Meanwhile he was gaining a footing as an actor. The accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber for March 15, 1594-5, bear record of Shakespeare's having been summoned, along with Kempe and Burbage, as a member of the Lord Chamberlain's Company, to present two comedies before the Queen at Greenwich Palace in the Christmas season of 1594. This is the earliest mention of the poet as sharing with his company a kind of recognition as honorable as it was profitable.
The records now take us back to his family. On August 11, 1596, his only son Hamnet was buried. In the same year John Shakespeare applied to the College of Heralds for a grant of arms, basing the claim on services of his ancestors to Henry VII, the continued good reputation of the family, and John's marriage to "Mary, daughter and heiress of Robert Arden, of Wilmcote, gent." Since there is evidence to show that the financial difficulties that had beset John Shakespeare before his son went to London had continued, and since the attempts of actors to obtain gentility by grants of arms were not uncommon, it is likely that the poet was the moving force in this matter. Though a draft granting this request was drawn up, it was not executed; but in 1599 a renewed application was successful, the heralds giving an exemplification of the coat which the applicants claimed had been assigned them in 1568, "Gold, on a bend sable, a spear of the first, and for his crest or cognizance a falcon, his wings displayed argent, standing on a wreath of his colours, The Purchase of New Placesupporting a spear gold steeled as aforesaid." The motto is "Non Sans Droit." These arms appear on the monument over Shakespeare's grave in Trinity Church in Stratford, and, impaled with the Hall arms, on the tombstone of his daughter Susanna and her husband John Hall.
A more substantial step towards restoring the standing of the family was taken when the poet bought on May 4, 1597, for sixty pounds, New Place, the largest house in Stratford. This was only the beginning of a considerable series of investments of the profits of his professional life in landed and other property in his native district. On his father's death in 1601 he inherited the two houses in Henley Street, the only real property of which the elder Shakespeare had retained possession; and in one of these the poet's mother lived until her death in 1608. About a hundred and seven acres of arable land with common pasture appertaining to it was conveyed to the poet on May 1, 1602, by William and John Combe, of Warwick and Old Stratford respectively, in consideration of £320; and twenty acres of pasture land were acquired from the same owners in 1610. On September 28, 1602, the Court Rolls of the Manor of Rowington record the transfer to Shakespeare from Walter Getley of a cottage and garden in Chapel Lane, Stratford. In 1605 he paid £440 for the thirty-one years remaining of a lease of the Stratford tithes, a purchase which involved him in a considerable amount of litigation. It was through this acquisition that he became involved in the dispute over the attempted inclosure of certain common fields belonging to the town of Stratford. John Combe, who died in July, 1614, bequeathing Shakespeare £5, left as heir a son, William, who with Arthur Mannering, sought to annex to their respective estates the aforesaid common lands. After having secured a deed safeguarding himself as part owner of the tithes from any loss that might result from the inclosure, Shakespeare seems to have lent his influence to Combe, in spite of the requests of the corporation for aid. The inclosure was not carried out.
His investments were not confined to his native county. A deed of sale has come down to us concerning the purchase of a house near the Blackfriars Theater in London, in March, 1613. The price was £140; but on the following day, March 11, Shakespeare gave the previous owner, Henry Walker, a mortgage deed for £60, which he never seems to have paid off. There is evidence of his ownership of other property in Blackfriars in three documents, recently discovered by Professor C. W. Wallace, dealing with a suit in Chancery, and dated April 26, May 15, and May 22, 1615, in which Shakespeare and others sought to obtain from one Matthew Bacon possession of certain deeds pertaining to their property within the precinct of Blackfriars.
