Shakspere reading to Elizabeth.
When still a boy Shakspere married a girl older than himself named Anne Hathaway. After he had been married a few years he left her and their three children, left the little town of Stratford, and went up to the great city of London to seek his fortune. There Shakspere got a job working around a theater, holding the horses of those who came to see the plays. Then he got a chance to act in the theater, and he became an actor, but he did not become a very good one.
In those days the theaters had no scenery. A sign was put up to tell what the scene was supposed to be. For instance, instead of forest scenery, they would put up a sign saying, “This is a forest,” or instead of a room scene a sign saying “This is a room in an inn.” There were no actresses. Men and boys took the parts of both men and women.
Shakspere was asked to change some of the plays that had already been written, so that they could be better acted. He did this very well; then he started in to write plays himself. Usually he took old stories and made them into plays, but he did it so wonderfully well that they are better than any plays that have ever been written before or since.
Though Shakspere left school when only thirteen years old, he seems to have had a remarkable knowledge of almost everything under the sun. He shows in his plays that he knew about history and law and medicine, and he knew and used more words than almost any writer who has ever lived. Indeed, some people say that with the little education he had, he could not possibly have written the plays himself, and so they have tried to prove that some one else must have written them. Some of the greatest of Shakspere’s plays are “Hamlet,” “The Merchant of Venice,” “Romeo and Juliet,” and “Julius Cæsar.”
Shakspere made a good deal of money for those times—almost a fortune. Then he left London and went back to live in the little town of Stratford where he was born. Here at last he died and was buried in the village church. People wanted to move his body to a greater and handsomer place, to a famous church in London. But some one, perhaps Shakspere himself, had written a verse which was carved on his tombstone. The last line of this verse said, “And curst be he who moves my bones”; so they never were moved, for no one dared to move them.
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