Is Shakespeare Dead? / From My Autobiography

Stratford from the time he was seven years old till he was thirteen.

his Latin in that school-the scho

ey supposed he attended, and get to work and help support his parents and their ten children. B

des, and decades, and two more decades after Shakespeare's death (until old age and mental decay had refreshed and vivified their memories). They hadn't two facts in stock about the long-dead distinguished citizen, but only just the one: he slaughtered calves and broke into oratory while he was at it. Curious. They had only one fact, yet the distinguished citizen had spent twenty-six years in that little town-just half his lifetime. However, rightly viewed, it was the most i

ached upon Sir Thomas Lucy's deer preserves and got haled before that magistrate for

pen, found no trouble in turning Sir Thomas Lucy into Mr. Justice Shallow. They have long ag

oh such a wild young scamp, and that gratuitous slander is established for all time! It is the very way Professor Osborn and I built the colossal skeleton brontosaur that stands fifty-seven feet long and sixteen feet high in the Natural History Museum, the awe and admiration of all the world, the stateliest

has been an embarrassment to his historians these many, many years. They have to make him write that graceful and polished and flawless and beautiful poem before he escaped from St

up Latin for future literary use-he had his youthful hands full, and much more than full. He must have had to put aside his Warwickshire dialect, which wouldn't be understood in London, and study English very hard. Very hard indeed; incredib

wledge the learned then possessed, and every kind of humble knowledge possessed by the lowly and the ignorant; and added thereto a wider and more intimate knowledge of the world's great literatures, ancient and modern, than was possessed by any other man of his time-for he was going to make brilliant and easy and admiration-compelling

of a Stratford court; just as a bright lad like me, reared in a village on the banks of the Mississippi, might become perfect in knowledge of the Behring Strait whale-fishery and the shop-talk of the veteran exercisers of tha

imself" by learning book-law in his garret and by picking up lawyer-talk and the rest of it through loitering about the law-courts and listenin

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 acc

and their ways and talk; also a knowledge of some foreign lands and their languages: for he was daily empty

rench, Italian and Spanish on the road; that he went in Leicester's expedition to the Low Countries, as soldier or sutler or something, for several months or years-or whatever length of time a surmis

the meantime; and who studied the books in the garret; and who frollicked in th

tle term for an unlisted actor; and in '94 a "regular" and properly and officially l

busy and flourishing business man, and was raking in money with both hands for twenty years. Then in a nobl

for Iesus

dust enclo

man yt spare

e he yt mov

ll, this is only conjecture. We have only

hy of William Shakespeare? It would strain the Unabridged Dictionary to hold th