the king's parks within a few miles of London five hundred deer were slain in one day. For the due punishment of such offences the taking of deer was again made felony. But the Act was again repealed in the 1st of Mary. In the 5th of Elizabeth it was attempted in Parliament once more to make the offence a capital felony. But this was successfully resisted; and it was enacted that, if any person by night or by day "wrongfully or unlawfully break or enter into any park empaled, or any other several ground closed with wall, pale, or hedge, and used for the keeping, breeding, and cherishing of deer, and so wrongfully hunt, drive, or chase out, or take, kill, or slay any deer within any such empaled park, or closed ground with wall, pale, or other enclosure, and used for deer, as is aforesaid," he shall suffer three months' imprisonment, pay treble damages to the party offended, and find sureties for seven years' good behaviour. But there is a clause in this Act (1562-3) which renders it doubtful whether the penalties for taking deer could be applied twenty years after the passing of the Act, in the case of Sir Thomas Lucy. "Provided always, That this Act, or anything contained therein, extend not to any park or enclosed ground hereafter to be made and used for deer, without the grant or licence of our Sovereign Lady the Queen, her heirs, successors, or progenitors." At the date of this statute Charlcote, it is said, was not a deer-park; was not an enclosed ground royally licenced. Mr. Collier has shown that the next Sir Thomas Lucy sent a present of a buck to Lord Keeper Egerton in 1602; and it is thence inferred that there were deer at Charlcote. No doubt. It appears to us that Malone puts the case against the tradition too strongly, when he maintains that Charlcote was not a licenced park in 1562; and that, therefore, its venison continued to be unprotected till the statute of the 3rd James I. The Act of Elizabeth clearly contemplates any "several ground" "closed with wall, pale, or hedge, and used for the keeping of deer;" and as Sir Thomas Lucy built the mansion at Charlcote in 1558, it may reasonably be supposed that, at the date of the statute, the domain of Charlcote was closed with wall, pale, or hedge. The deer-stealing tradition, however, has grown more minute as it has advanced in age. Charlcote, according to Mr. Samuel Ireland, was not the place of Shakspere's unlucky adventures. The Park of Fulbrooke, he says, was the property of Sir Thomas Lucy; and he gives us a drawing of an old house where the young offender was conveyed after his detection. Upon the Ordnance Map of our own day is the Deer Barn, where, according to the same veracious tradition, the venison was concealed. A word or two disposes of this part of the tradition: Fulbrooke did not come into the possession of the Lucy family till the grandson of Sir Thomas purchased it in the reign of James I. We have seen, then, that for ten years previous to the passing of the Act of Elizabeth for the preservation of deer there had been no laws in force except the old forest-laws, which applied not to private property. The statute of Elizabeth makes the bird-nesting boy, who climbs up to the hawk's eyrie, as liable to punishment as the deer-stealer. The taking of rabbits, as well as deer, was felony by the statutes of Henry VIII. and Edward VI.; but from the time of Henry VIII. to James I. there was no protection for rabbits; they were feræ naturæ. Our unhappy poet, therefore, could not be held to steal rabbits, however fond he might be of hunting them; and certainly it would have been legally unsafe for Sir Thomas Lucy to have whipped him for such a disposition. Pheasants and partridges were free for men of all condition to shoot with gun or cross-bow, or capture with hawk. There was no restriction against taking hares except a statute of Henry VIII., which, for the protection of hunting, forbade tracking them in the snow. With this general right of sport it is scarcely to be expected that the statute against the taking of deer should be very strictly observed by the bold yeomanry of the days of Elizabeth; or that the offence of a young man should have been visited by such severe prosecution as should have compelled him to fly the country. The penalty for the offence was a defined one. The short imprisonment might have been painful for a youth to bear, but it would not have been held disgraceful. All the writers of the Elizabethan |