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Changeset 158

Timestamp:

06/01/08 12:58:06 (6 months ago)

Author:

rgrp

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[shksprdata][m]: corrected versions of p. 778 to 780 (inclusive) of Britannica Shakespeare entry.

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trunk/shksprdata/ancillary/britannica-11th.txt (modified) (1 diff)

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trunk/shksprdata/ancillary/britannica-11th.txt

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 p.772:0
 SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM (1564--1616), English poet, player
 and playwright, was baptized in the parish church of Stratford-upon-Avon
 in Warwickshire on the 26th of April
 . The exact date of his birth is not known. Two 18th-century
 antiquaries, William Oldys and Joseph
 Greene, gave it as April 23, but without quoting
 authority for their statements, and the fact that April 23 was
 the day of Shakespeare's death in 1616 suggests a possible
 source of error. In any case his birthday cannot have been
 later than April 23, since the inscription upon his monument
 is evidence that on April 23, 1616, he had already begun his
 fifty-third year. His father, John Shakespeare, was a burgess
 of the recently constituted corporation of Stratford, and had
 already filled certain minor municipal offices. From 1561 to
 he had been one of the two chamberlains to whom the
 finance of the town was entrusted. By occupation he was a
 glover, but he also appears to have dealt from time to time in
 various kinds of agricultural produce, such as barley, timber
 and wool. Aubrey (Lives, 1680) spoke of him as a butcher, and
 it is quite possible that he bred and even killed the calves whose
 skins he manipulated. He is sometimes described in formal
 documents as a yeoman, and it is highly probable that he combined
 a certain amount of farming with the practice of his trade.
 He was living in Stratford as early as 1552, in which year he was
 fined for having a dunghill in Henley Street, but he does not
 appear to have been a native of the town, in whose records the
 name is not found before his time; and he may reasonably
 be identified with the John Shakespeare of Snitterfield, who
 administered the goods of his father, Richard Shakespeare,
 in 1561. Snitterheld is a village in the immediate neighbourhood
 of Stratford, and here Richard Shakespeare had been settled
 as a farmer since 1529. It is possible that John Shakespeare
 carried on the farm for some time after his father's death, and
 that by 1570 he had also acquired a small holding called Ingon
 in Hampton Lucy, the next village to Snitterfield. But both
 of these seem to have passed subsequently to his brother Henry,
 who was buried at Snitterfield in 1596. There was also at
 Snitterfield a Thomas Shakespeare and an Anthony Shakespeare,
 who afterwards moved to Hampton Corley; and these may have
 been of the same family. A John Shakespeare who dwelt at
 Clifford Chambers, another village close to Stratford, is clearly
 distinct. Strenuous efforts have been made to trace Shakespeare's
 genealogy beyond Richard of Snitterfield, but so far
 without success. Certain drafts of heraldic exemplifications of
 the Shakespeare arms speak, in one case of John Shakespeare's
 grandfather, in another of his great-grandfather, as having been
 rewarded with lands and tenements in Warwickshire for service
 to Henry VII. No such grants, however, have been traced, and
 even in the 16th-century statements as to "antiquity and service"
 in heraldic preambles were looked upon with suspicion.
 The name Shakespeare is extremely widespread, and is spelt
 in an astonishing variety of ways. That of John Shakespeare
 occurs 166 times in the Council Book of the Stratford corporation,
 and appears to take 16 different forms. The verdict, not
 altogether unanimous, of competent palaeographers is to the
 effect that Shakespeare himself, in the extant examples of his signature, always wrote "Shakspere."
 In the printed signatures to the dedications of his poems, on the title-pages of nearly
 all the contemporary editions of his plays that bear his name,
 and in many formal documents it appears as Shakespeare.
