In looking into Philip Henslowe’s old note-book, we see how the grasping play-brokers of the olden time speculated on the poor play-writers necessities, when plays were not regarded as literature; when the most strenuous and laborious of dramatic writers for the theatre could not hope to gain a competence by the pen alone, but wrote only for bread; when play-writers were in the employ of the shareholding actors, as hired men; and when their employers, the actors, were social outcasts who, in order to escape the penalty for the infraction of the law against vagabondage, were nominally retained by some nobleman. In further proof of the degradation which was attached to the production of dramatic composition, “when Sir Thomas Bodley, about the year 1600, extended and remodeled the old university library and gave it his name, he declared that no such riff-raff as play-books should ever find admittance to it.” “When Ben Jonson treated his plays as literature by publishing them in 1616 as his works, he was ridiculed for his pretentions, while Webster’s care in the printing of his plays laid himself open to the charge of pedantry.” V What Lord Rosebery says of Napoleon is equally true of the author of “Hamlet” and “King Lear,” “Mankind will always delight to scrutinize something that indefinitely raises its conception of its own powers and possibilities, and will seek, though eternally in vain, to penetrate the secrets of this prodigious intellect,” and it is to Stratford-on-Avon that many turn for the final glimpse of what Swinburne calls “the most transcendent intelligence that ever illuminated humanity.” William Shakspere, the third child and eldest son (probably), of John Shakspere, is supposed to have been born at a place on the chief highway or road leading from London to Ireland, where the road crosses the river Avon. This crossing was called Street-ford or Stratford. This, at any rate, was the place of his baptism in 1564, as is evidenced by the parish register. The next proven fact is that of his marriage in 1582, when he was little more than eighteen years old. Before this event nothing is known in regard to him. John Shakspere, the father apparently of William Shakspere, is first discovered and described as a resident of Henley Street, where our first glimpse is had of him in April, 1552. In that year he was fined the sum of twelve pence for a breach of the municipal sanitary regulations. Nothing is known in regard to the place of his birth and nurture, nor in regard to his ancestry. The evidence is, _prima-facie_, that the Shaksperes were of the parvenu class. John Shakspere seems to have been a chapman, trading in farmer’s produce. In 1557 he married Mary Arden, the seventh and youngest daughter of Robert Arden, who had left to her fifty-three acres and a house, called “Ashbies” at Wilmecote. He had also left to her other land at Wilmecote, and an interest in two houses at Smitterfield.