PENED TO HIM, as
far as anybody actually knows.

Then--1592--there is mention of him as an actor.

Next year--1593--his name appears in the official list of players.

Next year--1594--he played before the queen. A detail of no consequence:
other obscurities did it every year of the forty-five of her reign. And
remained obscure.

Three pretty full years follow. Full of play-acting. Then

In 1597 he bought New Place, Stratford.

Thirteen or fourteen busy years follow; years in which he accumulated
money, and also reputation as actor and manager.

Meantime his name, liberally and variously spelt, had become associated
with a number of great plays and poems, as (ostensibly) author of the
same.

Some of these, in these years and later, were pirated, but he made no
protest.

Then--1610-11--he returned to Stratford and settled down for good and
all, and busied himself in lending 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
shillings and coppers; being sued himself for shillings and coppers;
and acting as confederate to a neighbor who tried to rob the town of its
rights in a certain common, and did not succeed.

He lived five or six years--till 1616--in the joy of these elevated
pursuits. Then he made 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 si