But
when did he go? Again in doubt I take the shepherd's words in "The
Winter's Tale" as a guide. Most men would have said from fourteen to
twenty was the dangerous age for a youth; but Shakespeare had perhaps a
personal reason for the peculiar "ten to twenty-three." He was, no
doubt, astoundingly precocious, and probably even at ten he had learned
everything of value that the grammar school had to teach, and his
thoughts had begun to play truant. Twenty-three, too, is a significant
date in his life; in 1587, when he was twenty-three, two companies of
actors, under the nominal patronage of the Queen and Lord Leicester,
returned to London from a provincial tour, during which they visited
Stratford. In Lord Leicester's company were Burbage and Heminge, with
whom we know that Shakespeare was closely connected in later life. It
seems to me probable that he returned with this company to London, and
arrived in London, as he tells us in "The Comedy of Errors," "stiff and
weary with long travel," and at once went out to view the town and
"peruse the traders.
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