Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 51.djvu/362

Shakespeare to birth in the ‘Second Part of Henry IV,’ is represented in the opening scene of the ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’ as having come from Gloucestershire to Windsor to make a Star-chamber matter of a poaching raid on his estate. The ‘three luces hauriant argent’ were the arms borne by the Charlecote Lucys, and the dramatist's prolonged reference in this scene to the ‘dozen white luces’ on Shallow's ‘old coat’ finally establishes Shallow's identity with Lucy.

The poaching episode is best assigned to 1585, but it may be questioned whether Shakespeare, on fleeing from Lucy's persecution, at once sought an asylum in London. William Beeston, a seventeenth-century actor, remembered hearing that he had been for a time a country schoolmaster ‘in his younger years,’ and it seems possible that on first leaving Stratford he found some such employment in a neighbouring village. The suggestion that he joined, at the end of 1585, some youths of the district in serving in the Low Countries under the Earl of Leicester, whose castle of Kenilworth was within easy reach of Stratford, is based on an obvious confusion between him and others of his name (cf., Three Notelets on Shakespeare, 1865, pp. 116 sq.). The knowledge of a soldier's life which Shakespeare exhibited in his plays is no greater and no less than that which he displayed of almost all other spheres of human activity, and to assume that he wrote of all or of any from practical experience, unless the evidence be conclusive, is to underrate his intuitive power of realising life in almost every aspect by force of his imagination.

To London Shakespeare naturally drifted, doubtless trudging thither on foot during 1586, by way of Oxford and High Wycombe (cf., Notes on Shakespeare, 1884, pp. 1–24). Tradition points to that as Shakespeare's favourite route, rather than to the road by Banbury and Aylesbury. Aubrey asserts that at Grendon, near Oxford, ‘he happened to take the humour of the constable in “Midsummer Night's Dream”’—by which he meant, we may suppose, ‘Much Ado about Nothing’—but there were watchmen of the Dogberry type all over England, and probably at Stratford itself. The Crown Inn (formerly 3 Cornmarket Street) near Carfax, at Oxford, was long pointed out as one of his resting-places.

To only one resident in London is Shakespeare likely to have been known previously. Richard Field, a native of Stratford, and son of a friend of Shakespeare's father, had left Stratford in 1579 to serve an apprenticeship with Thomas Vautrollier [q. v.], the London printer. Shakespeare and Field, who was made free of the Stationers' Company in 1587, were soon associated as author and publisher, but the theory that Field found work for Shakespeare in Vautrollier's printing-office is fanciful (, Shakspeare and Typography). No more can be said for the attempt to prove that Shakespeare obtained employment as a lawyer's clerk. In view of his general quickness of apprehension, his accurate use of legal terms, which deserves all the attention that has been paid it, may be attributable in part to his observation of the many legal processes in which his father was involved, and in part to early intercourse with members of the inns of court (cf., Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements, 1859; , Shakespeare as a Lawyer, 1858, and Shakespeare's Testamentary Language, 1869).

Tradition and common-sense alike point to one of the only two theatres (The Theatre or The Curtain) that existed in London at the date of his arrival as an early scene of his regular occupation. The compiler of ‘Lives of the Poets’ (1753), assigned to Theophilus Cibber [q. v.], was the first to relate the story that his original connection with the playhouse was as holder of the horses of visitors outside the doors. According to the compiler, the story was related by D'Avenant to Betterton; but Rowe, to whom Betterton communicated it, made no use of it. The two regular theatres of the time were both reached on horseback by men of fashion, and the owner of the Theatre, James Burbage, kept a livery stable at Smithfield. There is no inherent improbability in the tale. Dr. Johnson's amplified version, in which Shakespeare was represented as organising a service of boys for the purpose of tending visitors' horses, sounds apocryphal.

There is every indication that Shakespeare was speedily offered employment inside the playhouse. In 1587 the two chief companies of actors, the queen's and Lord Leicester's, returned to London from a provincial tour, during which they visited Stratford. Two subordinate companies, who claimed the patronage of the Earl of Essex and Lord Stafford, also performed in the town during the same year. From such incidents doubtless sprang the opportunity which offered Shakespeare fame and fortune. According to Rowe's vague statement, ‘he was received into the company then in being at first in a very mean rank.’ William Castle, the parish clerk of Stratford at the end of the seventeenth century, was in the habit of telling visitors that he entered the playhouse as a servitor. Malone recorded in 1780 a stage