Long ago, when the world of mass tourism was relatively young, I used to act as tour guide for rich Americans, driving them about in an old Humber Imperial bought for the purpose.

In those days — and I am talking here of the late sixties and early seventies — the London to Stratford tour was known as “the milk run”, with Oxford cropping up at about midday — just too early for lunch and certainly too early for an overnight stay (as was often ruefully noted by restaurateurs and hoteliers keen to extract dollars from pockets).

Some 400 years earlier, Oxford fared better in that respect. Shakespeare found it an ideal place at which to stay overnight on his frequent journeys between the capital and his native Stratford-upon-Avon. He used to put up at the Tavern at 3 Cornmarket, where he lodged in the so-called Painted Room — which still exists, the painted walls having been re-discovered in 1927.

In my days as a guide, full of the over-confidence of youth, I had no qualms at all about wading into the whole Shakespeare debate, never failing to state as fact all sorts of highly conjectural theories. For instance there was the one, still going strong, about how young Will was caught poaching deer at Charlcote Park in Warwickshire.

The tale, first propagated by poet laureate Nicholas Rowe in a 1709 biography, has it that in about 1583 Shakespeare was brought before magistrate Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlcote Park, and charged with the crime. He was probably fined and possibly flogged; and then he stuck a ribald note on the gatehouse at Charlcote. The result of this foolhardy action was that he was forced to leave the district as fast as possible — and so went to London to seek fame and fortune.

The whole saga achieved credibility through the absurd Justice Shallow, who appears as a figure of fun in both The Merry Wives of Windsor and in Henry IV Part II, in a way that some say satirises the real life Sir Thomas. For example, Shallow’s coat of arms features “a dozen white luces” (pike) and the Lucy coat of arms does indeed contain three white pike. Then there is the fact that Sir Thomas was proud of his lineage — his family had lived at Charlcote since at least 1189 — and always referred to his coat of arms as “a very old coat too”, the words used by Shallow in The Merry Wives.

But the whole fun of talking about Shakespeare is that so few verifiable facts are known about him. And in spouting forth to tourists long ago I was only following in the footsteps of a whole line of Shakespeare scholars. I found out that his father, John Shakespeare, had been an illiterate glover — useful when we reached Woodstock and paid a visit to the glove factory there.

I also told my tourists about the famous bit of William Shakespeare’s will, in which he left his “second best bed” to his wife Anne Hathaway.

I didn’t know the part of the will in which he left 20 shillings to his godson. Had I known that I probably would have leapt (wrongly) to the conclusion that the godson in question was Sir William Davenant, son of the innkeeper of the tavern in which Shakespeare used to stay in Oxford.