preceding Shakespeare's marriage suggests the true position. of affairs. Sandells and Richardson, representing the lady's family, doubtless secured the deed on their own initiative, so that Shakespeare might have small opportunity of evading a step which his intimacy with their friend's daughter had rendered essential to her reputation. The wedding probably took place, without the consent of the bridegroom's parents - it may be without their knowledge — soon after the signing of the deed. Within six months- in May 1583 Birth of a a daughter was born to the poet, and was baptised in the daughter. name of Susanna at Stratford parish church on the 26th.

betrothal

Shakespeare's apologists have endeavoured to show that Formal the public betrothal or formal 'troth-plight' which was at probably the time a common prelude to a wedding carried with it dispensed all the privileges of marriage. But neither Shakespeare's with. detailed description of a betrothal nor of the solemn verbal contract that ordinarily preceded marriage lends the contention much support.

A contract of eternal bond of love,

Confirm'd by mutual joinder of your hands,

Attested by the holy close of lips,

Strengthen'd by interchangement of your rings;

And all the ceremony of this compact

Seal'd in my [i.e. the priest's] function by my testimony.

Twelfth Night, v. i. 160–4.

Moreover, the whole circumstances of the case render it highly improbable that Shakespeare and his bride submitted to the formal preliminaries of a betrothal. In that ceremony the parents of both contracting parties invariably played foremost parts, but the wording of the bond precludes the assumption that the bridegroom's parents were actors in any scene of the hurriedly planned drama of his marriage.

A difficulty has been imported into the narration of the poet's matrimonial affairs by the assumption of his identity with one 'William Shakespeare,' to whom, according to an entry in the Bishop of Worcester's register, a license was issued on November 27, 1582 (the day before the signing of the Hathaway bond), authorising his marriage with Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton. The theory that the maiden name of Shakespeare's wife was Whateley is quite untenable, and it is unsafe to assume that the bishop's clerk, when making a note of the grant of the license in his

register, erred so extensively as to write 'Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton' for 'Anne Hathaway of Shottery.' The husband of Anne Whateley cannot reasonably be identified with the poet. He was doubtless another of the numerous William Shakespeares who abounded in the diocese of Worcester. Had a license for the poet's marriage been secured on November 27, it is unlikely that the Shottery husbandmen would have entered next day into a bond 'against impediments,' the execution of which might well have been demanded as a preliminary to the grant of a license but was wholly supererogatory after the grant was made.

III

THE FAREWELL TO STRATFORD

ANNE HATHAWAY's greater burden of years and the likelihood that the poet was forced into marrying her by her friends were not circumstances of happy augury. Although it is dangerous to read into Shakespeare's dramatic utterances allusions to his personal experience, the emphasis with which he insists that a woman should take in marriage an 'elder than herself' ('Twelfth Night,' II. iv. 29), and that prenuptial intimacy is productive of 'barren hate, sour-ey'd disdain, and discord,' suggests a personal interpretation ('Tempest,' IV. i. 15-22). To both these unpromising features was added, in the poet's case, the absence of a means of livelihood, and his course of life in the years that immediately followed implies that he bore his domestic ties with impatience. Early in 1585 twins were born to him, a son (Hamnet) and a daughter (Judith); both were baptised on February 2. All the evidence points to the conclusion, which the fact that he had no more children confirms, that in the later months of the year (1585) he left Stratford, and that, although he was never wholly estranged from his family, he saw little of wife or children for eleven years. Between the winter of 1585 and the autumn of 1596-an interval which synchronises with his first literary triumph- there is only one shadowy mention of his name in Stratford records. In April 1587 there died Edmund Lambert, who held Asbies under the mortgage of 1578, and a few months later Shakespeare's name, as owner of a contingent interest, was joined to that of his father and mother in a formal assent given to an abortive proposal to confer on Edmund's son and heir, John Lambert, an absolute title to the estate on condition of his cancelling the mortgage and paying 201. But the deed does not indicate that Shakespeare personally assisted at the transaction.

cote.

Shakespeare's early literary work proves that while in the country he eagerly studied birds, flowers, and trees, and gained a detailed knowledge of horses and dogs. All his kinsfolk were farmers, and with them he doubtless as a youth practised many field sports. Sympathetic references to hawking, hunting, coursing, and angling abound in his early plays and poems. And his sporting experiences passed at times beyond orthodox limits. A poaching adventure, according to a credible tradition, was the immediate cause of his long severance from his native place. 'He had,' wrote Rowe in 1709, 'by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company, and, among Poaching them, some, that made a frequent practice of deer-stealing, at Charle- engaged him with them more than once in robbing a park that belonged to [a wealthy country gentleman] Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote [between four and five miles to the northeast of] 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 Warwickshire and shelter himself in London.' The independent testimony of Archdeacon Davies, who was vicar of Saperton, Gloucestershire, late in the seventeenth century, is to the effect that Shakespeare 'was much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits, particularly from Sir Thomas Lucy, who had him oft whipt, and sometimes imprisoned, and at last made him fly his native county to his great advancement.' The law of Shakespeare's day (5 Eliz. cap. 21) punished deer-stealers with three months' imprisonment and the payment of thrice the amount of the damage done.

Unwarranted doubts of the tradition.

The tradition has been challenged on the ground that the Charlecote deer-park was of later date than the sixteenth century. But Sir Thomas Lucy was an extensive gamepreserver, and owned at Charlecote a warren in which a few harts or does doubtless found an occasional home. Samuel Ireland was informed in 1794 that Shakespeare stole the deer not from Charlecote, but from Fulbroke Park, a few miles off, and Ireland supplied in his 'Views on the Warwickshire Avon,' 1795, an engraving of an old farm

house in the hamlet of Fulbroke, where he asserted that Shakespeare was temporarily imprisoned after his arrest. An adjoining hovel was locally known for some years as Shakespeare's 'deer-barn,' but no portion of Fulbroke Park, which included the site of these buildings (now removed) was Lucy's property in Elizabeth's reign, and the amended legend, which was solemnly confided to Sir Walter Scott in 1828 by the owner of Charlecote, seems pure invention.

The ballad which Shakespeare is reported to have fastened on the park gates of Charlecote does not, as Rowe acknowledged, survive. No authenticity can be allowed the worthless lines beginning 'A parliament member, a justice of peace,' which were represented to be Shakespeare's on the authority of an old man who lived near Stratford and died in 1703. But such an incident as the tradition reveals has left a distinct impress on Shakesperean drama. Justice Shallow is beyond doubt a reminiscence Justice of the owner of Charlecote. According to Archdeacon Shallow. Davies of Saperton, Shakespeare's 'revenge was so great that' he caricatured Lucy as 'Justice Clodpate,' who was (Davies adds) represented on the stage as 'a great man,' and as bearing, in allusion to Lucy's name, 'three louses rampant for his arms.' Justice Shallow, Davies's 'Justice Clodpate,' came to birth in the 'Second Part of Henry IV' (1598), and he 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 Justice Shallow's 'old coat' fully establishes Shallow's identity with Lucy.

Stratford.

The poaching episode is best assigned to 1585, but it The flight may be questioned whether Shakespeare, on fleeing from 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, a band of youths of the district in serving in the Low Countries under the Earl of Leicester, whose

C