No biographer has yet taken into consideration the effect which the circumstances of Shakespeare's life during these four or five formative years must necessarily have had in the development of his character. That this exquisite poet, this builder of dreams, should in the common affairs of life have displayed such an effectively practical bent, has always appeared an anomaly; a partial explanation is to be found in the incentive given to his energies by the conditions of his life, and of his father's affairs, at this formative period. To the habitually poor, poverty is a familiar; to the patrician who has had reverses, it may be a foil to his spirit: he still has his pride of family and caste. To the burgher class, in which Shakespeare moved in Stratford, the loss of money was the loss of caste. To provide for the future of his children and to restore the declining fortunes and prestige of his family became now his most immediate concern, if we may form any judgment from his subsequent activities. The history of literature has given us so many instances of poetic genius being unaccompanied by ordinary worldly wisdom, and so few instances of a combination of business aptitude with poetic genius, that some so-called biographers, enamoured of the conventional idea of a poet, seem almost to resent our great poet's practical common sense when displayed in his everyday life, and to impute to him as a derogation, or fault, the sound judgment in worldly matters, without which he never could have evolved the sane and unimpassioned philosophy of life, which, like a firm and even warp, runs veiled through the multicoloured weft of incident and accident in his dramas.
All Shakespearean biographers now agree in dating his hegira from Stratford not later than the year 1587. Early in 1585 his twin children, Judith and Hamnet, were born. The fact that no children were born to him later is usually advanced in favour of the assumption that he left Stratford shortly after this date. In the next eleven years we have but one mention of him in the Stratford records. Towards the end of 1587 his name, in conjunction with his father's, appears upon a legal form relating to the proposed cancellation of a mortgage upon some property in which he held a contingent interest. This, however, does not necessarily indicate his presence in Stratford at that time.