Shakespeare: A Life by Park Honan Page B

application were not severe. In theory (under the law of 5 Eliz. ,
c. 21) an archer caught with a deer faced three months in prison and
triple the cost of damages, and would have to provide sureties for
abstaining from illegal killing for five years. But punishments seldom
matched the statute. 24 Just because it involved outwitting the park-keeper, and a good deal of
self-control and silent skill, deer-poaching appealed to the
intelligent young. None of the poacher traditions attached to his name
proves that William killed deer in these years or later, but so much
smoke may suggest a little fire.
    Poaching flourished at Oxford, and had had a lively history in
Warwickshire. William learned about stalking, brakes, cover, the
deerherd, the herd's sensitivity to the slight 'noise of thy cross-bow', 25 and the ways of quiet, strategic poaching; he shows less knowledge of
the legitimate chase with the hounds or the sounds of the horn. Even
if he had studied the deer's anatomy in a Henley Street whittawer's
shed, nevertheless he could not -- one would think -- have gained his
fine sense of the herd's ambiance and habits in just that way.
    Almost no escapade of his own would have caused his withdrawal from
school, but straitened circumstances 'and the want of his assistance at
Home, forc'd his Father to withdraw him from thence', says Rowe. 26 We have no evidence that he quit at an unusually early point. It was
normal to leave at the age of 15 or 16, and it is probable that he
left Church Street within a few months of his fifteenth birthday.
    In April 1579 John Shakespeare would have needed 'assistance at home'
if he lacked cash to pay helpers; as we have seen, by then the
brethren were excusing him from levies he seems to have been unable to
pay. The Shakespeares buried their daughter Anne that month. Joan was
then 10, Gilbert and Richard 12½ and 5 respectively. Gilbert may have
been to petty school, since he later affixed, in an Italian hand, his
well-written "Gilbart Shakesper" to a Stratford lease (of 5 March
1610). 27 As spring turned into summer in the parish there was a normal
changeover at the King's New School when Master Jenkins was replaced
by John Cottom. The two teachers agreed to -- and signed -- an
arrangement as regards part-payment of salary, and Jenkins before
leaving had one task laid upon him by the full weight of canon law: he
had to recommend boys among those whom he had
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taught. He was supposed to send names of his abler pupils to the
bishop of Worcester, for the 'Scholemasters' each year, as the canons
read, 'shall signifie to the Byshop, what chosen scholers they haue of
all their number, which are of that aptnes, and so forward in learning,
that there may be a good hope they will become fitte, either for the
common wealth, or for the holy ministerie'. 28
    William can hardly have spent months in class without revealing some
'aptnes', or a sign that he might 'become fitte'; his later writing
does not suggest he had slept through school -- and in the exercise of
assimilating for imitatio he can only have shown promise. Yet we
do not know that a borough teacher ever sent his name to the Anglican
bishop of the diocese, ripe for advancement as he was. The evidence
is still uncertain, but, with their known connections, Master Jenkins
or Master Cottom may well have proposed for him an alternative way
ahead, and a journey that led him to wear at a surprisingly early age
'playe clothes'.
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5
0PP0RTUNITY AND NEED
Proud of employment, willingly I go. ( Boyet, Love's Labour's Lost )
    'In the Countrey'
    It is reasonable to think that at about the age of 15 or 16 Shakespeare
helped his father, and that for an interlude he even found
alternative employment. In the seventeenth century, John Aubrey was by
no means certain that Ben Jonson's report of the Stratford poet's
'small' Latin could be valid. 'He understood Latine pretty well',
Aubrey wrote of Shakespeare,