INTRODUCTION WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE APRIL 23, 1564, is a red-letter day in the history of English literature; for on that day, as tradition has it, was born in the village of Stratford, in the county of Warwick, England, William Shakespeare, the greatest poet of modern times. Certain it is that three days later, April 26, the christening ceremony of the infant poet took placé in the parish church at Stratford. William Shakespeare came of ancient and honorable lineage. The surname itself, "implying capacity in the wielding of the spear," testifies to the chivalric temper of some early ancestor. On both sides the poet could boast of sturdy yeoman ancestry. His father, John Shakespeare, was the son of a tenant farmer living at Snitterfield, four miles from Stratford, on land which was owned by Robert Arden, the maternal grandfather of the poet, and whose youngest daughter, Mary, was, in 1557, married to John Shakespeare. From her father, who died in 1556, Mary Arden inherited money and land, thus bringing a substantial dowry to her husband. John Shakespeare seems to have been a shrewd, energetic business man, combining the occupations of farmer, glover, and trader in agricultural produce. He must have commanded the respect and confidence of his fellow-townsmen, for he was elected to various offices of trust and responsibility; finally, in 1568, attaining the highest office in the gift of the corporation, that of High Bailiff. His education must, how. ever, have been very limited, some authorities asserting that he could neither read nor write; but according to Shakespeare's latest biographer, Sidney Lee, "When attesting documents he occasionally made his mark, but there is evidence in the Stratford archives that he could write with facility." Mary Arden, as was usually the case with women of her station in life, was entirely ignorant of book-lore. William was the third child and the first son of this marriage. His two elder sisters having died in infancy, he naturally took the place of the eldest child in the home, where three younger brothers and one sister grew up with him. Happily Stratford possessed an excellent Free Grammar School for the education of boys. The instruction was mainly in the Latin language and literature. Beginning with the Latin Grammar, or accidence as it was called, the boys were drilled in conversational exercises, and later they read the great Roman authors,- Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Seneca, Plautus, and Terence. From our point of view this may seem a very one-sided training; but acquaintance with such writers is in itself a liberal education. School hours were long, occupying the entire day winter and summer, and we cannot wonder that the nature-loving Shakespeare should have written feelingly of the "schoolboy creeping like snail unwillingly to school." Some knowledge of French and Italian he seems also to have acquired during the seven years that he is supposed to have attended the Grammar School. In his fourteenth year Shakespeare was withdrawn from school, as it is supposed to assist his father, who had then become seriously embarrassed financially. "Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend, This counsel which Shakespeare puts into the mouth of the worldly-wise Polonius in the play of Hamlet may naturally have been suggested by knowledge of his father's financial difficulties. For, in a moment of pressing need, John Shakespeare had borrowed money from the husband of his wife's sister, giving |