e Latin classics,--Virgil, Horace,
Ovid, Cicero, Seneca, and the rest,--and very little else. If
Shakespeare ever knew French or Italian, he picked it up in London
life, where he picked up most of his amazing stock of information on
all subjects. Besides Latin, he must have read and memorized a good
deal of the English Bible.

+Marriage+.--In the autumn of 1582 the eighteen-year-old Shakespeare
married a young woman of twenty-six. On November 28, of that year two
farmers of Shottery, near Stratford, signed what we should call a
guarantee bond, agreeing to pay to the Bishop's Court L40, in case the
marriage proposed between William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway should
turn out to be contrary to the canon--or Church--law, and so invalid.
This guarantee bond, no doubt, was issued to facilitate and hasten the
wedding. On May 26, 1583, Shakespeare's first child, Susanna, was
baptized. His only other children, his son Hamnet and a twin daughter
Judith, were baptized February 2, 1584-5[2]. It is probable that soon
after this date Shakespeare went to London and began his career as
actor, and afterwards as writer of plays and owner of theaters.

{6}

Anne Hathaway, as we have said, was eight years older than her husband.
She was the daughter of a small farmer at Shottery, a little out of
Stratford, whose house is still an object of pilgrimage for Shakespeare
lovers. We have really no just ground for inferring, from the poet's
early departure for London, that his married life was unhappy. The
Duke in _Twelfth Night_ (IV, iii) advises Viola against women's
marrying men younger than themselves, it is true; but such advice is
conventional. No one can tell how much the dramatist really felt of
the thoughts which his characters utter. Who would guess from any
words in _I Henry IV_, for instance, a play containing some of his
richest humor and freest joy in life, that, in the very year of its
composition, Shakespeare was mourning the death of his little son
Hamnet, and that his hopes of founding a family were at an end?
Another piece of evidence, far more important, is the fact that
Shakespeare does not mention his wife at all in his will, except by an
interlined bequest of his "second-best bedroom set." But here, again,
it is easy to misread the motives of the man who makes a will. Such
omissions have been made when no slight was intended, sometimes because
of previous private settlements, sometimes because a wife is