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 p.772:1
 This may be in part due to the martial derivation which the
 poet's literary contemporaries were fond of assigning to his
 name, and which is acknowledged in the arms that he bore. The
 forms in use at Stratford, however, such as Shaxpeare, by far
 the commonest, suggest a short pronunciation of the first syllable,
 and thus tend to support Dr Henry Bradley's derivation from the
 Anglo-Saxon personal name, Seaxberht. It is interesting, and
 even amusing, to record that in 1487 Hugh Shakspere of Merton
 College, Oxford, changed his name to Sawndare, because his
 former name vile reputatum est. The earliest record of a Shakespeare
 that has yet been traced is in 1248 at Clapton in Gloucestershire,
 about seven miles from Stratford. The name also occurs
 during the 13th century in Kent, Essex and Surrey, and during
 the 14th in Cumberland, Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, Essex,
 Warwickshire and as far away as Youghal in Ireland. Thereafter
 it is found in London and most of the English counties,
 particularly those of the midlands; and nowhere more freely
 than in Warwickshire. There were Shakespeares in Warwick
 and in Coventry, as well as around Stratford; and the clan
 appears to have been very numerous in a group of villages
 about twelve miles north of Stratford, which includes Baddesley
 Clinton, Wroxall, Rowington, Haseley, Hatton, Lapworth,
 Packwood, Balsall and Knowle. William was in common use
 as a personal name, and Williams from more than one other
 family have from time to time been confounded with the
 dramatist. Many Shakespeares are upon the register of the
 gild of St Anne at Knowle from about 1457 to about 1526.
 Amongst these were Isabella Shakespeare, prioress of the
 Benedictine convent of Wroxall, and Jane Shakespeare, a nun of the
 same convent. Shakespeares are also found as tenants on the
 manors belonging to the convent, and at the time of the Dissolution
 in 1534 one Richard Shakespeare was its bailiff and collector
 of rents. Conjectural attempts have been made on the one hand
 to connect the ancestors of this Richard Shakespeare with a
 family of the same name who held land by military tenure at
 Baddesley Clinton in the 14th and 15th centuries, and on me
 other to identify him with the poet's grandfather, Richard
 Shakespeare of Snitterfield. But Shakespeares are to be traced
 at Wroxall nearly as far back as at Baddesley Clinton, and there
 is no reason to suppose that Richard the bailiff, who was certainly
 still a tenant of Wroxall in 1556, had also since 1529 been farming
 land ten miles off at Snitterfield.
 With the breaking of this link, the hope of giving Shakespeare
 anything more than a grandfather on the father's side must be
 laid aside for the present. On the mother's side he was connected
 with a family of some distinction. Part at least of Richard
 Shakespeare's land at Snitterfield was held from Robert Arden
 of Wilmcote in the adjoining parish of Aston Cantlow, a cadet of
 the Ardens of Parkhall, who counted amongst the leading
 gentry of Warwickshire. Robert Arden married his second wife,
 Agnes Hill, formerly Webbe, in 1548, and had then no less
 than eight daughters by his first wife. To the youngest of these,
 Mary Arden, he left in 1556 a freehold in Aston Cantlow consisting
 of a farm of about fifty or sixty acres in extent, known as Asbies.
 At some date later than November 1556, and probably before
 the end of 1557, Mary Arden became the wife of John Shakespeare.
 In October 1556 John Shakespeare had bought two freehold
 houses, one in Greenhill Street, the other in Henley Street.
 The latter, known as the wool shop, was the easternmost of
 the two tenements now combined in the so-called Shakespeare's
 birthplace. The western tenement, the birthplace proper, was
 probably already in John Shakespeare's hands, as he seems to
 have been living in Henley Street in 1552. It has sometimes
 been thought to have been one of two houses which formed a
 later purchase in 1575, but there is no evidence that these were
 in Henley Street at all.
 William Shakespeare was not the first child. A Joan was
 baptized in 1558 and a Margaret in 1562. The latter was buried
 in 1563 and the former must also have died young, although
 her burial is not recorded, as a second Joan was baptized in 156o.
 A Gilbert was baptized in 1566, an Anne in 1571, a Richard in
 and an Edmund in 1580. Anne died in 1579; Edmund,
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 p.773:0
 who like his brother became an actor, in 1607; Richard in 1613.
