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 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 Shakespeare died in Stratford, _it was not an event_. It made no
more stir in England than the death of any other forgotten
theater-actor would have made. Nobody came down from London; there were
no lamenting poems, no eulogies, no national tears—there was merely
silence, and nothing more. A striking contrast with what happened when
Ben Jonson, and Francis Bacon, and Spenser, and Raleigh, and the other
distinguished literary folk of Shakespeare’s time passed from life! No
praiseful voice was lifted for the lost Bard of Avon; even Ben Jonson
waited seven years before he lifted his.
_So far as anybody actually knows and can prove_, Shakespeare of
Stratford-on-Avon never wrote a play in his life.
_So far as anybody knows and can prove_, he never wrote a letter to
anybody in his life.
_So far as any one knows, he received only one letter during his life_.
So far as any one _knows and can prove_, Shakespeare of Stratford wrote
only one poem during his life. This one is authentic. He did write that
one—a fact which stands undisputed; he wrote the whole of it; he wrote
the whole of it out of his own head. He commanded that this work of art
be engraved upon his tomb, and he was obeyed. There it abides to this
day. This is it:
Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare
To digg the dust encloased heare:
Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones
And curst be he yt moves my bones.
In the list as above set down will be found _every positively known_
fact of Shakespeare’s life, lean and meager as the invoice is. Beyond
these details we know _not a thing_ about him. All the rest of his vast
history, as furnished by the biographers, is built up, course upon
course, of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures—an Eiffel Tower
of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat and very thin
foundation of inconsequential facts.