incentive given to his energies by the conditions of his life, and of
his father's affairs, at this formative period. To the habitually poor,
poverty is a familiar; to the patrician who has had reverses, it may be
a foil to his spirit: he still has his pride of family and caste. To the
burgher class, in which Shakespeare moved in Stratford, the loss of
money was the loss of caste. To provide for the future of his children
and to restore the declining fortunes and prestige of his family became
now his most immediate concern, if we may form any judgment from his
subsequent activities. The history of literature has given us so many
instances of poetic genius being unaccompanied by ordinary worldly
wisdom, and so few instances of a combination of business aptitude with
poetic genius, that some so-called biographers, enamoured of the
conventional idea of a poet, seem almost to resent our great poet's
practical common sense when displayed in his everyday life, and to
impute to him as a derogation, or fault, the sound judgment in worldly
matters, without which he never could have evolved the sane and
unimpassioned philosophy of life, which, like a firm and even warp, runs
veiled through the multicoloured weft of incident and accident in his
dramas.

All Shakespearean biographers now agree in dating his hegira from
Stratford not later than the year 1587. Early in 1585 his twin children,
Judith and Hamnet, were born. The fact that no children were born to him
later is usually advanced in favour of the assumption that he left
Stratford shortly after this date. In the next eleven years we have but
one mention of him in the Stratford records. Towards the end of 1587 his
name, in conjunction with his father's, appears upon a legal form
relating to the proposed cancellation of a mortgage upon some property
in which he held a contingent interest. This, however, does not
necessarily indicate his presence in Stratford at that time.

At the present time the most generally accepted hypothesis regarding the
beginning of Shakespeare's theatrical career is that he joined the Earl
of Leicester's company of players upon the occasion of their visit to
Stratford-upon-Avon, either in the year 1586 or 1587. Upon the death of
the Earl of Leicester in 1588, when this company was disrupted, it is
thought probable that in company with Will Kempe, George Bryan, and
Thomas Pope (actors with whom he was afterwards affiliated for years),
he joined Lord