 Tradition has it that one of Shakespeare's brothers used to visit
 London in the 17th century as quite an old man. If so, this can
 only have been Gilbert.
 During the years that followed his marriage, John Shakespeare
 became prominent in Stratford life. In 1565 he was chosen
 as an alderman, and in 1568 he held the chief municipal office,
 that of high bailiif. This carried with it the dignity of justice
 of the peace. John Shakespeare seems to have assumed arms,
 and thenceforward was always entered in corporation documents
 as "Mr" Shakespeare, whereby he may be distinguished from
 another John Shakespeare, a "corviser" or shoemaker, who
 dwelt in Stratford about 1584-1592. In 1571 as an ex-bailiff he
 began another year of office as chief alderman.
 [Youth]
 One may think, therefore, of Shakespeare in his boyhood as
 the son of one of the leading citizens of a not unimportant
 provincial market-town, with a vigorous life of its
 own, which in spite of the dunghills was probably not
 much unlike the life of a similar town to-day, and with constant
 reminders of its past in the shape of the stately buildings formerly
 belonging to its college and its gild, both of which had been
 suppressed at the Reformation. Stratford stands on the Avon,
 in the midst of an agricultural country, throughout which in
 those days enclosed orchards and meadows alternated with open
 fields for tillage, and not far from the wilder and wooded district
 known as the Forest of Arden. The middle ages had left it
 an heritage in the shape of a free grammar-school, and here it
 is natural to suppose that William Shakespeare obtained a sound
 enough education[^1] with a working knowledge of  Mantuan"[^2]
 and Ovid in the original, even though to such a thorough scholar
 as Ben Jonson it might seem no more than "small Latin and
 less Greek." In 1577, when Shakespeare was about thirteen,
 his father's fortunes began to take a turn for the worse. He
 became irregular in his contributions to town levies, and had to
 give a mortgage on his wife's property of Asbies as security
 for a loan from her brother-in-law, Edmund Lambert. Money
 was raised to pay this off, partly by the sale of a small interest
 in land at Snitterfield which had come to Mary Shakespeare
 from her sisters, partly perhaps by that of the Greenhill Street
 house and other property in Stratford outside Henley Street,
 none of which seems to have ever come into William Shakespeare's
 hands. Lambert, however, refused to surrender the
 mortgage on the plea of older debts, and an attempt to recover
 Asbies by litigation proved ineffectual. John Shakespeare's
 difficulties increased. An action for debt was sustained against
 him in the local court, but no personal property could be found
 on which to distrain. He had long ceased to attend the meetings
 of the corporation, and as a consequence he was removed in
 from the list of aldermen. In this state of domestic affairs it
 is not likely that Shakespeare's school life was unduly prolonged.
 The chances are that he was apprenticed to some local trade.
 Aubrey says that he killed calves for his father, and "would do
 it in a high style, and make a speech."
 [^1]: It is worth noting that Walter Roche, who in 1558 became
 fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, was master of the school in
 -1572, so that its standard must have been good.
 [^2]: Baptista Mantuanus (1448-1516), whose Latin Eclogues were
 translated by Turberville in 1567.
 [Marriage]
 Whatever his circumstances, they did not deter him at the
 early age of eighteen from the adventure of marriage. Rowe
 recorded the name of Shakespeare's wife as Hathaway,
 and Joseph Greene succeeded in tracing her to a family
 of that name dwelling in Shottery, one of the hamlets of Stratford.
