They are merely a couple of chunks of plaster of paris.
There is a legend that he got his bread and butter by holding horses in front of the London theatres, mornings and afternoons.

Maybe he did.

If he did, it seriously shortened his law-study hours and his recreation-time in the courts.

In those very days he was writing great plays, and needed all the time he could get.

The horse-holding legend ought to be strangled; it too formidably increases the historian's difficulty in accounting for the young Shakespeare's erudition--an erudition which he was acquiring, hunk by hunk and chunk by chunk every day in those strenuous times, and emptying each day's catch into next day's imperishable drama.
He had to acquire a knowledge of war at the same time; and a knowledge of soldier-people and sailor-people and their ways and talk; also a knowledge of some foreign lands and their languages: for he was daily emptying fluent streams of these various knowledges, too, into his dramas.