except that of the pen,--these are all we have to build upon. One
record, in dribbling Latin, relates to the christening of
"Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere"; a second, unreliable as a
village gossip, tells an anecdote of the same person's boyhood; a
third refers to Shakespeare as "one of his Majesty's poor players";
a fourth records the burial of the poet's son Hamnet; a fifth
speaks of "Willi. Shakspere, gentleman"; a sixth is a bit of
wretched doggerel inscribed on the poet's tombstone; a seventh
tells us that in 1622, only six years after the poet's death, the
public had so little regard for his art that the council of his
native Stratford bribed his old company of players to go away from
the town without giving a performance.

It is from such dry and doubtful records that we must construct a
biography, supplementing the meager facts by liberal use of our
imagination.

[Sidenote: EARLY DAYS]

In the beautiful Warwickshire village of Stratford our poet was
born, probably in the month of April, in 1564. His mother, Mary
Arden, was a farmer's daughter; his father was a butcher and small
tradesman, who at one time held the office of high bailiff of the
village. There was a small grammar school in Stratford, and
Shakespeare may have attended it for a few years. When he was about
fourteen years old his father, who was often in lawsuits, was
imprisoned for debt, and the boy probably left school and went to
work. At eighteen he married Anne Hathaway, a peasant's daughter
eight years older than himself; at twenty-three, with his father
still in debt and his own family of three children to provide for,