Eureka Moment

On Tuesday I picked up Shakespeare, The Player, a Life in the Theatre by John Southworth in the ever worthwhile Oxfam Bookshop in Chichester. It's not as if I don't have plenty of books on Shakespeare biography already but one never knows what might come out of the next one. In this one, the life as an actor is pieced together with the usual makeshift methods of applying conjecture and supposition to a few established details but Southworth has a healthy disregard for some of the myths, legends and hearsay and has done more of his own original research to support his version of events. He has the dates of which theatre companies visited Stratford and when as well as noting a number of echoes in early Shakespeare plays from parts in Marlowe and Thomas Kyd that might have crept in from lines he had learnt.

All such work depends on the reader accepting the author's reasoning and many won't if the theory doesn't align with what they want to believe but some authors come with more credibility and cogent case-making than others and Southworth is more persuasive than most. I don't ask for much more than I already have in life but one thing I have been in search of is 'evidence' or something like it that Shakespeare wasn't in Stratford in 1584 at the time he needed to be to father the twins his wife gave birth to in February 1585. And this account has Shakespeare joining up with Worcester's Men, aged 16, and thus touring with them for an apprenticeship that would last seven years.

While he necessarily has William in Stratford when he needs to be to be because he assumes he is Hamnet and Judith's father, that is only because he thinks it is necessary but it is getting Shakespeare out of Stratford so early that is significant. It's what I've always wanted. It's nothing to do with poaching deer or going to teach in Lancashire, it's the move into the theatre with enough time to learn all about the business before beginning to provide the industry with plays of his own. This is very much the missing link required by Strange Fowl, the essay that has been so long a work-in-progress and a few paragraphs inserted will make it look so much better.

Of course it will not convince those who don't want to be convinced. It is a theory, not even originally my theory, but I can't find fault with it and nobody else has yet successfully done so either. This 'discovery' feels very like that significant jigsaw moment when a crucial piece fits in and it makes me much happier that it perhaps ought to but it is like finding something that one wasn't even sure was there to be found. I will return to Strange Fowl in due course with renewed enthusiasm. As with poems, or music, it matters less what anybody else makes of it - one can't help that- but I am the boy who got just what he always wanted.