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 fiercely; 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.
Various supposed remnants of this ballad surfaced in the 17th century, but none can be traced to William. There is also no evidence for the claim that Justice Shallow in ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ is based on Lucy. The whole myth seems to be one of a number devised for the seven ‘lost’ years between the birth of Anne’s twins, Hamnet and Judith, in 1585 and William’s emergence on the London stage in 1592.
That is, Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, not the Stratford in London’s East End. House and Park are now administered by the National Trust.