Long before a horseman was carrying the Privy Council's letter to Cambridge, the malapert, ambitious, subversive, talented young Christopher Marley had followed up the connections he had made through players on the Continent and set himself up with the Lord Admiral's Men in London.
And what of that other babe baptised back in 1564, Will, mewling son of a glovemaker and child of small-town Stratford? It is now, in London, that he re-enters our tale.
The lives of the two young men reflect each other, like those of twins in Kit's plays, one favoured by fortune, the other not. Perhaps, like Kit, Will went to an ABC school to pick up the elements of reading. Maybe a passing scrivener taught him how to write. As Dr Clemens points out in his Foreword, we can be sure his illiterate father did not help him out (in the same way that Will would fail to educate his own children), and he was never registered at the local school, nor did he go to university. But, like Kit, he developed an early fascination for the new theatre, and strolling troupes visited Stratford at least as often as they came to Canterbury or Cambridge. Warwick's Men were paid a handsome 17 shillings to perform there in August 1575, though Leicester's Men had to make do with a measly 1 shilling in 1573; Strange's, Oxford's and Worcester's Men all came to town. And in 1587a visit by the Queen's Men was to change the direction of young Will's life. The Stratford Corporation was happy to splash out a hefty 20 shillings for the star troupe, and the town's good citizens appeared to have had a riotous time: another i6d had to be found to repair a broken bench.
Vigorous actors they may have been, but the Queen's Men also had something of a reputation for violent affray. In Cambridge a few years earlier they had been paid 50 shillings not to perform. In 1583 in Norwich two of the players had chased an audience member who had sneaked in without paying, and so beat him about the head that he died. And just a few weeks before coming to Stratford, two of the leading men, John Towne and William Knell, had pursued each other with swords around the town of Thame, and up 'a close called the White Hound', where Towne had fatally pierced Knell through the throat. So the Queen's Men were two players short when they reached Stratford, with one dead and one in jail. Leaving behind his wife, daughter and toddler twins, twenty-three-year-old Will stepped into the breach. After touring briefly with the Queen's Men in the provinces he came back to Stratford, but only to make arrangements to rejoin them in London. Just what attracted Will to the players? Possibly he had the same motives as Kit. Indeed, they shared similar backgrounds, both being the sons of upwardly mobile craftsmen. Will's father had left rural life to become a glovemaker, and had risen through a sweep of public offices, from ale-taster to petty constable and eventually Chief Alderman and Justice of the Peace. Maybe Will felt the need to make his own mark, to better himself, even though the law famously deemed actors 'rogues and vagabonds'. Money may also have been an incentive - at the time his father's fortunes were in a slump. But most of all (especially for someone who had married young and almost immediately found himself responsible for three children), joining the players was an act of rebellion. The troupes offered young men a yeasty admixture of public popularity and social defiance. Not only the Puritans railed against theatre. London authorities disapproved and so, in general, did the Establishment (apart from a few frivolous aristocrats who bankrolled the companies, as indeed did the monarch herself). The emergent middle class was wary of innovation, staunchly moral and utilitarian, demanding piety or at least worthiness in drama, not the flash, fire and frolics of the strolling players. Companies like the Queen's Men offered a new and hazardous career, a fast raft to leap onto at a time of cultural turbulence, especially for a burgher's boy of limited prospects. It was a hard life, but one that glinted with possible gold and the lure of fame. Kit, destined by his Cambridge scholarship for the clergy, had forsaken the hundred people summoned to a sermon by 'an hour's tolling of a bell', for the thousand called forth to a 'filthy play' by a trumpet. Like his move into the secret service, it was a step of dissent, tinged by social ambition and spurred by financial need. So, too, with Will.
And so 1587 found young Will Shakspere and Christopher Marley both on the road to London. Of course, Will went as a 'mere player', not a poet, for although he was not without literary ambition, he lacked talent.