speare, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds by the quickness of his wit and invention." An interesting memorial—the only letter extant which is known to have been received by the poet—bears the date of the year 1598, and affords additional proof, if any were required, of his being now considered a man of substance:—"Loveing contreyman, I am bolde of yow, as of a ffrende, craveing your helpe with xxx. li. uppon Mr. Bushells and my securytee, or Mr. Myttons with me. Mr. Rosswell is nott come to London as yeate, and I have especiall cawse. Yow shall ffrende me muche in helpeinge me out of all the debetts I owe in London, I thanck God, and muche quiete my mynde, which wolde nott be indebeted. I am nowe towardes the cowrte, in hope of answer for the dispatche of my buysenes. Yow shall neither loose creddytt nor monney by me, the Lord wyllinge; and nowe but perswade yowrselfe soe, as I hope, and you shall nott need to feare butt with all heartie thanckfullnes I wyll holde my tyme, and content yowr ffreende; and yf we bargaine farther, yow shal be the paiemaster yowrselfe. My tyme biddes me hasten to an ende, ande soe I committ thys [to] yowr care and hope of yowr helpe. I feare I shall nott be backe thys night ffrom the Cowrte. Haste. The Lorde be with yow and with us all. Amen! Ffrom the Bell in Carter Lane, the 25 October, 1598. Yowrs in all kyndenes, Ryc. Quyney. To my loveinge good ffrende and contreyman, Mr. Wm. Shackespere, deliver thees." It is to be regretted that this letter, the only one saved out of the many hundreds he must have written and received, affords no indication as to what part of the metropolis Shakespeare then resided in. "From a paper now before me, which formerly belonged to Edward Alleyn, the player, our poet appears to have lived in Southwark, near the Bear Garden, in 1596," says Malone; but the paper he refers to has been lost. In 1598, however, it would seem from a subsidy roll discovered by the Rev. J. Hunter, wherein Shakespeare is assessed at £5, and subjected to a rate of 13s. 4d. in the parish of St. Helens, Bishopsgate, that he was then living on the northern side of the Thames: "Affid. William Shakespeare, v. li.—xiijs. iiijd." Mr. Collier quotes a small slip of paper which he found at Dulwich, to prove that Shakespeare was living in Southwark in 1596; but this paper, on examination, turns out to be a modern fabrication. To the list already given from Meres of the works produced by Shakespeare, we ought certainly to add, before the end of the sixteenth century, "The Taming of the Shrew;" "King Henry IV.," Part 2; the Three Parts of "King Henry VI.;" "King Henry V.;" "The Merry Wives of Windsor;" and probably the first draft of "Hamlet;" "As You Like It;" "Much Ado about Nothing;" "All's Well that Ends Well" (if this is not the play Meres calls "Love Labours Won"); and "Pericles." At the beginning of September, 1601, the poet's father died in his seventy-first year. He left no will, or rather, none has been discovered; and, in the absence of any proof to the contrary, we may fairly infer that the prosperity which gilded his declining days was due to the affection of his eldest son. In the year succeeding his father's death, Shakespeare made a large accession to his Stratford property, by purchasing one hundred and seven acres of arable land, for which he paid a sum equivalent to about £2000 at this day. Upon the death of Queen Elizabeth in March, 1602-3, Chettle, whom we have met with in connection with Greene's death-bed pamphlet, put forth a dismal elegy, entitled Englandes Mourning Garment, wherein he complains that Shakespeare, as well as others of the leading poets, had not employed his pen to wail the nation's loss:—
" Nor doth the silver-tonged Melicert,
Drop from his honied Muse one sable teare
To mourn her death that gracéd his desert,
And to his laies opend her royall eare.
Shepheard, remember our Elizabeth,
And sing her Rape done by that Tarquin, Death."
