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Submitted by mommi on October 20, 2005
Category: Miscellaneous
Words: 2215 | Pages: 9
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We do not know when Shakespeare joined the theatre after his marriage, or how he was employed in the mean time. In 1587 an actor of the Queen's Men - the most successful company of the 1580s - died as a result of manslaughter shortly before the company visited Stratford. That Shakespeare may have taken his place is an intriguing speculation. Nor do we know when he began to write. It seems likely (though not certain) that he became an actor before starting to write plays; at any rate, none of his extant writings certainly dates from his youth or early manhood. One of his less impressive sonnets - No. 145 - apparently plays on the name Hathaway' ("I hate" from hate away she threw'), and may be an early love poem; but this is his only surviving non-dramatic work that seems at all likely to have been written before he became a playwright. Possibly his earliest efforts in verse or drama are lost; just possibly some of them survive anonymously. It would have been very much in keeping with contemporary practice if he had worked in collaboration with other writers at this stage in his career. 1 Henry VI is the only early play that we feel confident enough to identify as collaborative, but other writers' hands have also been plausibly suspected in The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI), Richard, Duke of York (3 Henry VI), and the opening scenes, in particular, of Titus Andronicus.
The first printed allusion to Shakespeare dates from 1592, in the pamphlet Greene's Groatsworth of Wit, published as the work of Robert Greene, writer of plays and prose romances, shortly after he died. Mention of an upstart crow' who supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you' and who is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country' suggests rivalry; though parody of a line from Richard, Duke of York (3 Henry VI) shows that Shakespeare was already known on the London literary scene, the word upstart' does not suggest a...
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