The Complete Works of William Shakespeare - Israel Gollancz William Shakespeare [3390]
Wincot.
Wincot was the familiar designation of three small Warwickshire villages, and a good claim has been set up on behalf of each to be the scene of Sly’s drunken exploits. There is a very small hamlet named Wincot within four miles of Stratford now consisting of a single farmhouse which was once an Elizabethan mansion; it is situated on what was doubtless in Shakespeare’s day, before the land there was enclosed, an open heath. This Wincot forms part of the parish of Quinton, where, according to the parochial registers, a Hacket family resided in Shakespeare’s day. On November 21, 1591, ‘Sara Hacket, the daughter of Robert Hacket,’ was baptised in Quinton church. Yet by Warwickshire contemporaries the Wincot of ‘The Taming of The Shrew’ was unhesitatingly identified with Wilnecote, near Tamworth, on the Staffordshire border of Warwickshire, at some distance from Stratford. That village, whose name was pronounced ‘Wincot,’ was celebrated for its ale in the seventeenth century, a distinction which is not shown by contemporary evidence to have belonged to any place of like name. The Warwickshire poet, Sir Aston Cokain, within half a century of the production of Shakespeare’s ‘Taming of The Shrew,’ addressed to ‘Mr. Clement Fisher of Wincott’ (a well-known resident at Wilnecote) verses which begin
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’ () 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.
‘Henry IV.’
In 1597 Shakespeare turned once more to English history. From Holinshed’s ‘Chronicle,’ and from a valueless but very popular piece, ‘The Famous Victories of Henry V,’ which was repeatedly acted between 1588 and 1595, he worked up with splendid energy two plays on the reign of Henry IV. They form one continuous whole, but are known respectively as parts i. and ii. of ‘Henry IV.’ The ‘Second Part of Henry IV’ is almost as rich as the Induction to ‘The