Early Shakespeare, 1588–1594

Abstract

This is an essay about early Shakespeare and loss. 1 It attempts to put some kind of order on a span of several years when Shakespeare is first writing plays, or parts of plays, in a commercial environment with fellow professionals. It discusses a period of time, the mid to late 1580s and early 1590s, for which much information about Shakespeare and other working dramatists is lost. It asks, how do you write about that kind of loss? And, what sort of data-sets do you hold up to the blank spaces of those years, knowing only the likelihood of Shakespeare's activity, to enable plausible deductions about his early working life? In what follows, I consider how the early canon has been categorized and written about, situate the documentary evidence for Shakespeare's first forays into writing in the context of surviving evidence about theatrical activity in the 1580s, contextualize Shakespeare's overall career in the light of those of his peers, and, finally, consider some of the defining features of Shakespeare's earliest writings. Shakespeare and JuveniliaThese IUVENILIA (or these youth-pastimes,) Set forth in homely and vnpolish't Rhimes, Let none despise: For, whatsoere they seeme They haue their fate, their vse, & esteeme. 2George Wither (1588-1667) is the first recorded English author to use 'juvenilia' as a title description for writings completed while still young. 3 Wither made his literary debut in 1612, at the age of twenty-four, composing an extravagant set of elegiac writings upon the death of Prince Henry. 4 By the time Wither published his Juvenilia (1622), he was in his midthirties. In the address to the reader, quoted above, Wither describes these writings or 'youth-pastimes' as sometimes 'childish' and declares them the product of 'what Nature could impart,/ E're he had Time, or Meanes, to