Shakespeare must have been provisionally secured soon
after 1593, when the "Venus and Adonis" was signed with his name,
because in the next year, 1594, "The Taming of a Shrew" was printed, in
which the opening scene shews a drunken "Warwickshire" rustic
[Shakspeare was a drunken Warwickshire rustic], who is dressed up as
"My lord," for whom the play had been prepared. (In the writer's
possession there is a very curious and absolutely unique masonic
painting revealing "on the square" that the drunken tinker is
Shakspeare and the Hostess, Bacon.)
The early date at which Shakspeare had been secured explains how in
1596 an application for a grant of arms seems to have been made (we
say seems) for the date may possibly be a fraud like the rest of the
lying document.
We have referred to Shakspeare as a drunken Warwickshire rustic who
lived in the mean and dirty town of Stratford-on-Avon. There is a
tradition that Shakespeare as a very young man was one of the
Stratfordians selected to drink against "the Bidford topers," and with
his defeated friends lay all night senseless under a crab tree, that was
long known as Shakespeare's crab tree.
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