Is Shakespeare Dead? / From My Autobiography

lone, there is nothing resembling it in history, nothing resembling it in romance, nothing approaching it even in tradition. How sublime is their position, and how over-topping,

ow, of those details of Shakespeare's history which are f

A

on the 23d o

o could not read, could not wri

literate. Of the nineteen important men charged with the government of the town, thirteen had

rs of his life nothing is

William Shakespeare took out a

out a license to marry Anne Hathaw

hurry. By grace of a reluctantly-granted dispens

ths the first

g which period nothing at all happened

twins-1585

nk year

-year visit to London, l

is period nothing happened to him,

is mention of

me appears in the off

f no consequence: other obscurities did it every year

ears follow. Full o

ught New Plac

years in which he accumulated money, a

had become associated with a number of great pla

money, trading in tithes, trading in land and houses; shirking a debt of forty-one shillings, borrowed by his wife during his long desertion of his family; suing debtors for shilling

of these elevated pursuits. Then he made a will,

m of property he owned in the world-houses, lands, sword, silver-gilt bo

hurry by urgent grace of a special dispensation before he was nineteen; the wife whom he had left husbandless so many years; the wife who had had to borrow forty-one shillings in her

that "seco

ot even a penny to bless

nspicuously a business

ed not a s

bowls and second-best beds in those days, and when a depar

poem,not an unfinished literary work,

in history that has died this poor; the others all l

dog, Susanna would have got it; if an inferior one his wife would have got a dower interest in it. I wish he had had a

he will in

e signed two other

signatures

mens of his penmanship i

ad had no teaching, he left no provision for her education although he was rich, and in her mature womanhood she

e no lamenting poems, no eulogies, no national tears-there was merely silence, and nothing more. A striking contrast with what happened when Ben Jonson, and Francis Bacon, and Spenser, and Raleigh

can prove, Shakespeare of Stratford-o

can prove, he never wrote a

, he received only one

He did write that one-a fact which stands undisputed; he wrote the whole of it; he wrote the whole of it out of his own he

for Iesus

dust enclo

man yt spare

e he yt mov

ls we know not a thing about him. All the rest of his vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is built up, course upon course, of guesses, inf