Departure from Stratford.—In or after 1584 Shakespeare's career in Stratford seems to have come to a tempestuous close.
From this event until he emerges as an actor and rising play wright in 1592 his history is a blank, and it is impossible to say what experience may not have helped to fill it. Much might indeed be done in eight years of crowded Elizabethan life. Conjecture has not been idle, and has assigned him in turns during this or some other period to the occupations of a scrivener, an apothe cary, a dyer, a printer, a soldier and the like. The suggestion that he saw military service rests largely on a confusion with another William Shakespeare of Rowington. Aubrey had heard that "he had been in his younger years a schoolmaster in the country." The mention in Henry IV. of certain obscure yeomen families, Visor of Woncote and Perkes of Stinchcombe Hill, near Dursley in Gloucestershire, has been thought to suggest a so journ in that district, where indeed Shakespeares were to be found from an early date. Ultimately, of course, he drifted to Lon don and the theatre, where, according to the stage tradition, he found employment in a menial capacity, perhaps even as a holder of horses at the doors, before he was admitted into a com pany as an actor and so found his way to his true vocation as a writer of plays. Malone thought that he might have left Stratford with one of the travelling companies of players which from time to time visited the town. Later biographers have fixed upon Leicester's men, who were at Stratford in 1586-87, and have held that Shakespeare remained to the end in the same company, passing with it on Leicester's death in 1588 under the patron age of Ferdinando, Lord Strange and afterwards earl of Derby, and on Derby's death in 1594 under that of the lord chamber lain, Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon. This theory hardly takes sufficient account of the shifting combinations and recombinations of actors, especially during the disastrous plague years of 1592 to 1594. It is not possible to establish a continuity between Strange's company and Leicester's, and while the names of many members of Strange's company in and about 1593 are on record, Shakespeare's is not amongst them. It is at least possible, as will be seen later, that he had about this time relations with the earl of Pembroke's men, or with the earl of Sussex's men, or with both of these organizations.
Earliest Writings.—What is clear is that by the summer of 1592, when he was 28, he had begun to emerge as a playwright, and had evoked the jealousy of one at least of the group of scholar poets who in recent years had claimed a monopoly of the stage. This was Robert Greene, who, in an invective on behalf of
the play-makers against the play-actors which forms part of his Groats-worth of Wit, speaks of "an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrie." The play upon Shakespeare's name and the parody of a line from Henry VI. make the reference unmistakable. The London thea tres were closed first through riots and then through plague, from June 1592 to April 1594, with the exception of about a month at each Christmas during that period; and the companies were dissolved or driven to the provinces. Even if Shakespeare had been connected with Strange's men during their London seasons of 1592 and 1593, it does not seem that he travelled with them. Other activities may have been sufficient to occupy the interval. The most important of these was probably an attempt to win a reputation in the world of non-dramatic poetry. Venus and Adonis was published about April 1593, and Lucrece about May The poems were printed by Richard Field, in whom Shakespeare would have found an old Stratford acquaintance; and each has a dedication to Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southamp ton, a brilliant and accomplished favourite of the court, still in his nonage. A possibly super-subtle criticism discerns an in creased warmth in the tone of the later dedication, which is sup posed to argue a marked growth of intimacy. The fact of this intimacy is vouched for by the story handed down from Sir Wil liam Davenant to Rowe (who published in 1709 the first regular biography of Shakespeare) that Southampton gave Shakespeare ,000 "to enable him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to." The date of this generosity is not specified, and there is no known purchase by Shakespeare which can have cost anything like the sum named. The mention of Southampton leads naturally to the most difficult problem which a biographer has to handle, that of the Sonnets. But this will be more conveniently taken up at a later point, and it is only neces sary here to put on record the probability that the earliest of the sonnets belong to the period now under discussion. There is a surmise, which is not in itself other than plausible, and which has certainly been supported with a good deal of ingenious argu ment, that Shakespeare's enforced leisure enabled him to make of 1593 a Wanderjahr, and in particular that the traces of a visit to northern Italy may be seen in the local colouring of Lucrece as compared with Venus and Adonis, and in that of the group of plays which may be dated in or about 1594 and 1595 as compared with those that preceded. It must, however, be borne in mind that, while Shakespeare may perfectly well, at this or at some earlier time, have voyaged to Italy, and possibly Denmark and even Germany as well, there is no direct evidence to rely upon, and that inference from internal evidence is a dangerous guide when a writer of so assimilative a temperament as that of Shakespeare is concerned.