Shakespeare

It was an explosion of human energy. He had to reach it. Scholars and biographers have argued about the exact date of his arrival, but his destination was not in doubt. Others had made the journey from Stratford to London in the same period. His contemporary Richard Field had gone from the King’s New School to be enrolled as an apprentice. Roger Lock, son of John Lock the glover, had also taken up an apprenticeship in the city. Richard Quiney became a London merchant, as did his cousin John Sadler. Another native of Stratford, John Lane, journeyed from London to the Levant on a merchant ship. They may all have agreed that “Home-keeping youth, haue euer homely wits” (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 2).

In Shakespeare’s plays, too, young men often chafe and complain at being kept “rustically at home”; they wish to speed away and be free, on the wind of their instinct and ambition. Goethe once wrote that “in stillness talent forms itself, but character [is created] in the great current of the world.” The case of William Shakespeare, however, is singular in more than one sense. None of his contemporaries made their departures from wives or children. It was in fact almost unprecedented for a young man to leave behind his young family. It was unusual even in aristocratic households. It suggests, at the very least, strong determination and single-mindedness on Shakespeare’s part. He had to leave.

He was a very practical person. So it seems unlikely that he abandoned his family in some indeterminate or undetermined way. It is also improbable that he decided to seek his fortune in London on the basis of some irrational impulse. Some have suggested that he was fleeing from a bad or forced marriage. There is no evidence for this. Nevertheless he can hardly have been part of a completely successful or happy marriage, for the very good reason that he would not then have considered leaving it. What contented husband would have left his wife and children for an unknown future in an unknown city? It is the merest common sense, then, to imagine him in some respects restless or dissatisfied. Some force greater than familial love drove him onward. He left with a plan, and a purpose. He may conceivably have been accepting an invitation from a group of players, and the prospects of making money as a player were greater than those currently available for a provincial lawyer’s clerk. It was soon commonly reported of players that some “have gone to London very meanly and have come in time to be exceeding wealthy.”¹ If the best means of supporting his young family were to be found in London, then to London he must go. In the lives of great men and women, however, there is a pattern of destiny. Time and place seem in some strange way to shape themselves around them as they move forward. There would be no Shakespeare without London. Some oblique or inward recognition of that fact spurred his determination. In his Observations on Translating Shakespeare, Boris Pasternak wrote that at this time Shakespeare was “led by a definite star which he trusted absolutely.” That is another way of putting it.

James Joyce noted that “banishment from the heart, banishment from home” is a dominant motif in Shakespeare’s drama. The perception may better fit Joyce’s own exilic status, but it has an authentic note. Shakespeare’s “star” may have led him from home, but it would still be natural to look back at what had been lost. Joyce could only write about Dublin after he had left it. Did Shakespeare have a similar relation to the fields and forests of Arden?

There were two roads to London. The shorter route would have taken him through Oxford and High Wycombe; the other arrived in the capital by way of Banbury and Aylesbury. John Aubrey connects him with a small village on a side-road of the Oxford route. In Grendon Underwood, the dramatist is supposed to have found the model for Dogberry. But any talk of “models” is misplaced. Shakespeare would in subsequent years, however, become thoroughly familiar with the wooded regions and ridges of the Chilterns, the valley of the Great Ouse, the villages and market towns that characterise these journeys. The modern roads follow much the same path, through a transformed landscape.

As sensible as Shakespeare was, he would have set out in late spring or early summer. It was good travelling weather. He might have gone in company, as a safeguard against thieves, or travelled with the Stratford – London “carriers.” The principal one of these, William Greenaway, was a neighbour in Henley Street; on his pack-horses he took cheese and brawn, lamb-skins and linseed oil, woollen shirts and hose, to the capital, where he exchanged them for city goods such as spices and silverware. The journey by foot lasted for four days; by horse it took only two.