Chapter 3 - Page 2

author of the same.

Some of these, in these years and later, were pirated, but he made
no protest. Then--1610-11--he returned to Stratford and settled
down for good and all, and busied himself in lending money, trading
in tithes, trading in land and houses; shirking a debt of forty-one
shillings, borrowed by his wife during his long desertion of his
family; suing debtors for shillings and coppers; being sued himself
for shillings and coppers; and acting as confederate to a neighbor
who tried to rob the town of its rights in a certain common, and
did not succeed.

He lived five or six years--till 1616--in the joy of these elevated
pursuits. Then he made a will, and signed each of its three pages
with his name.

A thoroughgoing business man's will. It named in minute detail
every item of property he owned in the world--houses, lands, sword,
silver-gilt bowl, and so on--all the way down to his "second-best
bed" and its furniture.

It carefully and calculatingly distributed his riches among 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 need 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 dower 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