1587-1589 - “… the young prince be fet hither to London, to be crowned our King.”

“… the young prince be fet hither to London, to be crowned our King.” 1587 - 1589

So exactly how does the poor 23 year old William Shakespeare of Stratford with a wife and three children go from poverty to wealth, fame and notoriety in London in the space of eight to ten years?

One story goes that the Queen's Men, the leading players in England, visited Stratford-upon-Avon in 1587 and being short a player (due to the recent death of their actor William Knell in a fight in Oxfordshire) the 23 year old Shakespeare was paid to stand in and he did such a good job that they invited him to look them up in London.

This fits in with the theory that William Shakespeare in late April 1588 (straight after his 24^th birthday), acquired a license to travel and took to the road for the seven day walk or three day (220 km) horse ride to London. Shakespeare probably went to London by horse. If he took a horse, he would have walked up the road from his cottage or the Tudor house we now call ‘The Birthplace’ (the Henley Street house Shakespeare was born in and where he may have lived if he and Anne did not live in a cottage) for about 400 metres to get the horse from a local stables. He then probably travelled in a group of four to ten riders since highwaymen still roamed the roads and tracks.  

Shakespeare would have crossed the River Avon over one of Stratford’s two bridges and dropped down into the emerald green of the Warwickshire countryside. He then probably got off his horse as they ambled up the winding dirt track near the Cotswold’s escarpment. On the way he would have passed his mother’s birthplace and the birthplace of his wife Anne Hathaway in Shottery. He then would have gone onto Chipping Campden and Moreton-in-Marsh and probably would have stopped at Woodstock for the evening or if the weather was good, they have made it all the way to Oxford.

The next day, they would have started with a hard climb up the trail through the Chiltern Hills. Shakespeare would have seen the chairmakers along this route and probably made a note that when he made his fortune, this would be the place to acquire chairs and furniture. The reward after the hard hills would have been Dorney Lake and they would have stopped somewhere around here for the night and probably dabbled travel sore feet in Dorney Lake.

 

Then Shakespeare would have seen London for the first time. It was a city of over 180,000 in 1588 and it was a city where he would spend half of his life (26 years of his 52 year life). As Shakespeare entered London and came to a junction of Watling Street, he would see an area known as Tyburn. He would have heard of it. The gallows would probably have had the naked body of a thief still swinging in the gentle April breeze. Shakespeare knew this place well from family stories of what had happened to some of the more forthright Catholics in his family. The warning would have served as a reminder of what could happen to those who clung to the old religious ways. He then went down what is now Oxford Street before dismounting his horse, paying the horseman and entering the Bell Inn just south of St Paul’s Cathedral for his first of many nights in London.

Other stories suggests that Shakespeare left for and arrived in London a little later. Shakespeare’s name does appear in a ‘compaints bill’ in a law case dated 1588 and then a subsequent mention is made of this bill on October 9, 1589. Later biographers allude to Shakespeare escaping Stratford to avoid prosecution on deer poaching charges by Thomas Lucy. Some claim that he worked as a schoolmaster for Alexander Hoghton in Lancashire. Still others believe that he worked in Titchfield as a tutor and perhaps even a schoolmaster for the third Earl of Southhampton, Henry Wriothesley (whom Shakespeare later dedicated his poem Venus and Adonis to).

One story suggests that Shakespeare was brought down to London to tend horses for theatre patrons. Whatever the truth, we know that in the early 1590's that Shakespeare probably lived at Shoreditch (near to The Theatre which was built in 1576), that he had acted in a number of plays and was probably paid three shillings a week or £10 a year (£5,000 a year in today's money) as an inexperienced actor.

(N.B. 1 pound = 20 shillings, 1 shilling = 12 pence. It is difficult to say exactly what money in Shakespeare's day would be worth today. One way to calculate it approximately is to times every figure by 500. Thus £10 a year becomes £5,000 a year in today's money.)