Dear Deers - Sir Thomas Lucy and Charlecote Park Revisited

Abstract

THE period of Shakespeare’s ‘lost years’ have long been the subject of biographical enquiry and endless speculation. Theories regarding his occupation during these years, and, as importantly, the trigger for his departure from Stratford, have exercised generations of biographers and researchers. A well known and oft repeated tradition is given by Peter Holland in his account of Shakespeare in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: The traditional explanation, first set out by Nicholas Rowe … was that William poached deer from Sir Thomas Lucy’s estate at Charlecote, was caught and prosecuted, wrote a ballad against Lucy, and was forced to escape to London to avoid further prosecution. Shakespeare’s apparent jibe at the Lucy coat of arms in The Merry Wives of Windsor (I.i.13–20) has been explained as belated revenge, though why Shakespeare waited so long and revenged himself so obscurely is not adequately justified.1 The account has been subject to intense scrutiny and successive generations of scholars have assessed the credibility of the tale. In Shakespeare’s Lives, Samuel Schoenbaum seemed to give little credence to the story,2 but conceded in his subsequent William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life that a number of prominent twentieth-century authorities, including G. E. Bentley, E. K. Chambers, and A. L. Rowse, believed that the account may have been rooted in fact.3