Page:A life of William Shakespeare (IA lifeofwilliamsha02lees).pdf/21

Lord Bardolph, with the said L. Bardolph's cote quartred, which I shewed to Mr York [i.e. Ralph Brooke, a rigorous champion of heraldic orthodoxy], at a small graver's shopp in Foster Lane.' Lower down, on the same page, appear these words, 'Pope the player would have no other armes but the armes of S^r Tho. Pope, Chancelor of ye Augmentations.'

Player Phillipps's fraudulently adopted ancestor, 'Sir William Phillipp,' won renown at Agincourt in 1415. Doubtless the old warrior's title of Lord Bardolf or Bardolph received satiric commemoration at Shakespeare's hands when the dramatist bestowed on Falstaff's red-nosed companion the name of his actor-friend's imaginary progenitor. But Shakespeare's affectionate relations with player Phillipps were only interrupted by the latter's death in 1605, when he bequeathed 'to my fellowe, William Shakespeare, a thirty-shilling piece of gold.' Player Pope's alleged sponsor in heraldry, Sir Thomas Pope, was the courtier and Privy Councillor, who died without issue in the first year of Elizabeth's reign, after founding Trinity College, Oxford. Shakespeare's claim in his own heraldic application to descent from unspecified persons who did 'valiant and faithful service' in Henry the Seventh's time is thus seen to be comparatively modest. The discovery of the charges which Smith brought against two of the dramatist's leading colleagues is clear proof that Shakespeare's petition to