g his first six or eight years in London.
The purpose of this book is--by casting new light upon this period of
Shakespeare's career--to show the inception and development of
conditions and influences which continued from that time forward
materially to affect his and his friends' lives, and in turn to shape
and colour the expression of life in action which he gives us in his
works.

Though there is nothing known definitely concerning Shakespeare between
1587--when his name is mentioned in a legal document at Stratford
regarding the transfer of property in which he held a contingent
interest and which possibly infers his presence in Stratford at that
date--and 1592, when Robert Greene alludes to him in his posthumously
published _A Groatsworth of Wit_, it is usually assumed that he left
Stratford in 1586 or 1587 with a company of players, or else that he
joined a company in London at about that time.

As the Earl of Leicester's company is recorded as having visited
Stratford-upon-Avon in 1587,--some time before 14th June,--and as James
Burbage, the father of Richard Burbage, with whom we find Shakespeare
closely affiliated in later years, was manager of the Earl of
Leicester's company as late as 1575,--the year before he built the
Theatre at Shoreditch,--it is generally assumed that he was still
manager of this company in 1586-87, and that Shakespeare became
connected with him by joining Leicester's company at this time. This
assumption is, however, somewhat involved by another, nebulously held by
some critics, _i.e._, that James Burbage severed his connection with
Leicester's company in 1583, and joined the Queen's company, and that
the latter company played under his management at the Theatre in
Shoreditch for several years afterwards. It is further involved by the
equally erroneous assumption that Burbage managed the Curtain along with
the Theatre between 1585 and 1592.[2]

Certain biographical compilers also assert that Shakespeare, having
joined the Earl of Leicester's company, continued to be connected with
it under its supposed varying titles until the end of his London career,
and that he was never associated with any other company. They assume
that Leicester's company merged with Lord Strange's company of acrobats
in 1589, the combination becoming known as Lord Strange's players; and
that when this company left James Burbage and the Theatre, in 1592, for
Philip Henslowe and the Rose Theatre, that Shakespeare