of attention but seriously crowded the actors and rudely abused them if the
play was not to their liking. It should be added that from the latter part
of Elizabeth's reign there existed within the city itself certain 'private'
theaters, used by the boys' companies and others, whose structure was more
like that of the theaters of our own time and where plays were given by
artificial light.

SHAKESPEARE, 1564-1616. William Shakspere, by universal consent the
greatest author of England, if not of the world, occupies chronologically a
central position in the Elizabethan drama. He was born in 1564 in the
good-sized village of Stratford-on-Avon in Warwickshire, near the middle of
England, where the level but beautiful country furnished full external
stimulus for a poet's eye and heart. His father, John Shakspere, who was a
general dealer in agricultural products and other commodities, was one of
the chief citizens of the village, and during his son's childhood was
chosen an alderman and shortly after mayor, as we should call it. But by
1577 his prosperity declined, apparently through his own shiftlessness, and
for many years he was harassed with legal difficulties. In the village
'grammar' school William Shakspere had acquired the rudiments of
book-knowledge, consisting largely of Latin, but his chief education was
from Nature and experience. As his father's troubles thickened he was very
likely removed from school, but at the age of eighteen, under circumstances
not altogether creditable to himself, he married Anne Hathaway, a woman
eight years his senior, who lived in the neighboring village of Shottery.
The suggestion that the marriage proved positively unhappy is supported by
no real evidence, but what little is known of Shakspere's later life
implies that it was not exceptionally congenial. Two girls and a boy were
born from it.

In his early manhood, apparently between 1586 and 1588, Shakspere left