Those seven-and-a-half lost years belong in a wider landscape in which we know remarkably little about the playwright. We know virtually nothing for sure about Shakespeare’s schooling, which he probably completed in 1578 or so; nor what he did until he married Anne Hathaway in November 1582.

This is not only the case for Shakespeare: scholars may hate to admit it, but our ignorance of so much of this period is vast. Almost 60 per cent of the 3,000 different plays written between 1570 and 1642 are lost. While some titles survive, there could be some lost plays that we have never even heard of at all. It is a safe guess, but a guess nonetheless, that plays by Shakespeare are among these wholly lost plays. We are uncertain of even the most basic things. Until the remains of the Elizabethan Curtain playhouse in Shoreditch, London, were discovered in 2012, theatre historians assumed that it was round; it turned out to be rectangular.

Why the lost years matter

Shakespeare’s undocumented years have a special quality: enigmatic, evocative and instructive. As those years began, Shakespeare was a young man in a provincial town who had written nothing and had few prospects. When they ended, he was celebrated enough as a playwright to be worth attacking. The lost years are exactly the period of his genesis as a writer.

What has filled those years is a series of guesses and rumours. Half a century after Shakespeare’s death, the 17th-century antiquarian John Aubrey began collecting anecdotes and stories about Shakespeare from people who had known him, notably the son of an actor who had been a member of Shakespeare’s company.

The lost years are exactly the period of his genesis as a writer

Aubrey recounts, in his Brief Lives – a collection of short biographies – two slightly different stories about those lost years. “This William being inclined naturally to Poetry and acting,” Aubrey wrote, “came to London I guess about 18 and was an Actor at one of the Play-houses and did act exceedingly well.” Then a little later, he added: “he had been in his younger years a School-master in the Country.”

The two stories don’t quite fit together: a diligent, rural Shakespeare versus a theatrical, London one. But they establish the two main traditions of thinking about this time.

The writer and poet Nicholas Rowe prepared the first real biography of Shakespeare for his own edition of Shakespeare’s plays published in 1709. Rowe had apparently not read Aubrey, but he offers an expanded version of the first idea. He repeats a Stratford legend, that the young Shakespeare fell into “ill company” and poached a deer from a local gentleman. The ensuing trouble meant he had to flee to London, where he found work at a playhouse. There, suggests Rowe, “his admirable Wit, and the natural Turn of it to the Stage, soon distinguish’d him, if not as an extraordinary actor, yet as an excellent Writer”.

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This is an echo, or revision, of Aubrey’s first story. Another version, which circulated in the 17th century, was that the young Shakespeare held the horses at the playhouse door.

The alternative and less thespian description of Shakespeare also pops up in the early biographies. Edmond Malone, in his great edition of the plays (1790) and the biographical essay which accompanies it, extended Rowe’s biography into a much more reliable timeline of Shakespeare’s life and works. This edition is the foundation of much later textual study, and while it is a mountain of scholarship it is not without a little sentimental speculation.

In it, Malone speculates that after leaving school, Shakespeare was “employed, while he yet remained at Stratford, in the office of some country attorney”. Perhaps so: it is worth noting that Malone himself had trained as a barrister.

Along with the development of Shakespeare biography, and the beginnings of careful scholarly work on the texts of the plays, came the realisation that some things were unknown. We might say that the lost years are really a sign of how much has been found; it was only once much was known, with some degree of confidence, that the idea of “lost years” emerged. In a further apparent paradox, in the early 20th century the phrase itself became less an admission of ignorance than a boast about knowledge.

Player, teacher, clerk?

Those keenest to use the phrase have been those most sure they have the answer. Arthur Acheson’s 1920 book Shakespeare’s Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 confidently uses the phrase “lost years” – and sometimes “dark years” – to refer to this specific period, but only to find them to be not so lost at all. His book discovers Shakespeare, as in Rowe, arriving early in London. E A J Honigmann’s 1985 book Shakespeare: The “Lost Years” places him back in the countryside: in Lancashire, working in the household of a Catholic family in Lancashire, perhaps as a player (actor), or a tutor. In each case, that “lost” is rhetorical.

There is no evidence that he was not, say, a pirate or a mercenary in those years

Shakespeare the player, the teacher, the clerk: the timidity of the suggestions is revealing. There is no evidence that he was not, say, a pirate or a mercenary in those years. But what he wasn’t tells us much about him.

Shakespeare was not at university, while so many of his contemporary playwrights were. He was not a spy, while his great rival Christopher Marlowe was, in the same period of his life.

The lost years mark him as apart and this is why they matter both as an episode and a story. They say: here is a mystery. Your attempt to solve it may reveal something only about you.

Shakespeare got there first, of course. In the middle of his play The Winter’s Tale, a character called Time enters, and addresses the audience:

Impute it not a crime

To me, or my swift passage, that I slide

O’er sixteen years, and leave the growth untried

Of that wide gap.

Between the first and second halves of the play, 16 years have disappeared, and Time offers an apology that soon turns into a boast:

Of that wide gap, since it is in my power

To o’er throw law, and in one self-born hour

To plant and o’erwhelm custom.

The lost years are Shakespeare’s self-born hour. In them, he exits the world of conventional, discoverable biography, and enters the world of the theatre, of play and invention.

Daniel Swift is an associate professor of English at Northeastern University London. He is the author of The Dream Factory: London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare (2025)