The precise time of the Poet’s leaving Stratford is not known; but we cannot well set it down as later than 1586.  His children, Hamnet and Judith, were born, as I have said, in the early part of 1585; and for several years before that time his father’s affairs were drooping.  The prosecutions of Sir Thomas Lucy, added to his father’s straitness of means, may well have made him desirous of quitting Stratford; while the meeting of inclination and opportunity in his acquaintance with the players may have determined him where to go, and what to do.  The company were already in a course of thrift; the demand for their labours was growing; and he might well see, in their fellowship, a chance of retrieving, as he did retrieve, his father’s fortune.

Of course there need be no question that Shakespeare held at first a subordinate rank in the theatre.  Dowdal, writing in 1693, tells us “he was received into the playhouse as a servitor”; which probably means that he started as an apprentice to some actor of standing,—­a thing not unusual at the time.  It will readily be believed that he could not be in such a place long without recommending himself to a higher one.  As for the well-known story of his being reduced to the extremity of “picking up a little money by taking care of the gentlemen’s horses that came to the play,” I cannot perceive the slightest likelihood of truth in it.  The first we hear of it is in The Lives of the Poets, written by a Scotchman named Shiels, and published under the name of Cibber, in 1753.  The story is there said to have passed through Rowe in coming to the writer.  If so, then Rowe must have discredited it, else, surely, he would not have omitted so remarkable a passage.  Be that as it may, the station which the Poet’s family had long held at Stratford, and the fact of his having influential friends at hand from Warwickshire, are enough to stamp it as an arrant fiction.

We have seen that the company of Burbadge and his fellows held a patent under the great seal, and in 1587 took the title of “The Lord Chamberlain’s Servants.”  Eleven years before this time, in 1576, they had started the Blackfriars theatre, so named from a monastery that had formerly stood on or near the same ground.  Hitherto the several bands of players had made use of halls, or temporary erections in the streets or the inn-yards, stages being set up, and the spectators standing below, or occupying galleries about the open space.  In 1577, two other playhouses were in operation; and still others sprang up from time to time.  The Blackfriars and some others were without the limits of the corporation, in what were called “the Liberties.”  The Mayor and Aldermen of London were from the first decidedly hostile to all such establishments, and did their best to exclude them the City and Liberties; but the Court, many of the chief nobility, and, which was still more, the common people favoured them.  The whole mind indeed of Puritanism was utterly down on stage-plays of all sorts and in every shape.  But it did not go to work the right way:  it should have stopped off the demand for them.  This, however, it could not do; for the Drama was at that time, as it long had been, an intense national passion:  the people would have plays, and could not be converted from the love of them.