Shakespeare’s alleged poaching of deer from the park at Charlecote likely stemmed from more than a sudden craving for venison. Sir Thomas Lucy took advantage of his broad powers in the crackdown on Catholics to “enclose,” or append to his estate, many lands that were once either private (Catholic) or public grazing lands. In her 1938 play The Wooing of Anne Hathaway, playwright Grace Carlton suggests that for the Catholic youth of Stratford, deer poaching and other forms of trespass on Sir Thomas Lucy’s lands were not just youthful pranks but overt acts of civil disobedience.
As William Shakespeare spent himself and cried, “O true apothecary!” he experienced that momentary epiphany, that loss of self, that transportation to somewhere entirely else that often accompanies orgasm. Freedom. No care in the world. No responsibility. No past, no future, just satisfaction, release, ecstasy; oneness.
He and Rosaline were in a small meadow in the midst of Sir Thomas Lucy’s grounds at Charlecote. Though it was called “the deer park,” and there were deer to be found here, it was more properly a coney warren, and the rabbits who inhabited it were everywhere. There were, in fact, ten within William’s eyeshot at the moment. Four of them were humping.
William had taken the mysterious box back to the house at Henley Street and secreted it in the bottom of the clothing trunk that he and Gilbert shared. He slept uneasily that night. He woke several times thinking he heard horsemen in the lane, or a knock on the door, or a scraping at the bedroom window; but it was just the wind. Once, he started up in bed thinking he saw the ghost of Thomas Cottom; but it was merely the moon casting a shadow of a tree branch on the bedroom wall.
In the grey morning light he had lain awake and wondered how he would fulfill the promise he’d made, to deliver the mysterious box to John Cottom in Lancashire. He couldn’t, not until the end of the term. But as the day’s Latin lessons crawled by he ground his teeth and thought more and more about the rank injustices to the Cottom family, and to his own.
At the end of the day, he had stealthily approached Davy Jones’s house, and to his delight found Rosaline mulching its neglected rose garden. Even better, Davy Jones was, she said, already drunk and asleep. Using all the rhetorical tricks he could muster, William pleaded and cajoled her into a bold adventure. Starting out at sunset, they walked the four miles to Charlecote. Darkness had fallen when they approached a forlorn gate on the park’s west side, guarded by a forlorn keeper’s house on its left. They slipped quietly past the guardhouse and along the park’s fence, which was made with vertical split-oak palings of different heights to confuse any deer considering a leap. It was meant to keep deer in rather than poachers out, and they soon found a low stave, scrambled over, and fucked madly, aroused by the sense of danger that they might get caught in the act by Thomas Lucy or his minions.
It was, for William, both a sexual conquest and a literal fuck you and your deer park to Lucy’s authority.
Now, as William breathed heavily, Rosaline giggled beneath him. “Men may say strange things when they are spent, or so I am told. But what is this, of your apothecary?”
William covered the true association by kissing Rosaline gently on her flushed brow. “My apothecary? ‘He who, with charms most strange and weeds too-pow’rful, human shapes did change!’ ”
“You know your Ovid well,” Rosaline replied, then quoted back at him, “ ‘O, give us way to slide into each other’s arms! If such a bliss transcend our Fates, yet suffer us to kiss.’ Hath your apothecary given you means to slide into me again?”
Shakespeare kissed her again, then rolled off of her onto the grass. “A kiss must serve for now. ’Twould be a powerful weed indeed, so soon to change my shape to suit your pleasure. Though I be in the full flower of manhood, even a flower must fold, suck light and water, and rest ere it bloom again.”
“Very pretty,” Rosaline replied, and lay back, using William’s breeches as a pillow. “Your love talk is like to gilding what is already gold.”
“Nay,” he said, running his finger along a wet streak that ran shimmering along Rosaline’s thigh, “ ’ tis more like to painting the lily white.”
“A dainty picture to paint,” said Rosaline as she pulled down her skirts, “with so large a brush.”
William opened his mouth to reply, but nothing came. He smiled and shrugged.
“It seems at last that a woman has topped me.”
She laughed and swung herself astride him.
“By repute many a woman has topped you. Or are you so Puritan as to not allow them so high a position?”
“No Puritan I,” he said, no longer laughing, and rolled out from under her. They lay silent for a moment.
“William,” said Rosaline suddenly, “I spoke not in jest when I said you should write. Even Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, extemporized though it was, shows Anthony Munday a bull’s pizzle. You have the greater wit.”
“But the less learning. I am too unschooled.”
Rosaline leaned upon one elbow. “The stage need not be for men of learning only. Any man or woman, lettered or no, may see a play for a penny. You are lettered in the language of men and women, and what they say and do, and also in the tongue of love. The playwright’s aim is to hold a mirror up to nature, is it not?”
“Mayhap, mayhap. But the road to London, to the theatre in Blackfriars, runs not straight from Stratford. One must first pay toll at Cambridge or Oxford.”
“And where is that writ? You give yourself too little shrift of your skill and craft. Be not afeared to use what tools you are given,” she said, grabbing playfully at William’s crotch and pulling him toward her, “and use them while you may.”
William was kissing her deeply when he heard a noise in the brush behind him, followed by a voice he knew.
“Ah, what an arse is here!”
William turned suddenly around to see Sir Thomas Lucy, on his horse.
“The naked arse, no less, of young William Shakespeare. Poaching deer in my park!”
William didn’t bother to stand or reverence now. But he did pull on his breeches, and tried to riposte with the best weapon he had.
“ ‘Poaching deer,’ is it?” William replied. “That’s a new one.”
“William,” whispered Rosaline urgently, but he was already caught out, and not inclined to give Lucy the smallest shred of satisfaction.
“ ‘Hunting beaver,’ I’ve heard,” William continued. “ ‘Laying in the short grass’ is to the point.”
“William!” Rosaline whispered, louder, as she twisted suddenly to look at something behind them. But William was focused on Sir Thomas.
“ ‘Ploughing the untilled field,’ befits the setting. ‘Plucking forbidden fruit,’ now that gets it across. But ‘poaching deer’ — ”
William heard a thundering crack as something blunt and heavy hit him in the back of the head. As he fell he turned, and as blackness took him he caught a glimpse of Henry Rogers standing over him, holding the hilts of his sword like a club.