a will, and signed each of its three pages with
his name.

A thoroughgoing business man's will. It named in minute detail every
item of property he owned in the world--houses, lands, sword, silver-gilt
bowl, and so on--all the way down to his "second-best bed" and its
furniture.

It carefully and calculatingly distributed his riches among the members
of his family, overlooking no individual of it. Not even his wife: the
wife he had been enabled to marry in a 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 need, and which the lender was never able to collect of
the prosperous husband, but died at last with the money still lacking.
No, even this wife was remembered in Shakespeare's will.

He left her that "second-best bed."

And _not another thing_; not even a penny to bless her lucky widowhood
with.

It was eminently and conspicuously a business man's will, not a poet's.

It mentioned _not a single book_.

Books were much more precious than swords and silver-gilt bowls and
second-best beds in those days, and when a departing person owned one he
gave it a high place in his will.

The will mentioned _not a play_,_ not a poem_,_ not an unfinished
literary work_, _not a scrap of manuscript of any kind_.

Many poets have died poor, but this is the only one in history that has
died _this_ poor; the others all left literary remains behind. Also a
book. Maybe two.

If Shakespeare had owned a dog--but we need not go into that: we know he
would have mentioned it in his will. If a good 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 dog, just so we could see how painstakingly he
would have divided that dog among the family, in his careful business
way.

He signed the will in three places.

In earlier years he signed two other official documents.

These five signatures still exist.

There are _no other specimens of his penmanship in existence_. Not a
line.

Was he prejudiced against the art? His granddaughter, whom he loved, was
eight years old when he died, yet she had had no teaching, he left no
provision for her education although he was rich, and in her mature
womanhood she couldn't write and couldn't tell her husband's manuscript
from anybody else's--she thought it was Shakespeare's.

When Shakes