[271] The clumsy entry runs: ‘Sept. Mr. Shakespeare tellyng J. Greene that I was not able to beare the encloseing of Welcombe.’ J. Greene is to be distinguished from Thomas Greene, the writer of the diary. The entry therefore implies that Shakespeare told J. Greene that the writer of the diary, Thomas Greene, was not able to bear the enclosure. Those who represent Shakespeare as a champion of popular rights have to read the ‘I’ in ‘I was not able’ as ‘he.’ Were that the correct reading, Shakespeare would be rightly credited with telling J. Greene that he disliked the enclosure; but palæographers only recognise the reading ‘I.’ Cf. Shakespeare and the Enclosure of Common Fields at Welcombe, a facsimile of Greene’s diary, now at the Birthplace, Stratford, with a transcript by Mr. E. J. L. Scott, edited by Dr. C. M. Inglehy, 1885.
[272a] British Magazine, June 1762.
[272b] Cf. Malone, Shakespeare, 1821, ii. 500-2; Ireland, Confessions, 1805, p. 34; Green, Legend of the Crab Tree, 1857.
[272c] The date is in the old style, and is equivalent to May 3 in the new; Cervantes, whose death is often described as simultaneous, died at Madrid ten days earlier—on April 13, in the old style, or April 23, 1616, in the new.
[273] Hall’s letter was published as a quarto pamphlet at London in 1884, from the original, now in the Bodleian Library Oxford.
[274] Mr. Charles Elton, Q.C., has been kind enough to give me a legal opinion on this point. He wrote to me on December 9, 1897: ‘I have looked to the authorities with my friend Mr. Herbert Mackay, and there is no doubt that Shakespeare barred the dower.’ Mr. Mackay’s opinion is couched in the following terms: ‘The conveyance of the Blackfriars estate to William Shakespeare in 1613 shows that the estate was conveyed to Shakespeare, Johnson, Jackson, and Hemming as joint tenants, and therefore the dower of Shakespeare’s wife would be barred unless he were the survivor of the four bargainees.’ That was a remote contingency, which did not arise, and Shakespeare always retained the power of making ‘another settlement when the trustees were shrinking.’ Thus the bar was for practical purposes perpetual, and disposes of Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps’s assertion that Shakespeare’s wife was entitled to dower in one form or another from all his real estate. Cf. Davidson on Conveyancing; Littleton, sect. 45; Coke upon Littleton, ed. Hargrave, p. 379 b, note I.
[276a] A hundred and fifty pounds is described as a substantial jointure in Merry Wives, III. iii. 49.
[276b] Leonard Digges, in commendatory verses before the First Folio of 1623, wrote that Shakespeare’s works would be alive
[When] Time dissolves thy Stratford monument.
[277] Cf. Dugdale, Diary, 1827, p. 99; see under article on Bernard Janssen in the Dictionary of National Biography.