"As You Like It." These very brief
glimpses into his life as an actor are the more unsatisfactory because
he remained a player long after he had achieved greatness as a
playwright. When he left the boards it was to return to
Stratford-on-Avon and live the retired life. It may be taken for
granted, then, that his talents as an actor were not in any way
extraordinary, or those who witnessed his rising fame as a dramatist
would have left some record of his other work. His advice to the players
in "Hamlet" is often and justly quoted in evidence of the attention he
had given to the theory of the acting art, but there is evidence to be
found in the Sonnets to show that he did not admire himself as an actor.
Some very recent research in the Record Office shows that the poet
lodged with a family of French Huguenots named Mountjoy, at the corner
of Monkwell Street and Silver Street, in the City of London, where a
public-house called the Coopers' Arms now stands.

=HOLY TRINITY CHURCH AND THE AVON--STRATFORD=

As far as we can tell, the poet had been five years in London before he
started upon his life-work, and he entered the arena of the playwright
at the age of twenty-seven. His methods were his own. The stories and
legends that other men had set down, often crudely, in form of
chronicle, or even of a play, he melted in the crucible of his own brain
and gave back in a new and beautiful form. The play can be traced to its
source, whether that source be a _novellino_ of Masuccio, or Holinshed's
"Chronicles," or Plutarch's Lives in North's translation, from which
some passages are copied _in extenso_. The poet himself would seem to
have had but little consciousness of the worth of his own work. In his
time plays were not published. Publication was supposed to destroy the
playgoer's interest in the work presented, and many Elizabethan plays
owe their survival to the happy accident that enabled some unscrupulous
person to collect a set of the actors' parts and print them, in order
either to dispose of the acting rights for private use, or to derive the
ordinary profits of the sale. When a play was written for and bought by
a manager, it became his absolute property. He could request the author
to rewrite or modify passages deemed ineffective; he could even call in
another man to tinker the work, unrestrained and unrebuked. It is
supposed that Shakespeare first showed his great parts as a dramatist in
improving other men's wor