Taking only the six years we are certain of, however, he wrote between 1598 and 1604 Henry V., The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, All’s Well that Ends Well, Julius Cæsar, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, and Othello. In the two years following, whilst it is pretty sure he was still dwelling with the Mountjoys, he wrote Macbeth and King Lear, and the fact that he had his home here during the period in which he was writing ten of his plays—three of them amongst the greatest he or any man ever wrote—makes this corner of Monkwell Street the most glorious literary landmark in the world.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The house in which he lodged was destroyed by the Great Fire, and the site is occupied now by an old tavern, “The Cooper’s Arms.” Almost facing it, just the other side of Silver Street, is a fragment of the churchyard of St. Olave’s. The church, in which the apprentice Stephen was married to Mary Mountjoy, vanished also in the Great Fire and was not rebuilt, and this weedy remnant of the churchyard with its three or four crumbling tombs is all that survives of the street as Shakespeare knew it; his glance must have rested on that forlorn garden of the dead as often as he looked from the windows opposite or came out at Mountjoy’s door.
ST. OLAVE’S CHURCHYARD. SILVER STREET.
Turning to the right when he came out at that door, half a minute’s walk up Falcon Street would have brought him into Aldersgate Street, so the announcement on one of the shops there that he had lived in it may have been nothing worse than a perfectly honest mistake; it was known as a fact that he lived thereabouts, and tradition settled on the wrong house instead of on the right one, that was a hundred yards or so away from it. But when Shakespeare issued from Mountjoy’s shop you may depend that his feet more frequently trod the ground in the opposite direction; he would go to the left, along Silver Street, into Wood Street, and down the length of that to Cheapside, where, almost fronting the end of Wood Street, stood the Mermaid Tavern, and he must needs pass to the right or left of it, by way of Friday Street, or Bread Street, across Cannon Street and then down Huggin Lane or Little Bread Street Hill to Thames Street, whence, from Queenhithe, Puddle Wharf, or Paul’s Wharf, he could take boat over the Thames to the Globe Theatre on Bankside.
There has been no theatre on Bankside these many years; there is nothing there or in that vicinity now that belongs to Shakespeare’s age except some scattered, ancient, inglorious houses that he may or may not have known and the stately cathedral of St. Saviour. This holds still the span of ground that has belonged to it since before Chaucer’s day. You may enter and see there the quaint effigy of Chaucer’s contemporary, Gower, sleeping on his five-century-old tomb; and here and there about the aisles and in the nave are memorials of remembered or forgotten men and women who died while Shakespeare was living, and somewhere in it were buried men, too, who were intimate with him, though no evidence of their burial there remains except in the parish register. In the “monthly accounts” of St. Saviour’s you come upon these entries concerning two of his contemporary dramatists:—
“1625. August 29th, John Fletcher, a poet, in the church.”
“1638. March 18th, Philip Massinger, stranger, in the church.”