To pass rapidly in review the little that is known of Shakespeare's life is, nevertheless, to be impressed not only by its incessant and amazing literary fertility but by the quick succession of its salient incidents. The vitality must have been enormous that created in so short a time such a number and variety of works of the first class. The same quick spirit would naturally have kept in agitation all the elements of his daily experience. Descended from an ancestor who had fought for the Red Rose on Bosworth Field, he was born to repute as well as competence, and during his early childhood he received instruction and training in a comfortable home. He escaped the plague that was raging in Stratford when he was an infant, and that took many victims. He went to school when seven years old and left it when about fourteen. He then had to work for his living--his once opulent father having fallen into misfortune--and he became an apprentice to a butcher, or else a lawyer's clerk (there were seven lawyers in Stratford at that time), or else a schoolteacher. Perhaps he was all three--and more. It is conjectured that he saw the players who from time to time acted in the Guildhall, under the auspices of the corporation of Stratford; that he attended the religious entertainments that were customarily given in the not distant city of Coventry; and that in particular he witnessed the elaborate and sumptuous pageants with which in 1575 the Earl of Leicester welcomed Queen Elizabeth to Kenilworth Castle. He married at eighteen; and, leaving a wife and three children in Stratford, he went up to London at twenty-two. His entrance into theatrical life followed--in what capacity it is impossible to say. One dubious account says that he held horses for the public at the theatre door; another that he got employment as a prompter to the actors. It is certain that he had not been in the theatrical business long before he began to make himself known. At twenty-eight he was a prosperous author. At twenty-nine he had acted with Burbage before Queen Elizabeth; and while Spenser had extolled him in the "Tears of the Muses," the hostile Greene had disparaged him in the "Groat's-worth of Wit." At thirty-three he had acquired wealth enough to purchase New Place, the principal residence in his native town, where now he placed his family and established his home,--himself remaining in London, but visiting Stratford at frequent intervals. At thirty-four he was heard of as the actor of Knowell in Ben Jonson's comedy of _Every Man in his Humour_¹ and he received the glowing encomium of Meres in _Wits Treasury. _At thirty-eight he had written _Hamlet _and _As You Like It, _and moreover he had now become the owner of more estate in Stratford, costing £320. At forty-one he made his largest purchase, buying for £440 the "unexpired term of a moiety of the interest in a lease granted in 1554 for ninety-two years of the tithes