.

It seems clear that the story of his poaching expeditions in Charlecote
or Fulbroke Parks is not a mere legend unsupported by facts. Sir Thomas
Lucy, the owner of Charlecote Park, was of course a game preserver, and
Shakespeare must have thought that poaching was a reasonable pastime
enough. He dared "do all that may become a man," and the penalty of
exciting the wrath of a great landowner and game preserver was no less
then than now. Sir Thomas was angry; the poet is said to have written a
vulgar, bitter lampoon, still preserved, and affixed a copy to the
gates of Charlecote. The response was a persecution that made Stratford
too hot to hold a greater man than all the big sportsmen from Nimrod's
day to ours, and William Shakespeare left wife and children and vanished
from the old town's ken. Some think he lived in neighbouring towns or
villages awhile, and found work as a schoolmaster. There was an idea
that he went for a time as a soldier to the Low Countries under the Earl
of Leicester, whose splendid pageants in honour of a visit from Queen
Elizabeth may have inspired some of the fantasy of "A Midsummer Night's
Dream."

=ANNE HATHAWAY'S COTTAGE--INTERIOR=

Doubtless there was a Shakespeare or two in Lord Leicester's regiment;
the name was a common one enough; but it was no part of the poet's
experience "to trail a pike in Flanders." Directly or indirectly, he was
on the high road to London, and Sir Thomas Lucy was to find his claim to
immortality in the pursuit of a young poacher and in the poacher's
creation of Mr. Justice Shallow of Gloucestershire, whose foolishness,
suggested in "Henry IV." (Part II., Act iii. sc. 2), is still further
emphasised in the "Merry Wives of Windsor," where he figures as one who
has come to make a Star Chamber matter out of Sir John Falstaff's
poaching. His complaint will be remembered. "Knight, you have beaten my
men, killed my deer, and broken open my lodge ... the council shall know
this."

There has been no lack of determined effort among the poet's countless
biographers to give the lie direct to every story that does not cast
credit upon his youth. Because he was a great man, many people require
his history to be written in a fashion that shall lessen, ignore, or
deny his weaknesses. There can be no valid reason for pursuing such a
course, for we know that the rule of art is not the rule of morals, and
that while a very good poet may be a very bad man, a very worthy man