And in this covert will we make our ‘stand,’
Culling the principal of all the deer.”
Again, in Cymbeline (Act iii. Sc. 4), “When thou hast ta’en thy ‘stand,’ the elected deer before thee.” Other passages might be mentioned, but it will be sufficient to refer only to The Merry Wives of Windsor (Act v. Sc. 5), and to the song in As You Like It (Act iv. Sc. 2), commencing “What shall he have that kill’d the deer?”
Deer-stealing in Shakespeare’s day was regarded only as a youthful frolic. Antony Wood (“Athen. Oxon.” i. 371), speaking of Dr. John Thornborough, who was admitted a member of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1570, at the age
of eighteen, and who was successively Bishop of Limerick and Bishop of Bristol and Worcester, informs us, that he and his kinsman, Robert Pinkney, “seldom studied or gave themselves to their books, but spent their time in the fencing schools, and dancing schools, in stealing deer and conies, in hunting the hare and wooing girls.”
Shakespeare himself has been accused of this indiscretion. The story is first told in print by Rowe, in his “Life of Shakespeare”:—“He had, by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company, and amongst them some that made a frequent practice of deer-stealing engaged him 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, for some time, and shelter himself in London.”
Mr. Staunton, in his library edition of Shakespeare’s Plays, says: “What degree of authenticity the story possesses will never probably be known. Rowe derived his version of it no doubt through Betterton; but Davies makes no allusion to the source from which he drew his
information, and we are left to grope our way, so far as this important incident is concerned, mainly by the light of collateral circumstances. These, it must be admitted, serve in some respects to confirm the tradition. Shakespeare certainly quitted Stratford-upon-Avon when a young man, and it could have been no ordinary impulse which drove him to leave wife, children, friends, and occupation, to take up his abode among strangers in a distant place.
“Then there is the pasquinade, and the unmistakable identification of Sir Thomas Lucy as Justice Shallow, in the Second Part of Henry IV., and in the opening scene of The Merry Wives of Windsor. The genuineness of the former may be doubted; but the ridicule in the Plays betokens a latent hostility to the Lucy family, which is unaccountable, except upon the supposition that the deerstealing foray is founded on facts.”
The more legitimate sport in killing deer was by means of blood-hounds, and in The Midsummer Night’s Dream we are furnished with an accurate description of the dogs in most repute:—