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At Stratford, a small back settlement which in that day was shabby and unclean, and densely illiterate. Of the nineteen important men charged with the government of the town, thirteen had to "make their mark" in attesting important documents, because they could not write their names. Of the first eighteen years of his life nothing is known. They are a blank.
Muirson had organized the few churchmen at Stratford into a parish in 1707. Different clergymen had, from time to time, through the watchful care of Caleb Heathcote a name that we ought never to forget ministered to that little band in their sore trials and vexations.
This nobleman is said to have given Shakespeare, on one occasion, "a thousand pounds to enable him to make a purchase which he heard he had a mind to." This would show that Shakespeare had a capacity for attracting people and making lasting friendships. In 1597 he purchased "New Place," the stateliest house in Stratford, and we hear no more of his father's financial troubles.
One thing is certain about the Stratford bust. In perusing the copious arguments of the Anti-Shakesperean but Non- Baconian Mr.
Suppose, therefore, that his marriage was solemnized on the 1st day of December; it was barely possible that it could be earlier, considering that the sureties, drinking, perhaps, at Worcester throughout the 28th of November, would require the 29th, in so dreary a season, for their return to Stratford; after which some preparation might be requisite to the bride, since the marriage was not celebrated at Stratford.
If the verdict was Yes, I should feel quite convinced that the Stratford Shakespeare, the actor, manager, and trader who died so obscure, so forgotten, so destitute of even village consequence, that sixty years afterward no fellow-citizen and friend of his later days remembered to tell anything about him, did not write the Works. Shakespeare as a Lawyer
as it was limned in death-seeming life. He will be shown the tombs of her ancient family in Stratford church, and the door of that fatal vault; he will hear something of her noble birth her fine character her fascinating beauty her short, innocent, eventful life her horrible death.
We know that in those lean times his own purse would have been but ill-lined, and both his father's household and his own were suffering from the pinch of poverty. His wife was forced to borrow money; his father's affairs went steadily from bad to worse. Nor was there in all Stratford any help for a family that had fallen from comparative affluence into the slough of financial troubles.
It is thought that he travelled to town on foot by way of Oxford and High Wycombe, and that once in the metropolis he sought a friend of the family, one Richard Field of Stratford, who had left Warwickshire seven years before, and after serving his apprenticeship to a printer, had set up an office of his own in Blackfriars.
These houses impressed me strongly with the idea of patriarchal simplicity and content. We went to see Shakespeare's own house, which, of all the houses at Stratford I think is now the worst, and one that made the least appearance. Yet, who would not be proud to be the owner of it?
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