Walter Strawberry

Constable Strawberry was a London constable in the late sixteenth century. He indiscriminately served under the Catholic, Spanish-backed Queen Isabella and the Protestant, natively English Queen Elizabeth.

Strawberry observed William Shakespeare for the Spaniards, and was presented with a fair amount of evidence that Shakespeare and Lord Westmoreland's Men were writing the seditious play Boudicca. However, Strawberry was easily misled by Shakespeare and his co-conspirators, and he never even suspected what they were doing.

His fluency in the English language was no better than his competence at law enforcement, and Strawberry's speech was peppered with a number of malapropisms, much to the bafflement and bemusement of the professional wordsmiths (including Lope de Vega, who was not a native speaker) with whom he frequently dealt.