e name of the maid of the inn is given as
Cicely Hacket, and the alehouse is described in the stage direction as
'on a heath.'

Wincot.

Wincot was the familiar designation of three small Warwickshire villages,
and a good claim has been set up on behalf of each to be the scene of
Sly's drunken exploits. There is a very small hamlet named Wincot within
four miles of Stratford now consisting of a single farmhouse which was
once an Elizabethan mansion; it is situated on what was doubtless in
Shakespeare's day, before the land there was enclosed, an open heath.
This Wincot forms part of the parish of Quinton, where, according to the
parochial registers, a Hacket family resided in Shakespeare's day. On
November 21, 1591, 'Sara Hacket, the daughter of Robert Hacket,' was
baptised in Quinton church. {165} Yet by Warwickshire contemporaries the
Wincot of 'The Taming of The Shrew' was unhesitatingly identified with
Wilnecote, near Tamworth, on the Staffordshire border of Warwickshire, at
some distance from Stratford. That village, whose name was pronounced
'Wincot,' was celebrated for its ale in the seventeenth century, a
distinction which is not shown by contemporary evidence to have belonged
to any place of like name. The Warwickshire poet, Sir Aston Cokain,
within half a century of the production of Shakespeare's 'Taming of The
Shrew,' addressed to 'Mr. Clement Fisher of Wincott' (a well-known
resident at Wilnecote) verses which begin

_Shakspeare_ your _Wincot_ ale hath much renowned,
That fox'd a Beggar so (by chance was found
Sleeping) that there needed not many a word
To make him to believe he was a Lord.

In the succeeding lines the writer promises to visit 'Wincot' (_i.e._
Wilnecote) to drink

Such ale as _Shakspeare_ fancies
Did put Kit Sly into such lordly trances.

It is therefore probable that Shakespeare consciously invested the home
of Kit Sly and of Kit's hostess with characteristics of Wilnecote as well
as of the hamlet near Stratford.

Wilmcote, the native place of Shakespeare's mother, is also said to have
been popularly pronounced 'Wincot.' A tradition which was first recorded
by Capell as late as 1780 in his notes to the 'Taming of The Shrew' (p.
26) is to the effect that Shakespeare often visited an inn at 'Wincot' to
enjoy the society of a 'fool who belonged to a neighbouring mill,' and
the Wincot of this story is, we are told, locally associated with