Excerpt from Shakespeare: With Some Notes on His Early Biography and an Identification of the Characters of William Fenton and Ann Page, With William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway Dyce, who ought. To have been the guardian of his fame, gives a contemptuous summary of his career, Speaks in discourteous terms of his wife, and shows no love for his family. Had he looked back into the re cords of his mother's family in the Heralds' Ofiice, he would have found undoubted testimonials of a family of worship in' the stock from which Shakespeare sprung. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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A new biography of William Shakespeare that explores his private life in Stratford-upon-Avon, his personal aspirations, his self-determination, and his relations with the members of his family and his neighbours. The Private Life of William Shakespeare tells the story of Shakespeare in Stratford as a family man. The book offers close readings of key documents associated with Shakespeare and develops a contextual understanding of the genres from which these documents emerge. It reconsiders clusters of evidence that have been held to prove some persistent biographical fables. It also shows how the histories of some of Shakespeare's neighbours illuminate aspects of his own life. Throughout, we encounter a Shakespeare who consciously and with purpose designed his life. Having witnessed the business failures of his merchant father, he determined not to follow his father's model. His early wedding freed him from craft training to pursue a literary career. His wife's work, and probably the assistance of his parents and brothers, enabled him to make the first of the property purchases that grounded his life as a gentleman. With his will, he provided for both his daughters in ways that were suitable to their circumstances; Anne Shakespeare was already protected by dower rights in the houses and lands he had acquired. His funerary monument suggests that the man of 'small Latin and less Greek' in fact had some experience of an Oxford education. Evidences are that he commissioned the monument himself.