the members of his family, overlooking no individual of it. Not
even his wife: the wife he had been enabled to marry in a hurry
by urgent grace of a special dispensation before he was nineteen;
the wife whom he had left husbandless so many years; the wife who
had had to borrow forty-one shillings in her need, and which the
lender was never able to collect of the prosperous husband, but
died at last with the money still lacking. No, even this wife
was remembered in Shakespeare’s will.
He left her that “second-best bed.”
And NOT ANOTHER THING; not even a penny to bless her lucky
widowhood with.
It was eminently and conspicuously a business man’s will,
not a poet’s.
It mentioned NOT A SINGLE BOOK.
Books were much more precious than swords and silver-gilt
bowls and second-best beds in those days, and when a departing
person owned one he gave it a high place in his will.
The will mentioned NOT A PLAY, NOT A POEM, NOT AN UNFINISHED
LITERARY WORK, NOT A SCRAP OF MANUSCRIPT OF ANY KIND.
Many poets have died poor, but this is the only one in
history that has died THIS poor; the others all left literary
remains behind. Also a book. Maybe two.
If Shakespeare had owned a dog–but we not go into that: we
know he would have mentioned it in his will. If a good dog,
Susanna would have got it; if an inferior one his wife would have
got a downer interest in it. I wish he had had a dog, just so we
could see how painstakingly he would have divided that dog among
the family, in his careful business way.
He signed the will in three places.
In earlier years he signed two other official documents.
These five signatures still exist.
There are NO OTHER SPECIMENS OF HIS PENMANSHIP IN EXISTENCE.
Not a line.
Was he prejudiced against the art? His granddaughter, whom
he loved, was eight years old when he died, yet she had had no
teaching, he left no provision for her education, although he was
rich, and in her mature womanhood she couldn’t write and couldn’t
tell her husband’s manuscript from anybody else’s–she thought it
was Shakespeare’s.
When Shakespeare died in Stratford, IT WAS NOT AN EVENT. It
made no more stir in England than the death of any other
forgotten theater-actor would have made. Nobody came down from
London; there were no lamenting poems, no eulogies, no national
tears–there was merely silence, and nothing more. A striking
contrast with what happened when Ben Jonson, and Francis Bacon,
and Spenser, and Raleigh, and the other distinguished literary
folk of Shakespeare’s time passed from life! No praiseful voice
was lifted for the lost Bard of Avon; even Ben Jonson waited
seven years before he lifted his.
SO FAR AS ANYBODY ACTUALLY KNOWS AND CAN PROVE, Shakespeare
of Stratford-on-Avon never wrote a play in his life.
SO FAR AS ANY ONE KNOWS, HE RECEIVED ONLY ONE LETTER
DURING HIS LIFE.
So far as any one KNOWS AND CAN PROVE, Shakespeare of
Stratford wrote only one poem during his life. This one is
authentic. He did write that one–a fact which stands
undisputed; he wrote the whole of it; he wrote the whole of it
out of his own head. He commanded that this work of art be
engraved upon his tomb, and he was obeyed. There it abides to
this day. This is it:
Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare
To digg the dust encloased heare:
Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones
And curst be he yt moves my bones.
In the list as above set down will be found EVERY POSITIVELY
KNOWN fact of Shakespeare’s life, lean and meager as the invoice
is. Beyond these details we know NOT A THING about him. All the
rest of his vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is
built up, course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories,
conjectures–an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high
from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential
facts.
IV
Conjectures
The historians “suppose” that Shakespeare attended the Free
School in Stratford from the time he was seven years old till he