With a growing family and his father's financial problems, Shakespeare must have been desperate. Some scholars believe he worked for a while as a teacher's assistant in the Stratford school. Others assert he worked as a butcher. A popular legend has it that Shakespeare was a poacher, hunting game illegally on the estate of a local nobleman. When he was caught committing this potentially capital offense, according to the story shown in this 19^th century painting, Shakespeare decided to leave town quickly. We will never know the exact reason for his departure or its date.

Whatever prompted his leaving Stratford, Shakespeare's decision to leave his family and seek his fame and fortune as an actor seems an act of desperate folly. Actors, such as the traveling troupe shown here, were considered little better than pickpockets and thieves. Many towns prohibited actors from staying overnight for fear of crime. City officials in London banned public playhouses in an attempt to control anti-social behavior by apprentices and workmen. Whenever a plague broke out, the theaters were the first places closed on the theory that they were an affront to God. Parliament passed laws to regulate what was said on stage, trying to stop blasphemy and political sedition.

Besides the legal discouragement being an actor was a tough way to live. Among people who were very provincial and suspicious of strangers, actors were vagabonds and rogues. It was a violent life: Shakespeare's friend Ben Jonson killed a man and spent time in prison. It was a very unreliable way to make a living: Shakespeare's contemporary Robert Greene allegedly starved to death. We will never know exactly what motivated Shakespeare's choice, but within the context of the time it was a remarkable decision and probably upsetting to his family. In 1999 it would be as if a young man in his early twenties announced to his parents and his wife (with three kids) that he was going off to begin a career in show business - by appearing in porno films!