. William Shakespeare; poet, dramatist, and man . en whom heknew, the instinct and impulse of his own nature —these things determined his career, and, far moreinsistently than any outward circumstance or hap-pening, drew him to London. His daughter Susannah was born in May, 1583;in February, 1585, his twin children, Hamnet andJudith, were baptized. He had assumed the grav-est responsibilities, and there is no reason to doubtthat he felt their full wei2;ht. Stratford offered himnothing which would have been anything more thandrudgery to such a nature as his. To London, there-fore, in 1586 he ma
. William Shakespeare; poet, dramatist, and man . en whom heknew, the instinct and impulse of his own nature —these things determined his career, and, far moreinsistently than any outward circumstance or hap-pening, drew him to London. His daughter Susannah was born in May, 1583;in February, 1585, his twin children, Hamnet andJudith, were baptized. He had assumed the grav-est responsibilities, and there is no reason to doubtthat he felt their full wei2;ht. Stratford offered himnothing which would have been anything more thandrudgery to such a nature as his. To London, there-fore, in 1586 he made his way in search of work andopportunity. There were two well-established routes to Lon-don in that day of few, bad, and dangerous roads ;one ran through Banbury and Aylesbury, and theother, which lay a little farther to the west and wasa little longer, ran through Oxford and High 92 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Wycombe. The journey was made in the saddle oron foot; there were no other methods of of all kinds were carried by packhorses;. THE CROWN INN, OXFORD. Where, according to tradition, Shakespeare lodged on his way to London. From an oldprint. This inn has entirely disappeared. wagons were very rude and very rare; it was fiftyyears later before vehicles began to run regularlyas public conveyances. If Shakespeare, after the MARRIAGE AND LONDON 93 custom of the time, bought a horse for the occasion,he probably sold it, as Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps sug-gests, on reaching Smithfield, to James Burbage,who was a livery-man in that neighbourhood — thefather of the famous actor Richard Burbage, withwhom the poet was afterwards thrown in intimaterelations. It was the custom among men of smallmeans to buy horses for a journey, and sell themwhen the journey was accomplished. Traditionhas long affirmed that Shakespeare habitually usedthe route which ran through Oxford and HighWycombe. The Crown Inn, which stood nearCarfax, in Oxford, was the centre of many associa-tions, real
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