Thomas Lucy

John Foxe, who had witnessed the persecution of Protestants under Queen Mary, had been briefly a tutor in the Lucy household in around 1547.

Lucy also arrested and interrogated Catholic families in the area after the missionary activities of the Jesuit, Edmund Campion.

[8] Edmond Malone noted a different ballad seemingly ridiculing Lucy's marriage, which was still being sung in Stratford c. 1687–90 when Joshua Barnes heard it and wrote it down.

Another story, first recorded by Richard Davies in the late 17th century, is that the young Shakespeare was involved in poaching from Lucy's estate.

[2] Davies wrote, "Shakespeare was much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits, particularly from Sir –– Lucy who oft had him whipped and sometimes imprisoned and at last mad[e] him fly his native country to his great advancement.

And tho' this, probably the first Essay of his Poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter, that it redoubled the Prosecution against him to that degree, that he was oblig'd to leave his Business and Family in Warwickshire, for some time, and shelter himself in London.

Lucy is portrayed as a "mildly pretentious" figure, "longing for the good old days when classes knew their place".

John Semple Smart and Edgar Innes Fripp also tried to disprove the story by arguing that Lucy could not have kept deer in the 1580s.

[13] Samuel Schoenbaum, however, noted that Lucy had a "free warren", which would have supported rabbits, hares, pheasants and other birds, along with larger animals—which could have included roe-deer.

[14] Shakespeare is sometimes thought to have satirised Lucy with the character of Justice Shallow, who appears in Henry IV, Part 2 and The Merry Wives of Windsor.

[6] The latter play seems to contain jokes about Lucy's name similar to the "lousy" ballad, when Shallow and his dim-witted relative Slender discuss the "luces" (pike) in their coat of arms, which unintentionally becomes literally lice-ridden when this is misinterpreted as a "dozen white louses".

[18] Leslie Hotson argues that the satire in Merry Wives is not directed at Lucy, but at William Gardiner, a corrupt Justice of the Peace whose coat of arms also contained luces, though Shakespeare may have remembered the luces/louses pun from anti-Lucy jokes in Stratford.