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   Part Three of Shakespeare's bio coming up.

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Shakespeare:  A Biography

by

Peter Ackroyd

Part Three

Chapter 20: To Morrow, Toward London

No one is quite sure when Shakespeare arrived in London. Though many of his contemporaries from Stratford went to London at around the same time, Shakespeare's case is unique in more ways than one.  It was almost unheard of for a young man to leave behind his young family, even in aristocratic houses, suggesting his determination of Shakespeare's part that he just had to leave.

He was a very practical person so it seems unlikely that he abandon his family in some undetermined way.  It is also improbable that he left for 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.  Instead it was some force greater than familial love that drove him forward.  He left with a plan and a purpose.  He may have accepted an invitation from a group of players and the prospect of making money as a player were greater than those available for a provincial lawyer's clerk.  If the best means of supporting his family were to be found in London, then London he was going to go.

As sensible as Shakespeare was, he would have set out in late spring or early summer.  He might have gone in company, to guard against thieves, or traveled with the Stratford-London "carriers." The journey by foot lasted for four days and by horse it took two.

As he approached the city, the first thing he would have seen was the pall of smoke.  He would have heard it, a confused roar of humanity mixed with bells.  He could smell it too.  The odour of London penetrated twenty-five miles on all sides.   The young Shakespeare had never seen anything like it before and must have found it deeply exciting.

A traveler entering the city for the first time could not help but be profoundly moved or disturbed by the experience.  It assaulted the senses with its stridency and vigour.  It was a vortex of energy.  The traveller was surrounded by street-traders or by merchants begging him to buy. Apprentices stood outside the workshops of their masters to trade gossip or insults with neighbours.  There was no privacy in the modern sense of that word.

There were rows of shops, all in one vicinity selling the same limited range of goods.  There were old women crouched upon the ground with parcels of nuts, or withered vegetables.  There seemed to be endless numbers of men carrying sacks.  The children were busy at work along side the adults.  There literally hundreds of ballad-sellers.  There were alleys that seemed to lead nowhere, sudden flights of steps, gaping holes and rivulets of filth and garbage.

It was already an ancient place.but the miracle of late sixteenth-century London lay in the fact that it was renewing itself.   That is why it is seen as the age of the adventurer and the dreamer of vast schemes.  It was a young man's world in which aspiration and ambition might lead anywhere.  This was where Shakespeare belonged.