 Her monument gives her first name as Anne, and her age as
 sixty-seven in 1623. She must, therefore, have been about eight
 years older than Shakespeare. Various small trains of evidence
 point to her identification with the daughter Agnes mentioned
 in the will of a Richard Hathaway of Shottery, who died in
 , being then in possession of the farm-house now known
 as "Anne Hathaway's Cottage." Agnes was legally distinct
 name from Anne, but there can be no doubt that ordinary
 custom treated them as identical. The principal record of the
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 p.773:1
 marriage is a bond dated on November 28, 1582, and executed
 by Fulk Sandells and John Richardson, two yeomen of Stratford
 who also figure in Richard Hathaway's will, as a security to the
 bishop for the issue of a licence for the marriage of William
 Shakespeare and "Anne Hathwey of Stratford," upon the
 consent of her friends, with one asking of the banns. There
 is no reason to suppose, as has been suggested, that the procedure
 adopted was due to dislike of the marriage on the part of John
 Shakespeare, since, the bridegroom being a minor, it would not
 have been in accordance with the practice of the bishop's officials
 to issue the licence without evidence of the father's consent.
 The explanation probably lies in the fact that Anne was already
 with child, and in the near neighbourhood of Advent within
 which marriages were prohibited, so that the ordinary procedure
 by banns would have entailed a delay until after Christmas.
 A kindly sentiment has suggested that some form of civil
 marriage, or at least contract of espousals, had already taken
 place, so that a canonical marriage was really only required in
 order to enable Anne to secure the legacy left her by her father
 "at the day of her marriage." But such a theory is not rigidly
 required by the facts. It is singular that, upon the day before
 that on which the bond was executed, an entry was made in
 the bishop's register of the issue of a licence for a marriage
 between William Shakespeare and "Annam Whateley de Temple
 Grafton." Of this it can only be said that the bond, as an
 original document, is infinitely the better authority, and that
 a scribal error of "Whateley" for "Hathaway" is quite a
 possible solution. Temple Grafton may have been the nominal
 place of marriage indicated in the licence, which was not always
 the actual place of residence of either bride or bridegroom.
 There are no contemporary registers for Temple Grafton, and
 there is no entry of the marriage in those for Stratford-upon-
 Avon. There is a tradition that such a record was seen during
 the 19th century in the registers for Luddington, a chapelry
 within the parish, which are now destroyed. Shakespeare's
 first child, Susanna, was baptized on the 26th of May 1583,
 and was followed on the 2nd of February 1585 by twins,
 Hamnet and Judith.
 [Obscure years, 1584-1592]
 In or after 1584 Shakespeare's career in Stratford seems to
 have come to a tempestuous close. An 18th-century story of a
 drinking-bout in a neighbouring village is of no Obscure
 importance, except as indicating a local impression
 that a distinguished citizen had had a wildish youth.
 But there is a tradition which comes from a double
 source and which there is no reason to reject in substance, to
 the effect that Shakespeare got into trouble through poaching
 on the estates of a considerable Warwickshire magnate, Sir
 Thomas Lucy, and found it necessary to leave Stratford in order
 to escape the results of his misdemeanour. It is added that he
 afterwards took his revenge on Lucy by satirizing him as the
 Justice Shallow, with the dozen white louses in his old coat,
 of The Merry Wives of Windsor. From this event until he
 emerges as an actor and rising playwright in 1592 his history is
 a blank, and it is impossible to say what experience may not
 have helped to fill it. Much might indeed be done in eight years
 of crowded Elizabethan life. Conjecture has not been idle, and
 has assigned him in turns during this or some other period to
 the occupations of a scrivener, an apothecary, a dyer, a printer,
 a soldier, and the like. The suggestion that he saw military
 service rests largely on a confusion with another William Shakespeare of Rowington. Aubrey had heard that "he had been
 in his younger years a schoolmaster in the country." The
 mention in Henry IV. of certain obscure yeomen families,
 Visor of Woncote and Perkes of Stinchcombe Hill, near Dursley
 in Gloucestershire, has been thought to suggest a sojourn in
 that district, where indeed Shakespeares were to be found from
 ÃÂ€ an early date. Ultimately, of course, he drifted to London
 and the theatre, where, according to the stage tradition, he
 found employment in a menial capacity, perhaps even as a
 holder of horses at the doors, before he was admitted into a company as an actor and so found his way to his true vocation
 as a writer of plays. Malone thought that he might have left
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 p.774:0
 Stratford with one of the travelling companies of players which
 from time to time visited the town. Later biographers have
 fixed upon Leicester's men, who were at Stratford in 1587,
 and have held that Shakespeare remained to the end in the same
 company, passing with it on Leicester's death in 1588 under the
 patronage of Ferdinando, Lord Strange and afterwards earl of
 Derby, and on Derby's death in 1594 under that of the lord
 chamberlain, Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon. This theory perhaps
 hardly takes sufficient account of the shifting combinations
 and recombinations of actors, especially during the disastrous
 plague years of 1592 to 1594. The continuity of Strange's
 company with Leicester's is very disputable, and while the names
 of many members of Strange's company in and about 1593
 are on record, Shakespeare's is not amongst them. It is at least
 possible, as will be seen later, that he had about this time
 relations with the earl of Pembroke's men, or with the earl of
 Sussex's men, or with both of these organizations.
