Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 18.djvu/62

* SHAKESPEARE. 46 preacher may have been invited to the house through his influence. On the 9th of July, 1614, a lire at Stratford destroyed lifty-four houses, besides barns and other buildings. Fortunately New Place and the Shakespeare birthplace in Henley Street escaped the conflagration. In that same summer John Combe of Welcombe died, leaving £5 to Shakespeare in his will. In the autumn of 1614 the good people of Stratford ■were greatly excited by the attempt of William Combe, the' squire of" Welcombe, to inclose a laroe portion of the common fields near the town. The design was resisted by the corporation as likely to injure the agricultural interests of the town and materially to diminish the tithes. For this latter reason, if for no other, Shakespeare would naturally have been opposed to the scheme ; but it seems probable that he was finally induced to favor it, being assured by Combe that his personal interests should suffer no detriment. It does not appear, however, that he took any active part in promoting the inclosures, which were finallv prohibited by an order issued by Chief Justice Coke on the 27th of March, 1615. On the 10th of February, 1616, Judith, the poet's younger daughter, so charmingly idealized in Mr." Black's novel bearing her name, was mar- ried to Thomas Quiney, who was nearly four years her junior, having been baptized on the 26th of February, 1589. He was an accomplished penman, and we" may inter that he was acquainted with French from a "motto in that language which he inserted in an oflicial document. At the time of his marriage he was in business as a vintner, and was patronized by the corporation and the leading citizens. In 1617 he was elected a burgess, and in 1621-23 .acted as chamberlain. In 1630 he retired from the council, and, his busi- ness having fallen off. he removed in 1652 to London, where he died a few years later. He had three sons, two of whom died in infancy and the third when twenty years old. Judith Quiney lived to the age of 76, surviving all the members of her family except her aunt, Joan Hart. Judith's marriage took place without a license, an irregularity for which a fine was im- posed by the ecclesiastical court at Worcester. As no other cause is known or suspected, it is supposed that the nuptials were hastened on ac- count of the failing health of her father. He had made his will in the latter part of Jan- uary, and from the original date and some other erasures in the document it appears to have been a corrected draft for the engrossed copy that was to be signed on the 25th of the month, but for some reason this was postponed. The draft was therefore laid aside until Shakespeare's condi- tion became suddenly worse, when his lawyer was. hurriedly summoned from Warwick, and, without waiting to make a regular transcript of the will, it was signed after a few more altera- tions had been hastily made. The most peculiar interlineation in the document, and one which has been much discussed as perhaps .bearing on the question whether the poet was happy in his domestic relations, is that in which he leaves his widow his "second best bed, with the furniture." The first best bed was the one generally reserved for visitors, and, being perhaps a family heir- loom, would have descended to his eldest daugh- ter as 'undcvisable property.' There is no other reference to Mistress Shakespeare in the will ; but she was amply provided for by virtue of her SHAKESPEARE. rights of dower, and such omission in a case of this kind was by no means uncommon in wills of the time. The gift of the bed, like many similar bequests in those old wills, was doubtless prompted by love and tender associations, and not the insult it would otherwise have been — an in- sult which William Shakespeare on his deathbed could never have inflicted on the mother of his children. We have seen, moreover, that as soon as he began to be prosperous in London he bought the dilapidated New Place, and, as fast as his means allowed, repaired the house, en- larged and improved the estate, and gradually made it the elegant and delightful home which nmst have been his ideal from the first, and which he kept steadily in view for the fourteen or more years before he returned to Stratford to enjoy it. That during all that time he looked forward to sharing that home with a wife whom he did not love is inconceivable. Shakespeare died on Tuesday, April 23, 1616. According to a tradition of which no mention occurs until about fifty years later, the poet in the latter jiart of ilarch was visited by his friends Drayton and Ben Jonson; and at a '■merry meeting" in a Stratford tavern, the three "drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a feavour there contracted." But the story prob- ably had no other foundation than the popular notion of the time that fevers were generally due to some excess in eating or drinking. It is more likely, as Halliwell-Phillipps suggests, that Shakespeare's disease was induced by the wretched sanitary conditions of the immediate neighborhood of New Place — an explanaticm that would not have occurred even to the medical men of the time. The funeral of "Will. Shakespeare, gent.," ac- cording to the parish register, occurred on the 25th of April. His remains were deposited in the chancel of the church, that being the legal place for the interment of the ovi'ners of the tithes. The grave is covered with a slab bearing this inscription: Good freiid. for lesus sake forbeare To digg: thp dust enoloaeed heare : Bleste be the man that spare.=* thes etones. And curst be he that moYes my bones. According to a tradition that dates back only to 1693, "the lines were composed by the poet himself "a little before his death;" but neither Dugdale in 1656 nor Ro-ve in 1709. when referring to the tomb, ascribes them to him. If he desired that the verses, or something to the same effect, should be put on the stone, it -was doubtless from fear that his bones might be re- moved at some time to the ancient charnel house that adjoined the chancel wall near his grave. The monument to Shakespeare in the chancel •was erected before 1623. when it was mentioned in the verses by Leonard Digges in the folio pub- lished that year. It consists of an ornamental niche in which is a life-sized bust supposed to have been copied from a posthumous cast of the poet's face. It has no merit as a work of art, but as a portrait it must have been considered tolerable enough to be accepted by the surviving relatives. It was originally painted, the eyes being hazel and the hair and beard auburn ; but in 1793, at Malone's instigation, it -svas covered with a coat of white paint, which remained until 1861. when the former coloring -was restored. The only other portrait of the poet the authen-