About the year 1587 Shakespeare left his family and went to London and joined himself to Burbage’s company of players.  A persistent tradition says that he had incurred the anger of Sir Thomas Lucy, first by poaching deer in that nobleman’s park, and then, when haled before a magistrate, by writing a scurrilous ballad about Sir Thomas, which so aroused the old gentleman’s ire that Shakespeare was obliged to flee the country.  An old record[147] says that the poet “was much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits,” the unluckiness probably consisting in getting caught himself, and not in any lack of luck in catching the rabbits.  The ridicule heaped upon the Lucy family in Henry IV and the Merry Wives of Windsor gives some weight to this tradition.  Nicholas Rowe, who published the first life of Shakespeare,[148] is the authority for this story; but there is some reason to doubt whether, at the time when Shakespeare is said to have poached in the deer park of Sir Thomas Lucy at Charlescote, there were any deer or park at the place referred to.  The subject is worthy of some scant attention, if only to show how worthless is the attempt to construct out of rumor the story of a great life which, fortunately perhaps, had no contemporary biographer.

Of his life in London from 1587 to 1611, the period of his greatest literary activity, we know nothing definitely.  We can judge only from his plays, and from these it is evident that he entered into the stirring life of England’s capital with the same perfect sympathy and understanding that marked him among the plain people of his native Warwickshire.  The first authentic reference to him is in 1592, when Greene’s[149] bitter attack appeared, showing plainly that Shakespeare had in five years assumed an important position among playwrights.  Then appeared the apology of the publishers of Greene’s pamphlet, with their tribute to the poet’s sterling character, and occasional literary references which show that he was known among his fellows as “the gentle Shakespeare.”  Ben Jonson says of him:  “I loved the man and do honor his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any.  He was indeed honest, and of an open and free nature.”  To judge from only three of his earliest plays[150] it would seem reasonably evident that in the first five years of his London life he had gained entrance to the society of gentlemen and scholars, had caught their characteristic mannerisms and expressions, and so was ready by knowledge and observation as well as by genius to weave into his dramas the whole stirring life of the English people.  The plays themselves, with the testimony of contemporaries and his business success, are strong evidence against the tradition that his life in London was wild and dissolute, like that of the typical actor and playwright of his time.