(9) He left unpaid a debt contracted by his wife to her father's shepherd, who in 1601 "directed his executors to recover the sum from the poet and distribute it among the poor of Stratford " (p. 187). (10) He neglected his daughter Judith's education so that she had to sign her name by a mark or "sign manual," as Mr. Lee euphemistically styles it (p. 226). (11) He is credited with "many sportive adventures," among them the unsavoury story in which he figured with Burbage, "the sole anecdote of Shakespeare that is positively known to have been recorded in his lifetime"[1] (p. 265). (12) He entertained his two friends Drayton and Jonson, and they "drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a feavour then contracted " (p. 272). (13) The Davenant incident, of which Mr. Lee writes: "The antiquity and persistence of the scandal belie the assumption [whose ?] that Shakespeare was known to his contemporaries as a man of scrupulous virtue" (p. 266). This led Emerson to say, "Other admirable men have led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man in wide contrast," characterising his life as "obscure and profane." Mr. Lee can see no inconsistency, however, in associating the author of Hamlet with immorality, money-lending, and meanness, without even the tradition of a noble or loveable action.
On page 4 of the Life Mr. Lee says: "The son Henry remained all his life at Snitterfield, where he engaged in farming, with gradually diminishing success; he died in embarrassed circumstances in December, 1596. John,
- ↑ "To be told that he played a trick on his brother player in a licentious amour, or that he died of a drunken frolic … does not exactly inform us of the man who wrote Lear."—Hallam. "Bohemian ideals and modes of life had no genuine attraction for Shakespeare."— S. Lee (p. 278). [See note p. 22.]
Could it have been Mrs. Shakespeare's marriage-bed?" [Probably.']—:Dr. Garnett.