Long before his accession to the English throne. King James had given earnest of his dramatic partialities. So early as 1589 there is said to have been a company of actors, called her majesty's players, at the Scottish court. Ten years later the monarch licensed a company of comedians to perform in Edinburgh. On the 9th of October, 1601, the registers of the Aberdeen council inform us that the English players received thirty-two marks as a gratuity; and on the 22nd of the same month they record that the freedom of the city was conferred upon "Laurence Fletcher, comedian to his majesty." To judge by the entries in the Accounts of the Revels, Shakespeare's dramas were in high estimation at the new court. From November, 1604, to March, 1605, six of them were played before the king at Whitehall; and lames, in token of his admiration of their author, is reported to have written him a letter "with his own hand." A marvellous piece of royal condescension in that age, and one which the poet is thought to have requited by the sublime allusion to James' ancestry in the vision in "Macbeth." But the favour of princes is proverbially unstable, and, if we may trust certain lines in Davies' Scourge of Folly, Shakespeare lived to experience the wisdom of the apothegm:—
" To our English Terence, Mr. Will. Shakspeare.
Some say (good Will) which I in sport do sing,
Hadst thou not plaid some kingly parts in sport,
Thou hadst bin a companion for a king,
And beene a king among the meaner sort."
The rational interpretation of the second line is, that the dramatist had acted royalty on some occasion in a manner offensive to the king. Could it be that he had represented James himself upon the stage, and thus incurred the sovereign's ire? In Winwood's Memorials there is a letter from John Chamberlain to Sir R. Winwood, dated December 18, 1604, which certainly gives countenance to such a supposition. The writer states that the king's company of actors had given umbrage to the court, by performing a play on the subject of the Gowry conspiracy. "The tragedy of Gowry, with all the Action and Actors, hath been twice represented by the King's Players with exceeding concourse of all sorts of people. But whether the matter or manner be not well handled, or that it be thought unfit that princes should he played on the stage in their lifetime, I hear that some great Counsellors are much displeased with it, and so 'tis thought shall be forbidden."
The licentiousness of the theatres at this time appears indeed to have been unbounded; and what strikes us as most remarkable is the fact, that the king's players were equally culpable with the less respectable of their profession. On the 5th of April, 1606, the French ambassador wrote from London that the king's players "had brought forward their own king and all his favourites in a very strange fashion. They made him curse and swear because he had been robbed of a bird, and beat a gentleman because he called off the hounds from the scent. They represent him as drunk at least once a day," &c.—(F. von Raumer's History of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.)
In the same letter the ambassador relates that the players, notwithstanding an express prohibition to the contrary, persisted in acting the History of the Duke of Biron, in which they introduced the queen of France, until the king at last "made order that no play shall be henceforth acted in London."
What influence, if any, the growing dissension between the court and the theatre may have had upon Shakespeare's retirement from the stage, is a matter of speculation. The last appearance of his name as an actor is in a printed list of the characters to Ben Jonson's Sejanus, which was played at the Globe in 1603, and speedily withdrawn. It is extremely probable that he retained a fellowship in the company long after he abandoned the profession of a player; but the evidence adduced by Mr. Collier to prove this is now known to be fictitious.—(See An Inquiry into the genuineness of the Manuscript Corrections in Mr. J. Payne Collier s Annotated Shakespeare, folio, 1632; and of certain Shaksperian documents likewise published by Mr. Collier; Bentley, 1860. See also A Complete View of the Shakespeare Controversy. By C. M. Ingleby, LL D., Trinity College, Cambridge; Natali and Bond.)
He was in the habit, Aubrey tells us, of visiting his native town once a year; and we incline to the belief that it was not long after 1605 when he carried into effect the design which during many years he had been preparing for, and settled permanently down at Stratford in the midst of his family, to combine play-making and husbandry. We have seen that so early as 1597, he began to invest the surplus proceeds of his vocation in buying property at Stratford. In 1602, again, he added to the purchase of the "Great House," or, as he named it, "New Place," one hundred and seven acres in Old Stratford, as well as a house in the town. A year onward he made a further investment by purchasing a messuage at Stratford, with barns, gardens, and orchards; and in 1605 he executed an indenture for the purchase of the unexpired term of a lease of the great and
