Page:1909. Is Shakespeare Dead? From My Autobiography.djvu/48

IS SHAKESPEARE DEAD? 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 theatre-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 34