One of the most well-known stories of Shakespeare’s youth involves his running afoul of a local justice of the peace, Sir Thomas Lucy. This paints a quaint image of Shakespeare as a boisterous youth, mildly rebellious in the face of blustering, provincial authority. But Sir Thomas Lucy was a heavy character: a “pursuivant,” a local officer of the Crown charged with ferreting out Catholic “recusants” who refused to attend reformed church services — and making their lives as miserable as possible.
On Thursday, as William walked home through the crisp fall air toward his midday meal and a free afternoon, he thought of Rosaline and of the improvised triumph of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus. Then he thought of Isabella Burns; and then again, happily, of Rosaline. The incessant fog of the past few days had broken, and sunlight gleamed on the walls and windows of New Place and the bustling shops of High Street. William thought that Stratford, today, looked uncommonly beautiful.
It did not smell nearly so pretty.
As he turned the corner into Henley Street and crossed the Meer Stream that ran through it, he heard a female voice overhead. “Ho, there!” Instinctively he jumped back as a rain of shit and piss splattered into the brook beside him. “Mark thy ways, boy!” He looked up to see a housewife leaning out a second-story window, shaking the dregs out of her emptied chamber pot. This was a fairly common occurrence.
The Shakespeare house in Henley Street looked like crap; or more accurately, like a dunghill. That was the first thing one noticed on approaching the property. A ten-foot-high pile of table scraps, dead cats, festering turds of cow, sheep, goat, and dog, and last night’s chamber-pot contents greeted the potential customer or visitor who approached the humble shoppe and attached home of John Shakespeare, Whittawer & Glover.
William shook his head at the dung heap and grumbled past it. Its mere presence here — the farmishness and ugliness of its blight on the fairest street of the fairest town in Warwickshire, where a young man might daydream of the fairest women in England — annoyed him with that peculiar annoyance that comes only from daily reminders of parents’ shortcomings. Behind the dunghill, the house teetered over Henley Street. It was badly in need of attention, the whitewash peeling and the timbers splintering. Two shutters wanted repairing. The windows had no glass; such extravagances were strictly for the wealthy. Instead they were stretched across with linen that was stained and torn. The wide, horizontally hinged window that swung open as the storefront for the family business was closed, though it was midday. The thatch roof was threadbare in places; it perched slightly askew atop the house, like a drunk’s hat.
William ducked into the carriageway that passed through from Henley Street to the Shakespeares’ backyard and separated the structure into business and residence. On the right was the entrance to the workshop, on the left the entrance to the house. William peeked in at the workshop door. Inside was, of all things, a black-clad nobleman, poking idly and impatiently at the littered array of purses, bags, laces, gloves, mittens, satchels, and various scraps and whole skins of kid, lamb, calf, and dog.
“God ye good den, noble sir,” William offered from the hallway. The noble figure turned and William, seeing the face, started and bowed immediately. Despite the protection it offered from chamber-pot bombardment, William never wore a hat. But if he had, he’d have doffed it. “My Lord Lucy. You honor our humble shop by your presence. I cry you mercy, sir, at finding the shop thus closed before its time. If you would withdraw — ”
“Pray hold thy obsequious prattling tongue,” Sir Thomas Lucy snapped. William could never remember that in the presence of nobility, he should never speak first. “What is thy name, boy?” Lucy said, and threw down the small, empty coin purse he had been examining onto a pile of similar items heaped in a cobwebby corner.
“William Shakespeare, my lord,” William responded with another reverence.
“Where is thy father?”
“I know not, my lord. I’the tanning yard most like, tending to his trade.”
Lucy looked about distractedly, as though not quite certain where he was or what he was doing there. “I am in need of” — he put a hand to his arrowhead-pointed, razor-sharp red beard, and the touch seemed to inspire him — “gloves,” he continued. “Master Shakespeare is a glover, ’struth?”
William glanced quickly down the hall to the yard and then over a shoulder into the house’s main hall, looking hopefully for Gilbert or his father. Inside the house, he heard his baby brother, Edmund, screaming bloody murder as usual and his younger sister, Joan, trying desperately to shush him. Gilbert and his father were nowhere to be seen.
“Ay, my lord,” William said. He entered the shop and put on his business face. Only then did he see the large and hairy man standing, arms crossed and feet apart, in the shadows behind the door.
William cast a glance at him, and bowed tentatively. The henchman did not move.
