Shakspeare your Wincot ale hath much renowned,
That fox’d a Beggar so (by chance was found
Sleeping) that there needed not many a word
To make him to believe he was a Lord.
In the succeeding lines the writer promises to visit ‘Wincot’ (i.e. Wilnecote) to drink
Such ale as Shakspeare fancies
Did put Kit Sly into such lordly trances.
It is therefore probable that Shakespeare consciously invested the home of Kit Sly and of Kit’s hostess with characteristics of Wilnecote as well as of the hamlet near Stratford.
Wilmcote, the native place of Shakespeare’s mother, is also said to have been popularly pronounced ‘Wincot.’ A tradition which was first recorded by Capell as late as 1780 in his notes to the ‘Taming of The Shrew’ (p. 26) is to the effect that Shakespeare often visited an inn at ‘Wincot’ to enjoy the society of a ‘fool who belonged to a neighbouring mill,’ and the Wincot of this story is, we are told, locally associated with the village of Wilmcote. But the links
that connect Shakespeare’s tinker with Wilmcote are far slighter than those which connect him with Wincot and Wilnecote.
The mention of Kit Sly’s tavern comrades—
Stephen Sly and old John Naps of Greece,
And Peter Turf and Henry Pimpernell—
was in all likelihood a reminiscence of contemporary Warwickshire life as literal as the name of the hamlet where the drunkard dwelt. There was a genuine Stephen Sly who was in the dramatist’s day a self-assertive citizen of Stratford; and ‘Greece,’ whence ‘old John Naps’ derived his cognomen, is an obvious misreading of Greet, a hamlet by Winchcombe in Gloucestershire, not far removed from Shakespeare’s native town.