SECTION 13 - What happened in 1572

Summary

Where in Warwickshire should a patron be found to charge himself with the board and upbringing of young William? There were the princely establishments at the Castles of Warwick and Kenilworth, both in Shakespeare's youth in the possession of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester: and Dudley, in his cold, magnificent way, may be accounted a fosterer of learning and literary men. But his interests were centred in the Court, and it was at London that the ‘Leicester set’ gathered. There is no reason to suppose that John of Stratford had any such acquaintance with the Earl as to procure the admission of his son to either of his Warwickshire households. Moreover, about these great, historic sites Shakespeare is curiously silent. Warwick is mentioned only once, and that incidentally, in the Third Part of Henry VI (v, I. 3): Kenilworth (Killingworth) occurs only once, in a probably un-Shakespearean scene of the Second Part (iv, 4. 39, 44). Yet Shakespeare probably passed both places in travelling between Stratford and Coventry. The idea that he was taken by his father to the Kenilworth pageants in 1575 is purely fanciful: if there be any allusion to them in Midsummer Night's Dream it was derived from the description of them in a pamphlet of 1576.