Joe,
The story of Shakespeare stealing deer is completely apocryphal,
according to a couple books I've recently read. But so, of course, is
just about everything else concerning Shakespeare's biography.
What we do know, from the few documents that survive in relation to
him, is that the man was a litigious bastard of the most petty kind,
ready to screw over his fellow Stratfordians for a few extra
shillings--fast to hoard grain, even, in a time of hunger. And then he
wrote a barely literate will giving his second best bed to his wife
(nice guy!), leaving one of his daughters entirely out of the bequests
(bequests which bear no trace of any literary vocation whatsoever, not
even a few books).
But whoever Shakespeare really was (probably Edward DeVere, Earl of
Oxford, from the best evidence, it seems), he was certainly a literary
thief and poacher, albeit the greatest one in the language. But he
poached plots and ideas, not deer.
And Ben Jonson, a drunk and murderer, as you say (albeit also the
greatest one in the language) was in the pay of Oxford's close allies
when he wrote the coded preface to the First Folio, so that explains
that, hey.
long live dogs with names like Tray.
Kent
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