Walter Roche, Shakespeare had to leave his Latin book and the quaint gabled schoolroom with its rough desks and wooden beams, which still forms a most genuine attraction to all Stratford pilgrims—he had to quit these altogether, and rally to the help of his father in the humble trade to which all his great projects had reduced him, that of a common butcher.

John Aubrey, the first of our antiquaries who thought it worth while to record anecdotes about Shakespeare, when collecting materials (the product of a journey made to Stratford about 1662) for Anthony à Wood, wrote of the poet at this time: "His father was a butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours, that when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade, but when he kill'd a calf he would doe it in high style, and make a speech. There was at that time another butcher's son in this towne that was held not at all inferior to him for naturall witt, his acquaintance and coetanean, but dyed young." These days in the slaughter-house must evidently have been to Shakespeare what those in the blacking factory were to Dickens. They begot in him an unconquerable determination to rise to a position of well-to-do respectability in the world.

A mile or two from Stratford is a hamlet named Shottery, accessible by a short walk through pleasant fields from the little town. Here, in a cottage of thatch, brick, and rubble which is still standing, lived Richard Hathaway, husbandman, and his daughter Anne. Shakespeare as a lad of eighteen must apparently have fallen in love with the maiden of twenty-five or six. According to an entry in the register of the Bishop of Worcester (Whitgift), a licence was granted on November 27th, 1582, for a marriage between William Shaxpere and Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton. On the following day (November 28th) a bond was entered into, in which two

husbandmen of Stratford guaranteed the bishop against liability for any objection that might be made against him (such as pre-contract or consanguinity) for allowing the contemplated marriage between William Shagspere and Anne Hathwey of Stratford-upon-Avon: provided, moreover, that Anne obtained the consent of her friends, the marriage was to be allowed to proceed with but once asking of the banns instead of the usual thrice. Although at first sight the discrepancy in details appears to justify the opinion that different transactions are referred to, there are good reasons for the belief that both of the records relate to the licence for the poet's marriage, and that the entry in the bishop's register is incorrect, all the available evidence being in favour of the greater accuracy of the bond. The presumption is that the ceremony of marriage was precipitated; the view, however, that anything discreditable to Shakespeare or his wife is implied by the application for a licence is not sustained either by the documentary evidence or by a consideration of the known facts relating to the marriage. The urgency may have been dictated by a prospect of legal advantage, or by the poet's impending departure from Stratford. Aubrey "guessed" that he went to London "about eighteen" (1582). On the other hand legend hints that during the next three years or so Shakespeare endeavoured to gain his living as a lawyer's clerk and as a village schoolmaster.

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1 For obscure questions raised by Shakespeare's marriage, see C. I. Elton, William Shakespeare: his Family and Friends; and Joseph William Gray, Shakespeare's Marriage, 1905. The baptisms of his children are thus recorded in the Stratford registers: 1583. b. May 26, Susanna, daughter to William Shakspere." "1585. b. February 2, Hamnet and Judeth, sonne and daughter to William Shakspere." Hamnet, who died in August, 1596, was named after a neighbour, Hamnet Sadler, who was on March 25th, 1616, one of the signatories of Shakespeare's will.

Aubrey, in his short account, expressly says "he understood Latin pretty well, for he had been in his younger days a schoolmaster in the country." Whatever Shakespeare's chief means of subsistence may have been at the time and there are reasons for supposing that he may have endeavoured to play more than one part-everything points to the fact that his chief relaxation was to be found in those sports of the countryside to which his country training and connections would naturally predispose him. Most notable, indeed, throughout Shakespeare's writings are the spontaneous and almost unconscious allusions to the minuter details of field sport. A poaching adventure is plausibly alleged to have been the immediate cause of his abandonment of Stratford. "He had," wrote his first biographer, Nicholas Rowe, in 1709, "by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company, and, among them, some that made a frequent practice of deer-stalking, engaged him with them more than once in robbing a park that belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy, of Charlecote, near 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." Whether it be true or no, as a local parson, Richard Davies, who died in 1708, used to relate, that Lucy had Shakespeare whipped for his depredations, it is certain that Sir Thomas Lucy spoke in Parliament during 1585 on behalf of more stringent game laws, and that Shakespeare had a clear passado at Sir Thomas in 1600 when he made Justice Shallow boast of the dozen white luces in his coat in proof of his ancient lineage. It is an old