school pupils were quite familiar with the great Latin authors, and with Latin drama and rhetoric. Shakespeare is unique among his contemporaries in the extent of figurative language derived from country life and nature. The familiarity with the animals and plants of the English countryside exhibited in his poems and plays, especially the early ones, suggests that he lived the childhood of a typical country boy, with easy access to rural nature and a propensity for outdoor sports, especially hunting. Marriage On 27 November 1582, Shakespeare was issued a special licence to marry Anne Hathaway, the daughter of the late Richard Hathaway, a yeoman farmer of Shottery, about a mile west of Stratford (the clerk mistakenly recorded the name "Anne Whateley"). He was 18 and she was 26. The licence, issued by the consistory court of the diocese of Worcester, 21 miles west of Stratford, allowed the two to marry with only one proclamation of the marriage banns in church instead of the customary three successive Sundays. Since he was under age and could not stand as surety, and since Hathaway's father had died, two of Hathaway's neighbours – Fulk Sandalls and John Richardson – posted a bond of £40 the next day to ensure: that no legal impediments existed to the union; that the bride had the consent of her "friends" (persons acting in lieu of parents or guardians if she was under age); and to indemnify the bishop issuing the licence from any possible liability for the wife and any children should any impediment nullify the marriage. Neither the exact day, nor place, of their marriage is now known. The reason for the special licence became apparent six months later with the baptism of their first daughter, Susanna, on 26 May 1583. Their twin children – a son Hamnet and a daughter Judith (named after Shakespeare's neighbours Hamnet and Judith Sadler) – were baptised on 2 February 1585, before Shakespeare was 21 years of age. Lost years After the baptism of the twins in 1585, and except for being party to a lawsuit to recover part of his mother's estate which had been mortgaged and lost by default, Shakespeare leaves no historical traces until Robert Greene jealously alludes to him as part of the London theatrical scene in 1592. This seven-year period – known as the "lost years" to Shakespeare scholars – was filled by early biographers with