who was poor, at the head of a growing family, and not yet twenty-one – not the most promising of situations for a young man with ambitions. Yet somehow from these most unpropitious circumstances he became a notable success in a competitive and challenging profession in a distant city in seemingly no time at all. How he did it is a perennial mystery.
One possibility is often mentioned. In 1587, when Shakespeare was twenty-three, an incident occurred among the Queen’s Men, one of the leading acting troupes, that may have provided an opening for Shakespeare. Specifically, while touring the provinces, the company was stopped at Thame, a riverside town in Oxfordshire, when a fight broke out between William Knell, one of the company’s leading men, and another actor, John Towne. In the course of their fight, Towne stabbed Knell through the neck, mortally wounding him (though evidently in self-defence, as he was subsequently cleared of blame). Knell’s death left the company an actor short, and raised the possibility that they recruited or were joined by a stage-struck young William Shakespeare when they passed through Stratford. Unfortunately, there is no documentary evidence to connect Shakespeare to the Queen’s Men at any stage of his career, and we don’t know whether the troupe visited Stratford before or after its fateful stop in Thame.
There is, however, an additional intriguing note in all this. Less than a year later Knell’s youthful widow, Rebecca, who was only fifteen or sixteen, remarried. Her new partner was John Heminges, who would become one of Shakespeare’s closest friends and associates and who would, with Henry Condell, put together the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works after Shakespeare’s death.
But a few intriguing notes are all that the record can offer. It is extraordinary to think that before he settled in London and became celebrated as a playwright, history provides just four recorded glimpses of Shakespeare – at his baptism, his wedding, and the two births of his children. There is also a passing reference to him in a lawsuit of 1588 filed by his father in a property dispute, but that has nothing to say about where he was at that time or what he was doing.
Shakespeare’s early life is really little more than a series of occasional sightings. So when we note that he was now about to embark on what are popularly known as his lost years, they are very lost indeed.
* It was an unlikely courtship. The Queen was old enough to be his mother – she was nearly forty, he just eighteen – and the Duke moreover was short and famously ugly (his champions suggested hopefully that he could be made to look better if he grew a beard). It was only the Duke’s death in 1584 that finally put an end to the possibility of marriage.
Chapter Three The Lost Years, 1585–1592
FEW PLACES IN history can have been more deadly and desirable at the same time as London in the sixteenth century. Conditions that made life challenging elsewhere were particularly rife in London, where newly arrived sailors and other travellers continually refreshed the city’s stock of infectious maladies.
Plague, virtually always present somewhere in the city, flared murderously every ten years or so. Those who could afford to left the cities at every outbreak. This in large part was the reason for the number of royal palaces just outside London – at Richmond, Greenwich, Hampton Court and elsewhere. Public performances of all types – in fact all public gatherings except for church-going – were also banned within seven miles of London each time the death toll in the city reached forty, and that happened a great deal.
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