Other traces of Shakespeare's business transactions suggest that he was by no means averse to going to law. After his resumption of relations with Stratford in Litigation1596, we find his parents engaged (November, 1597) in a lawsuit, the outcome of which does not appear to recover the mortgaged estate of Asbies, which had formed part of his mother's inheritance. The years 1600, 1604, 1608, and 1609 all contain records of suits by the poet to recover small sums of money; and, on the other hand, we find tax collectors in London seeking payment of taxes incurred on his goods while he lived in the parish of St. Helen's, Bishopgate, in 1593 or 1594. These claims Shakespeare satisfied some years later when he was living across the river in Southwark. The documents of a law case of 1612, recently discovered by Professor C. W. Wallace in the Public Record office, include Shakespeare's deposition as a witness and add some interesting information. It appears that, possibly from 1598 to 1604, he lodged in the house of Christopher Mountjoy, a wigmaker, at the corner of Muggle and Silver streets near Cripplegate. In 1604 he had aided in arranging the marriage of Mary Mountjoy to her father's apprentice, Stephen Bellott. The lawsuit was brought by Bellott against his father-in-law to secure the dowry and promise of inheritance. Shakespeare's negotiations in regard to the marriage play an important part in the various depositions, as the question whether a dowry of £50 had been promised was crucial to the case. Shakespeare himself was examined on September 11, but the poet failed to remember that a definite sum had been agreed upon for the dowry.
Further evidence relating to Shakespeare as a man of substance is to be found in letters in the Stratford archives, written by prominent townsmen. One, from Abraham Sturley to a relative in London on the business of the town of Stratford, dated January 24, 1597-8, contains a reference to "Mr. Shaksper" as "willing to disburse some money upon some odd yard-land or other at Shottery or near about us," and suggests urging upon Shakespeare the purchase of the tithes. It seems fairly certain from other letters of Sturley's that this one was addressed to Richard Quiney, father of Shakespeare's future son-in-law, Thomas Quiney. On October 25 of the same year, this Richard Quiney wrote from the Bell in Carter Lane, London, "to my loving friend and countryman, Mr. Wm. Shackespere," asking for his help with £30. From a letter from Abraham Sturley to Richard Quiney on the following fourth of November it appears that Quiney was seeking an enlargement of the charter of Stratford, with a view to an increase of revenue. In Sturley's previous letter reference had been made to an attempt to gain "an ease and discharge of such taxes and subsidies wherewith our town is like to be charged, and I assure you I am in great fear and doubt by no means able to pay." In this extreme condition of affairs Sturley heard with satisfaction "that our countryman Mr. Wm. Shak. would procure us money, which I will like of as I shall here when, and where, and how; and I pray let not go that occasion if it may sort to any Professional Progressindifferent conditions." The poet is probably referred to in still another letter, of about the same period, to Richard Quiney, this time from his father Adrian: "If you bargain with Wm. Sha., or receive money therefor, bring your money home that you may." All of these documents carry the unmistakable implication that William Shakespeare in London was regarded by his fellow-townsmen as a person of resources, likely to be of service to his friends in financial stress.
If we return now to the evidences of Shakespeare's professional progress, we shall see whence these resources were derived. Confining ourselves still to explicit and unambiguous records, we find the year 1598 marking Shakespeare's emergence as actor and dramatist into a somewhat opener publicity. The quarto editions of Richard II and Love's Labour's Lost, issued that year, are the first plays to exhibit his name on the title-page; and in the 1616 folio edition of Ben Jonson's works, attached to Every Man in His Humour, is the statement: "This Comedie was first Acted in the yeere 1598 by the then L. Chamberleyne his servants. The principal Comedians were Will. Shakespeare, Aug. Philips, Hen. Condel, Will. Slye, Will. Kempe, Ric. Burbadge, Joh. Hemings, Tho. Pope, Chr. Beeston, Joh. Dyke." These evidences of prominence are more than corroborated by the famous passage in the Palladis Tamia (1598) of Francis Meres, in which he not only compares the "mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare" with Ovid for his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, "his sugred sonnets among his private friends," but with Plautus and Seneca for his excellence "in both kinds for the stage; for comedy, witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love Labors Lost, his Love Labours Wonne, his Midsummers Night Dreame, and his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy, his Richard the 2, