On the Road

What the twenty-year-old Camden did after relinquishing his “conversation with the muses” is not known. There is no concrete information about Camden's “lost years” between 1571, when he left Oxford, and 1575, when he became under-master at Westminster School. What a man of his modest means and considerable talents did for four years is interesting white space on our canvas – if he did not have an important future ahead, we could accept it as the oblivion that lay ahead for most people, regardless of background. But given his personable, Protestant personality, his solid connections, and his literary predilections, it is odd that he does not take his place in history's subordinate clauses as someone's secretary or tutor, or enter the patronage market as a poet – courses of action taken by others of his background and talent such as Spenser, Drayton, Daniel. When we study the lives of people living on the margins of Tudor society, we are particularly aware of the peripatetic nature of their existence and the need to find some occupational branch to settle on temporarily. The term “marginal” is useful here. As “marginalium” he remains on the periphery of more fixed social groups and institutions, drawing some identification from their stabler “text” around which he moves.

Camden's case is interesting, though, because in an increasingly mobile late-Tudor society, a man with his skills, his Anglican religious leanings, and his Oxford education had the ability and contacts to make his (documentary) mark on the margins if not actually to enter the text itself. He should not have disappeared so completely. It is hard to imagine that he was so lacking ambition that he drifted for five years.