 [Playwright and poet]
 What is clear is that by the summer of 1592, when he was
 twenty-eight, he had begun to emerge as a playwright, and had
 evoked the jealousy of one at least of the group of
 scholar poets who in recent years had claimed a
 monopoly of the stage. This was Robert Greene,
 who, in an invective on behalf of the play-makers
 against the play-actors which forms part of his Groats-worth
 of Wit, speaks of "an upstart Crow, beautiiied with our feathers,
 that with his *Tygers heart wrap! in a Players hide,* supposes he
 is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you:
 and being an absolute *Johannes fac iotum*, is in his owne conceit
 the onely Shake-scene in a countrie." The play upon Shakespeare's
 name and the parody of a line from Henry VI. make
 the reference unmistakable.[^1] The London theatres were closed,
 first through riots and then through plague, from June 1592
 to April 1594, with the exception of about a month at each
 Christmas during that period; and the companies were dissolved
 or driven to the provinces. Even if Shakespeare had been
 connected with Strange's men during their London seasons of
 and 1593, it does not seem that he travelled with them.
 Other activities may have been sufficient to occupy the interval.
 The most important of these was probably an attempt to win
 a reputation in the world of non-dramatic poetry. *Venus and
 Adonis* was published about April 1593, and *Lucrece* about May
 . The poems were printed by Richard Field, in whom
 Shakespeare would have found an old Stratford acquaintance;
 and each has a dedication to Henry Wriothesley, earl of South-
 ampton, a brilliant and accomplished favourite of the court, still
 in his nonage. A possibly super-subtle criticism discerns an
 increased warmth in the tone of the later dedication, which is
 supposed to argue a marked growth of intimacy. The fact of
 this intimacy is vouched for by the story handed down from
 Sir William Davenant to Rowe (who published in 1709 the first
 regular biography of Shakespeare) that Southampton gave
 Shakespeare a thousand pounds "to enable him to go through
 with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to." The date of
 this generosity is not specified, and there is no known purchase by
 Shakespeare which can have cost anything like the sum named.
 The mention of Southampton leads naturally to the most
 difficult problem which a biographer has to handle, that of the
 *Sonnets*. But this will be more conveniently taken up at a
 later point, and it is only necessary here to put on record the
 probability that the earliest of the sonnets belong to the period
 now under discussion. There is a surmise, which is not in itself
 other than plausible, and which has certainly been supported with
 a good deal of ingenious argument, that Shakespeare's enforced
 leisure enabled him to make of 1593 a *Wanderjahr*, and in
 particular that the traces of a visit to northern Italy may clearly
 be seen in the local colouring of *Lucrece* as compared with *Venus
 and Adonis*, and in that of the group of plays which may be dated
 in or about 1594 and 1595 as compared with those that preceded.
 It must, however, be borne in mind that, while Shakespeare
 may perfectly well, at this or at some earlier time, have voyaged
 [^1]: It is most improbable, however, that the apologetic reference in
 Chettle's *Kind-hart's Dream* (December 1592) refers to Shakespeare.
