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SHAKESPEARE

AS YOU LIKE IT

EDITED BY

A. R. WEEKES, B.A. LOND.

EDITOR OF SHAKESPEARE THE TEMPEST; SHELLEY ADONAIS

DRURY LANE, W.C.

1909

LIFE AND WORKS OF SHAKESPEARE.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE was born in 1564 at Stratfordon-Avon in Warwickshire, where his father, John Shakespeare, was a trader and farmer, and at that time in prosperous circumstances. During the poet's boyhood John Shakespeare fell gradually into poverty; he parted with the land his wife Mary Arden, a woman of good connections-brought him, was prosecuted for debt, and deprived of his alderman's gown. Of William Shakespeare between the time of his baptism and his marriage in his nineteenth year to Anne Hathaway (a woman some eight years his senior) we know almost nothing: it is conjectured that he received some little classical education at the Stratford Grammar School, and that he cast about to earn a living when his father's troubles thickened.

Between 1583 and 1585 three children were born to him, Susanna in 1583, and Hamnet and Judith (twins) in 1585. About this time he must have left Stratford to seek his fortune in London. A tradition, which is apparently ungrounded, connects his departure with a deerstealing adventure on Sir Thomas Lucy's estate at Charlecote, and Sir Thomas Lucy himself has been identified with Justice Shallow who came up to London to make a Star Chamber matter of a poaching affray. Shallow's coat of arms contained luces, which also belonged to the Lucy coat; but the passage in which the coat of arms is described (Merry Wives) does not occur in the earliest editions

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