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For many Shakespearean scholars the idea that the Bard spent time at Hoghton Tower, in Lancashire, is simply not acceptable: they want their man to have arrived in London directly from Stratford fully formed as a playwright and poet; but playwrights and poets never arrive fully formed - they need a bit of experience first, and usually that experience is thrust upon them. They cope or they fail. Shakespeare coped wonderfully.

The information that has been passed down about Shakespeare's time in Lancashire came initially from the 17th century antiquary and writer, John Aubrey, whose stories about Shakespeare's adventures in the north-west of England came back into prominence in 1937 when a book dealer by the name of Oliver Baker revitalised Aubrey's tale by stating that Shakespeare had been sent north to escape prison after poaching deer at Charlecote Park, just a few miles to the north-east of Stratford. I doubt it.

Had the teenage Shakespeare actually poached deer on land belonging to the Lucy family, and been caught, he'd probably have suffered little more than a good beating, with his father no doubt heavily fined. It was not a crime that warranted Shakespeare fleeing for his life; because flee for his life is what he did.

We must remember that in those dark and dangerous Tudor times Queen Elizabeth I was becoming increasingly paranoid about her safety, especially, as she saw it, from a scheming bunch of Roman Catholics who wanted her dead. And let's not forget that Shakespeare's father, John, knew most of the men who would later metamorphose into the Gunpowder Plotters. Plus, Stratford was at heart a Roman Catholic town (although it was part of the Protestant diocese of Worcester), and John Shakespeare a recusant who, nevertheless, as an alderman of the town, tried desperately to make the town appear, on the surface ( he even white-washed out the Roman Catholic paintings on the inside walls of the Guild Chapel), to be a good protestant town. And with Elizabeth's religious police searching out any and all recusants, and doing all sorts of nasty and painful things to them, John Shakespeare didn't want his son, under torture, to start talking about his father's rather iffy friends, which would have meant certain death for John and William Shakespeare. So the young Shakespeare had to be sent away. And where better than the isolated Roman Catholic stronghold of Lancashire, which, before motorways and trains, took an age to get to.

And it would be to one of

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