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 p.774:1
 to Italy, and possibly Denmark and even Germany as well,
 there is no direct evidence to rely upon, and that inference from
 internal evidence is a dangerous guide when a writer of so assimilative
 a temperament as that of Shakespeare is concerned.
 [Connexion with the Chamberlain's company of actors]
 From the reopening of the theatres in the summer of 1594
 onwards Shakespeare's status is in many ways clearer. He had
 certainly become a leading member of the Chamberlain's
 company by the following winter, when his
 name appears for the first and only time in the treasurer
 of the chamber's accounts as one of the recipients of
 payment for their performances at court; and there is
 every reason to suppose that he continued to act with
 and write for the same associates to the close of his career. The
 history of the company may be briefly told. At the death of the
 lord chamberlain on the 22nd of July 1596, it passed under the
 protection of his successor, George, 2nd Lord Hunsdon, and
 once more became "the Lord Chamberlain's men" when he
 was appointed to that office on the 17th of March 1597. James I.
 on his accession took this company under his patronage as grooms
 of the chamber, and during the remainder of Shakespeare's
 connexion with the stage they were "the King's men." The
 records of performances at court show that they were by far the
 most favoured of the companies, their nearest rivals being the
 company known during the reign of Elizabeth as "the Admiral's,"
 and afterwards as "Prince Henry's men." From the summer
 of 1594 to March I603 they appear to have played almost
 continuously in London, as the only provincial performances by
 them which are upon record were during the autumn of 1597,
 when the London theatres were for a short time closed owing to
 the interference of some of the players in politics. They travelled
 again during 1603 when the plague was in London, and during
 at any rate portions of the summers or autumns of most years
 thereafter. In 1594 they were playing at Newington Butts, and
 probably also at the Rose on Bankside, and at the Cross Keys
 in the city. It is natural to suppose that in later years they
 used the Theatre in Shoreditch, since this was the property of
 James Burbage, the father of their principal actor, Richard
 Burbage. The Theatre was pulled down in 1598, and, after a
 short interval during which the company may have played at the
 Curtain, also in Shoreditch, Richard Burbage and his brother
 Cuthbert rehoused them in the Globe on Bankside, built in part
 out of the materials of the Theatre. Here the profits of the
 enterprise were divided between the members of the company
 as such and the owners of the building as "housekeepers,"
 and shares in the "house" were held in joint tenancy by Shake-
 speare and some of his leading "fellows." About 1608 another
 playhouse became available for the company in the "private "
 or winter house of the Black Friars. This was also the property
 of the Burbages, but had previously been leased to a company
 of boy players. A somewhat similar arrangement as to profits
 was made.
 Shakespeare is reported by Aubrey to have been a good actor,
 but Adam in *As You Like It*, and the Ghost in *Hamlet* indicate
 the type of part which he played. As a dramatist, however,
 he was the mainstay of the company for at least some fifteen years,
 during which Ben Jonson, Dekker, Beaumont and Fletcher, and
 Tourneur also contributed to their repertory. On an average
 he must have written for them about two plays a year, although
 his rapidity of production seems to have been greatest during
 the opening years of the period. There was also no doubt a good
 deal of rewriting of his own earlier work, and also perhaps, at
 the beginning, of that of others. Occasionally he may have
 . entered into collaboration, as, for example, at the end of his
 career, with Fletcher.
 [Stratford Affairs]
 In a worldly sense he clearly flourished, and about 1596, if
 not earlier, he was able to resume relations as a moneyed
 man with Stratford-on-Avon. There is no evidence to show
 whether he had visited the town in the interval, or whether
 he had brought his wife and family to London. His son Hamnet
 died and was buried at Stratford in 1596. During the last ten
 years John Shakespeare's affairs had remained unprosperous.