William went to the shop chest, turning his attention back to Lucy. “Gloves for work or leisure?”
Sir Thomas Lucy didn’t reply.
William held up a pair. “I know the park at Charlecote is fine for falconry.” He passed Lucy the gloves. “These are made for such sport. Buck’s leather, rabbit lined — ”
“What knowest thou of my park, boy? Dost thou come at times unawares to thieve and sport at mine expense? Mayhap to poach my deer?” Lucy snatched the gloves away. “Wouldst thou, like a Jew of the Orient, sell me at a profit that which thou hast stolen from me?” He threw the deerskin gloves like a discarded noserag at William’s feet. “No, I want none of thy buckskin for falconry.”
William held Lucy’s gaze for a moment. Then he stooped, picked up the gloves, and tossed them back on the table. “Swordplay, then?” William offered brightly. “A most sharp-edged blade you wield, my lord. These are made for playing at fencing.” He held out a pair of fine chamois gloves.
Lucy screwed up his nose. “Fie! They reek of piss. A foul wind blows from this shop, and infects this house, this street, nay this very county.”
William Shakespeare bowed. “An’ it please your lord, it is, after all, a glover’s shop, which are rarely known for sweetness of scent.”
Lucy gave Shakespeare a sour stare, then turned away. Rummaging amongst the goods in the shop, his gaze landed on a large leather triangle with a hardened leather peak.
Lucy picked it up by one corner as though it might carry the plague. “A codpiece! Tell me not thou sellest this as an item of fashion?” He laughed, and looked to his colleague in the corner, who snorted once, derisively. “ ’ Tis a popish affectation,” Lucy continued, “a devilish idolatry of the privy parts. Yet, as a collector’s piece . . . what is thy price?”
“Two crowns, my lord?”
“Two crowns?! Surely ’tis worth less than half that.” Sir Thomas Lucy paused a moment. “Thou hadst best ask thy father the price.”
William knew his father would want simply to unload the thing, but he also knew he should ask first — John Shakespeare didn’t like others making his deals for him. “An’t please my lord, take your ease but a moment and I shall enquire.” He slipped back out the door with a bow and a glance at the muscle who hadn’t yet moved from his henchman’s pose.
As William stepped out of the carriageway and into the backyard of the house, a decapitated chicken went flailing and scrabbling across his path. A second later it was followed by a rooster who pecked and poked hungrily at the gore trailing and drizzling from the hen’s neck.
Another second later, the cock was followed by a man. He wore a filthy apron over a filthier chemise and greasy leather hose, and ran bent forward at the waist, his cheeks flaming red, his nose a bouquet of booze blossoms, hair wild and matted, with both arms extended toward the headless running fowl. “It’s the stew pot or foul hell for thee, Mary!” Mary was the name of the bifurcated hen.
William observed: “You speak, Father, to the bird’s nether, senseless part. Address rather the gory chopping block where lie our supper’s ears.” The bottom portion of Mary (the hen) was still running full speed. “Or but wait a moment,” William said.
And indeed, Mary (the hen) ran into the side of a barrel with a wet, feathery fwap, bounced backward, twitched three times, and finally died.
“And there ’tis,” said William.
John shooed away the snacking rooster, picked up Mary (the hen’s) carcass, and handed it to William’s younger brother Gilbert, who stood next to the chopping block still holding a bloodied axe. “Take that to thy mother, Gil.”
“Ay, Father,” said Gilbert, and ran inside.
“There’s an enquiry about the codpiece,” William continued after Gilbert scurried into the house. He gestured back over his shoulder and widened his eyes significantly, a cue that his father missed.
“To buy it?” John asked.
“Ay. I priced it at two crowns,” William said, and nodded urgently toward the shop behind him while mouthing “Sir Thomas Lucy.” Again his father didn’t notice.
“Od’s teeth!” said John, “ ’ tis but a scrap Adrian Quiney bade me remove from his hose, for he is e’er the fop and the codpiece is no longer in the courtly fashion. Sell it for a penny if they’ll have it. What fool — ”
A voice from behind William mocked, “What fool, nay knave, nay, I prithee pardon . . . what alderman lives in such squalor as this?” Sir Thomas Lucy had appeared in the yard.
John Shakespeare swept back his matted, sweaty hair streaked with flour and egg yolk, and did his reverence. “Sir Thomas.”
