J 34 Shakspeare 



On reaching London, whether directly from 

 Stratford or indirectly after humble work of some 

 sort elsewhere, he made his way to the playhouse 

 in Blackfriars ; there his first employment, accord- 

 ing to report, was to take charge of the horses of 

 those who rode to it on horseback. So good was 

 the care he took of them that he soon had a large 

 business and found it necessary to employ boys to 

 assist him, who, known as Shakspeare's boys, were 

 much in request. Be the story true or not, certain 

 it is that his occupation about or in the playhouse 

 was at first of a mean sort. How he was attracted 

 to it is not known, but it is probable that he had 

 made acquaintances in the companies of players 

 or their hangers-on who, under the patronage of 

 different noblemen, visited Stratford from time to 

 time and performed plays in the Town Hall at the 

 cost of the Corporation. He may, too, have been 

 drawn there by his love of the theatre and the 

 premonitory poet's throes which he could scarce 

 fail to have felt, even if he had not already given 

 youthful utterances to them in the doggerel 

 rhymes which, as an unauthenticated story tells, 

 he declaimed when flourishing a knife to kill a 

 calf, and in the lampoon fixed on Sir Thomas 

 Lucy's park gate. For it is not to be believed 

 that, " born under a rhyming planet " and having 



shows an extraordinary acquaintance with the diseases of the 

 horse, particularizing in The Taming of the Shrew some dozen 

 different ailments with which Petruchio's horse was said to be 

 afflicted. 



