These seven-and-a-half misplaced years belong in a wider panorama by which we all know remarkably little concerning the playwright. We all know nearly nothing for positive about Shakespeare’s education, which he most likely accomplished in 1578 or so; nor what he did till he married Anne Hathaway in November 1582.
This isn’t solely the case for Shakespeare: students might hate to confess it, however our ignorance of a lot of this era is huge. Nearly 60 per cent of the three,000 totally different performs written between 1570 and 1642 are misplaced. Whereas some titles survive, there may very well be some misplaced performs that we’ve got by no means even heard of in any respect. It’s a protected guess, however a guess nonetheless, that performs by Shakespeare are amongst these wholly misplaced performs. We’re unsure of even essentially the most basic items. Till the stays of the Elizabethan Curtain playhouse in Shoreditch, London, have been found in 2012, theatre historians assumed that it was spherical; it turned out to be rectangular.
Why the misplaced years matter
Shakespeare’s undocumented years have a particular high quality: enigmatic, evocative and instructive. As these years started, Shakespeare was a younger man in a provincial city who had written nothing and had few prospects. After they ended, he was celebrated sufficient as a playwright to be price attacking. The misplaced years are precisely the interval of his genesis as a author.
What has crammed these years is a collection of guesses and rumours. Half a century after Shakespeare’s demise, the Seventeenth-century antiquarian John Aubrey started accumulating anecdotes and tales about Shakespeare from individuals who had identified him, notably the son of an actor who had been a member of Shakespeare’s firm.
The misplaced years are precisely the interval of his genesis as a author
Aubrey recounts, in his Temporary Lives – a group of brief biographies – two barely totally different tales about these misplaced years. “This William being inclined naturally to Poetry and performing,” Aubrey wrote, “got here to London I suppose about 18 and was an Actor at one of many Play-houses and did act exceedingly properly.” Then a bit later, he added: “he had been in his youthful years a Faculty-master within the Nation.”
The 2 tales don’t fairly match collectively: a diligent, rural Shakespeare versus a theatrical, London one. However they set up the 2 fundamental traditions of fascinated by this time.
The author and poet Nicholas Rowe ready the primary actual biography of Shakespeare for his personal version of Shakespeare’s performs revealed in 1709. Rowe had apparently not learn Aubrey, however he provides an expanded model of the primary thought. He repeats a Stratford legend, that the younger Shakespeare fell into “unwell firm” and poached a deer from an area gentleman. The following bother meant he needed to flee to London, the place he discovered work at a playhouse. There, suggests Rowe, “his admirable Wit, and the pure Flip of it to the Stage, quickly distinguish’d him, if not as a unprecedented actor, but as a wonderful Author”.
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That is an echo, or revision, of Aubrey’s first story. One other model, which circulated within the Seventeenth century, was that the younger Shakespeare held the horses on the playhouse door.
The choice and fewer thespian description of Shakespeare additionally pops up within the early biographies. Edmond Malone, in his nice version of the performs (1790) and the biographical essay which accompanies it, prolonged Rowe’s biography into a way more dependable timeline of Shakespeare’s life and works. This version is the inspiration of a lot later textual research, and whereas it’s a mountain of scholarship it’s not with out a little sentimental hypothesis.
In it, Malone speculates that after leaving faculty, Shakespeare was “employed, whereas he but remained at Stratford, within the workplace of some nation legal professional”. Maybe so: it’s price noting that Malone himself had educated as a barrister.
Together with the event of Shakespeare biography, and the beginnings of cautious scholarly work on the texts of the performs, got here the realisation that some issues have been unknown. We would say that the misplaced years are actually an indication of how a lot has been discovered; it was solely as soon as a lot was identified, with some extent of confidence, that the thought of “misplaced years” emerged. In an extra obvious paradox, within the early twentieth century the phrase itself turned much less an admission of ignorance than a boast about information.
Participant, trainer, clerk?
These keenest to make use of the phrase have been these most positive they’ve the reply. Arthur Acheson’s 1920 e book Shakespeare’s Misplaced Years in London, 1586-1592 confidently makes use of the phrase “misplaced years” – and typically “darkish years” – to confer with this particular interval, however solely to seek out them to be not so misplaced in any respect. His e book discovers Shakespeare, as in Rowe, arriving early in London. E A J Honigmann’s 1985 e book Shakespeare: The “Misplaced Years” locations him again within the countryside: in Lancashire, working within the family of a Catholic household in Lancashire, maybe as a participant (actor), or a tutor. In every case, that “misplaced” is rhetorical.
There is no such thing as a proof that he was not, say, a pirate or a mercenary in these years
Shakespeare the participant, the trainer, the clerk: the timidity of the options is revealing. There is no such thing as a proof that he was not, say, a pirate or a mercenary in these years. However what he wasn’t tells us a lot about him.
Shakespeare was not at college, whereas so lots of his up to date playwrights have been. He was not a spy, whereas his nice rival Christopher Marlowe was, in the identical interval of his life.
The misplaced years mark him as aside and that is why they matter each as an episode and a narrative. They are saying: here’s a thriller. Your try to unravel it might reveal one thing solely about you.
Shakespeare obtained there first, after all. In the course of his play The Winter’s Story, a personality known as Time enters, and addresses the viewers:
Impute it not against the law
To me, or my swift passage, that I slide
O’er sixteen years, and depart the expansion untried
Of that vast hole.
Between the primary and second halves of the play, 16 years have disappeared, and Time provides an apology that quickly turns right into a boast:
Of that vast hole, since it’s in my energy
To o’er throw legislation, and in a single self-born hour
To plant and o’erwhelm customized.
The misplaced years are Shakespeare’s self-born hour. In them, he exits the world of typical, discoverable biography, and enters the world of the theatre, of play and invention.
Daniel Swift is an affiliate professor of English at Northeastern College London. He’s the creator of The Dream Manufacturing unit: London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare (2025)