To say Thomas Lucy looked with distaste at John Shakespeare would understate the matter; his look positively puked at him. “Master Shakespeare,” he said. “I have not seen thee of late, neither at meetings, nor parades, nor any public affair nigh these — how long is it, Master Rogers?” He turned to his muscle, who uncrossed his arms long enough to hold up six knobby fingers — one of which was gnarled and cut off at the second knuckle — and then return to his pose.
“Five and a half years?” said Lucy. “A long time, thus to neglect thy civic duty.”
“I beg your pardon, my lord,” replied John. “But you know my office is discharged as charity. I have been much engaged with private toil in this my humble trade.”
Lucy looked around at the yard. “Which indeed looks . . . and smells . . . like discharge.”
Following Lucy’s surveying gaze, William had to agree. In addition to the chicken head still on the block, there were three goats, two sheep, two dogs, a rooster, eight hens, a pig, and a half-dead ass named, not coincidentally, Lucy. The rooster and chickens were still in a clucking tizzy about the recent offing of one of their kin. The family cart listed on one side, its broken left wheel lying nearby awaiting repair. Skins in various stages of the process from animal part to clothing were strewn everywhere. There were three large vats, one filled with sulphuric alum and oil, one with bubbling lactic acid made of fermenting bran and water, and another boiling a twenty percent solution of dog manure and urine. A smaller vat, which John had been stirring just prior to Mary (the hen’s) demise, was filled with a viscous bushel of flour and fresh egg yolks for softening leather. The discarded eggshells and whites oozed and congealed in a crate nearby. The whole place smelled like a particularly nasty breakfast fart.
“Since you have removed yourself from public discourse for some time,” said Lucy with mock ceremony, “perhaps you have yet to meet your new magistrate? Allow me to introduce you to Henry Rogers, until recently apprenticed to Richard Topcliffe of London.” Richard Topcliffe was a well-known name, a name of fear: he was an expert torturer in the employ of Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham.
“Master Rogers,” said Lucy, “this proud citizen is Master John Shakespeare, alderman, onetime bailiff, ale-taster, and husband to Mary Arden of the Ardens of Park Hall. A very, very honorable and important man.” Lucy smiled with mock sympathy. “Now seemingly fallen on hard times.”
Henry Rogers stepped forward to examine John Shakespeare’s bulbous nose. “Still an ale-taster, by the looks of it.”
“Strictly amateur,” John joked nervously. “Of my days of public service in that regard I have fond remembrance; but they were long ago.”
“I have not seen thee i’the church, Master Shakespeare,” said Rogers.
“They say,” said Lucy, turning to Henry Rogers, “it has been some three years since Master John graced God’s house in his alderman’s robes. There are rumors of recusancy.”
Henry Rogers looked hard at John Shakespeare, awaiting an answer.
“I go not to the church not for lack of devotion to the new rites, my lord, but for fear of being served for process of debt,” John Shakespeare replied, looking at the ground. “My affairs are much disordered, and I am debtor to many, creditor to none. Some there are who have threatened violence upon my person for debts outstanding, which I intend full well someday to honor, but cannot now redeem with aught but blood or limb.”
Lucy exchanged a look with Henry Rogers.
“I suggest, Master Shakespeare, that if thy limbs are threatened, you take a surety against those that would harm you, rather than skulk in your barnyard at the peril of your eternal soul. It is given to Henry Rogers to enforce the Queen’s law in this as in all things. See you look to’t.”
Shakespeare bowed. “Ay, my lord.”
“Then all is well. We will take our leave and see thee i’the church.” Lucy tossed a small coin purse to Shakespeare. “Here is two crowns for thy codpiece. It would be well spent on removing the dung heap from thy doorstep — which, I believe, is it not, Master Rogers, against the town charter?”
Henry Rogers nodded silently.
Sir Thomas Lucy gave a last withering look to John, then to William, and then to the tanning yard. Without a farewell he spun and swept out through the hallway in a flurry of black velvet. Henry Rogers gave one last, hard look at William, a longer, harder look at John, and left.
When they were gone, John’s forced smile turned to a frown. “Puritan scum,” he muttered under his breath to William, and cocked his arm as if to throw the coin purse after them. But then he seemed to think better of it, and tucked it into his belt.
“Shall we move the dunghill?” asked William.
Before his father could answer, there came the clanging of a spoon on a pot from the house.
“Not now, William,” said John. “Come, let’s to table. Your mother awaits.”