 He incurred fresh debt, partly through becoming surety for
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 p.775:0
 his brother Henry; and in 1592 his name was included in a list
 of recusants dwelling at or near Stratford-on-Avon, with a note
 by the commissioners that in his case the cause was believed to
 be the fear of process for debt. There is no reason to doubt
 this explanation, or to seek a religious motive in
 John Shakespeare's abstinence from church. William
 Shakespeare's purse must have made a considerable
 difference. The prosecutions for debt ceased, and in 1597 a
 fresh action was brought in Chancery for the recovery of Asbies
 from the Lamberts. Like the last, it seems to have been
 without result. Another step was taken to secure the dignity
 of the family by an application in the course of 1596 to the
 heralds for the confirmation of a coat of arms said to have been
 granted to John Shakespeare while he was bailiff of Stratford.
 The bearings were *or* on a bend *sable* a spear *or* steeled *argent*,
 the crest a falcon his wings displayed *argent* supporting a spear
 *or* steeled *argent*, and the motto *Non sanz droict*. The grant
 was duly made, and in 1599 there was a further application for
 leave to impale the arms of Arden, in right of Shakespeare's
 mother. No use, however, of the Arden arms by the Shakespeares
 can be traced. In 1597 Shakespeare made an important
 purchase for Â£60 of the house and gardens of New Place in Chapel
 Street. This was one of the largest houses in Stratford, and
 its acquisition an obvious triumph for the ex-poacher. Presumably
 John Shakespeare ended his days in peace. A visitor to
 his shop remembered him as "a merry-cheekt old man" always
 ready to crack a jest with his son. He died in 1601, and his wife
 in 1608, and the Henley Street houses passed to Shakespeare.
 Aubrey records that he paid annual visits to Stratford, and there
 is evidence that he kept in touch with the life of the place. The
 correspondence of his neighbours, the Quineys, in 1598 contains
 an application to him for a loan to Richard Quiney upon a visit
 to London, and a discussion of possible investments for him
 in the neighbourhood of Stratford. In 1602 he took, at a rent
 of 2s. 6d. a year, a copyhold cottage in Chapel Lane, perhaps
 for the use of his gardener. In the same year he invested
 Â£320 in the purchase of an estate consisting of 107 acres in the
 open fields of Old Stratford, together with a farm-house, garden
 and orchard, 20 acres of pasture and common rights; and in
 he spent another Â£440 in the outstanding term of a lease
 of certain great tithes in Stratford parish, which brought in an
 income of about Â£60 a year.
 [London Associations]
 Meanwhile London remained his headquarters. Here Malone
 thought that he had evidence, now lost, of his residence in South-
 Lmdon wark as early as 1596, and as late as 1608. It is
 known that payments of subsidy were due from him
 for 1597 and 1598 in the parish of St Helen's, Bishopsgate,
 and that an arrear was ultimately collected
 in the liberty of the Clink. He had no doubt migrated from
 Bishopsgate when the Globe upon Bankside was opened by the
 Chamberlain's men. There is evidence that in 1604 he "lay,"
 temporarily or permanently, in the house of Christopher
 Mountjoy, a tire-maker of French extraction, at the corner of
 Silver Street and Monkwell Street in Cripplegate. A recently
 recovered note by Aubrey, if it really refers to Shakespeare
 (which is not quite certain), is of value as throwing light not
 only upon his abode, but upon his personality. Aubrey seems to
 have derived it from William Beeston the actor, and through
 him from John Lacy, an actor of the king's company. It is
 as follows: "The more to be admired q[uod] he was not a
 company-keeper, lived in Shoreditch, would not be debauched,
 & if invited to court, he was in paine." Against this testimony
 to the correctness of Shakespeare's morals are to be placed an
 anecdote of a green-room amour picked up by a Middle Temple
 student in 1602 and a Restoration scandal which made him the
 father by the hostess of the Crown Inn at Oxford, where he
 baited on his visits to Stratford, of Sir William Davenant, who
 was born in February 1606. His credit at court is implied by
 Ben Jonson's references to his flights "that so did take Eliza
 and our James," and by stories of the courtesies which passed
 between him and Elizabeth while he was playing a kingly part in
 her presence, of the origin of *The Merry Wives of Windsor* in
 ### END: ED4A803_0.tif.txt ###