Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592

Giving new light on the pre-Sonnet period; showing the inception of relations between Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton and displaying
JOHN FLORIO
Sir JOHN FALSTAFF
AUTHOR OF SHAKESPEARE AND THE RIVAL POET MISTRESS DAVENANT, THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS , ETC.
NEW YORK BRENTANO'S 1920
All rights reserved
TO MY SONS ARTHUR MURRAY ACHESON AND ALEXANDER G. ACHESON I DEDICATE THIS VOLUME
The purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was, and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.
Hamlet , Act III. Scene ii.
INTRODUCTORY
The most interesting and important fifteen years in the records of English dramatic literature are undoubtedly those between 1588 and 1603, within which limit all of Shakespeare's poems and the majority of his plays were written; yet no exhaustive English history, intelligently co-ordinating the social, literary, and political life of this period, has ever been written.
Froude, the keynote of whose historical work is contained in his assertion that the Reformation was the root and source of the expansive force which has spread the Anglo-Saxon race over the globe, recognising a logical and dramatic climax for his argument in the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, ends his history in that year; while Gardiner, whose historical interest was as much absorbed by the Puritan Revolution as was Froude's by the Reformation, finds a fitting beginning for his subject in the accession of James I. in 1603. Thus an historical hiatus is left which has never been exhaustively examined. To the resulting lack of a clearly defined historical background for those years on the part of Shakespearean critics and compilers—who are not as a rule also students of original sources of history—may be imputed much of the haziness which still exists regarding Shakespeare's relations to, and the manner in which his work may have been influenced by, the literary, social, and political life of this period.