There are seven years of William Shakespeare's life where no records exist after the birth of his

twins in 1585. Scholars call this period the "lost years," and there is wide speculation on what he
was doing during this period.

One theory is that he might have gone into hiding for poaching game from the local landlord, Sir
Thomas Lucy. Another possibility is that he might have been working as an assistant
schoolmaster in Lancashire.

It's generally believed he arrived in London in the mid- to late 1580s and may have found work
as a horse attendant at some of London's finer theaters, a scenario updated centuries later by the e
theater culture in 16th century England was not highly admired by people of high rank, some of
the nobility were good pat

a series of losses and dislocations that would pursue him

throughout his brief life. His father was seriously injured when his
horse stumbled as he rode home, and he died the next day. The
shock to the family was great, emotionally and financially. Within
two months of her husband’s death, Frances Keats had moved the
children to her mother’s home and remarried; but the marriage
soon proved disastrous, and it appears that, after losing the
stables and some of her inheritance to her estranged husband,
William Rawlings, the poet’s mother left the family, perhaps to live
with another man. She had returned by 1808, however, broken
and ill; she died of tuberculosis (as had her brother just a few
months before) in March 1809. John became the oldest male in his
family, and, to the end of his life, felt a fiercely protective loyalty to
his brothers and sister, Fanny Keats. His most thoughtful and
moving letters on poetry’s relation to individual experience, to
human suffering and spiritual development, were written to his
brothers.

At school, Keats drew closer to the headmaster, John Clarke, and

his son, Cowden. He became, in fact, one of Clarke’s favorite pupils,
reading voraciously and taking first prizes in essay contests his
last two or three terms. In some part this new academic interest
was a response to his loneliness after his mother’s death. But he
had by then already won an essay contest and begun translating
Latin and French. Keats’s love for literature, and his association of
the life of imagination with the politics of a liberal intelligentsia,
really began in Clarke’s school. It was modeled on the Dissenting
academies that encouraged a broad range of reading in classical
and modern languages, as well as history and modern science;
discipline was light, and students were encouraged to pursue their
own interests by a system of rewards and prizes. Clarke himself
was a friend of the radical reformers John Cartwright and Joseph
Priestley and subscribed to Leigh Hunt’s Examiner, which Cowden
Clarke said, “no doubt laid the foundation of [Keats’s] love of civil
and religious liberty.”
Keats’s sense of the power and romance of literature began as the
Clarkes encouraged him to turn his energy and curiosity to their
library. Cowden Clarke recalled his reading histories, novels,
travel stories; but the books “that were his constantly recurrent
sources of attraction were Tooke’s ‘Pantheon,’ Lamprière’s
‘Classical Dictionary,’ which he appeared to learn, and Spence’s
‘Polymetis.’ This was the store whence he acquired his intimacy
with the Greek mythology.” On his own, Keats translated most of
the Aeneid and continued learning French. Literature for him was
more than a dreamy refuge for a lonely orphan: it was a domain
for energetic exploration, “realms of gold,” as he later wrote,
tempting not only as a realm of idealistic romance but also of a
beauty that enlarges our imaginative sympathies. All through his
life his friends remarked on his industry and his generosity:
literature for Keats was a career to be struggled with, fought for,
and earned, for the sake of what the poet’s struggle could offer
humankind in insight and beauty. This impression recurs often in
accounts of Keats, this pugnacity of one who fought his way into
literary circles, and this compassion for others that justifies the
literary career.