The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Fifty-Six In which Lucy is lousy

The story is soon told. Shakespeare fell in with bad company, a misfortune common enough to young, romantic fellows. Amongst them there were some who made a frequent practice of deer-stealing, and these engaged with him more than once in robbing a park that belonged to the magistrate Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, near Stratford. On moonlit nights they killed rabbits as well as deer. Worse, when Lucy threatened the poachers with prosecution, Will wrote a ballad upon him, which he then went and hung on the gates of Charlecote Park.

Pickleherring has in this 56th box the first stanza of that ballad, put down in writing for him by one of Shakespeare's accomplices in crime, the amiable Mr Thomas Jones of Tardebigge. It is all that Mr Jones could well remember. It goes like this:

A parliament member, a justice of peace,

At home a poor scarecrow, in London an ass,

If lousy is Lucy (as some volk miscall it)

Then Lucy is lousy, whatever befall it.

He thinks himself great,

Yet an ass in his state

We allow by his ears but with asses to mate.

If Lucy is lousy (as some volk miscall it)

Sing O lousy Lucy whatever befall it.

Apart from the rhythm (which I count a pleasant rollick), there are several points of interest to this stanza.

First, we might learn from it what Mr Shakespeare's voice sounded like when he was young, before he came to London - volk being the way he pronounced the word folk. Old Mr Jones was insistent upon this spelling - both that volk is the way Shakespeare wrote it, and also the way that he said it. 'It is the way, besides, that King Alfred would have said it,' he told me, with a great air of triumph. (A hit for my country history! A very palpable hit!) Yet I should in fairness add that the mild-mannered gentleman might have been missing the point, since by spelling the word volk Shakespeare could be extending some criticism of those among his fellows who pronounce the name Lucy as lousy. Already he is standing at a little distance from the crowd. They say Lucy as lousy. He doesn't. He says Lucy is lousy.

Second, we might observe that the lampoon is scurrile. Lucy's ass's ears are similar equipment to a cuckold's horns, and in lines 6 and 7 what is being suggested is that the man has to submit to buggery to achieve his sexual satisfactions. (I have even wondered whether Mr Jones modified the seventh line for what he took to be my maiden ears, and whether the fifth word in that line should not properly if improperly be rear.)

Third, there is a triple (if trivial) pun being made upon Lucy's coat of arms - 'three silver pikes gasping'. A pike is a luce is a louse.

Fourth, last, and most important, we can take pleasure in the way this whole tiny constellation of wit appears again years later in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where foolish Shallow is Lucy, with 'a dozen white luces' in his coat of arms.

Reminiscing for me, Mr Thomas Jones remarked that Will had never been much of a poacher. He was 'a cack-handed tradesman with a snare', and much too tender-hearted - once they had taken a hare alive, and Will had let her go before they could 'dacently' club her. Mr Jones also described, unbidden, the hated magistrate, saying that while Lucy was very thin and queer, he was 'lecherous as a monkey'. He had never heard of Falstaff's description of Justice Shallow:

'Like a man made after supper of a cheese-paring: when a' was naked he was for all the world like a forked radish, with a head fantastically carved upon it with a knife.'

When I quoted this to him, my ancient informant clapped his skinny yellow hands together and cried, 'That's Lucy to the life!'

I see Mr Shakespeare in his role of poacher as one like Fenton in the Wives, who himself confesses to his 'riots past, my wild societies', and who capers and dances and has the eyes of youth. He does not just go out, a thief in the night, to rob a rich man of his deer (and his rabbits). He is Alan a' Dale as well as bold Robin Hood. He writes verses, he speaks holiday, he smells April and May. Stolen venison tastes sweetest, and Will's offence has a ring of high spirits to it, as well as youthful daring. As he asks in Titus Andronicus: 'What! has not thou full often struck a doe and borne her cleanly by the keeper's nose?' Some say he not only took the game but seduced the gamekeeper's daughter.

But, alas, this Lucy was the same louse who had already had Shakespeare imprisoned for selling those dragons. The prospect of another term of imprisonment, or of a public whipping at the post by the High Cross, for the theft and for the libel, made up Will's mind for him.

One night in the summer of 1587, Shakespeare kissed his wife and bairns good-bye, and slipped out of the back door of the house on Henley Street, and down across Clopton Bridge, and out of Stratford, taking the high road to London.