ce 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.

The flight from Stratford.

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, a band of 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. {30} 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 under almost every aspect by force of
his imagination.

IV--ON THE LONDON STAGE

The journey to London.

To London Shakespeare naturally drifted, doubtless trudging thither on
foot during 1586, by way of Oxford and High Wycombe. {31a} Tradition
points to that as Shakespeare's favoured 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.

Richard Field, his townsman.

To only one resident in London is Shakespeare likely to have be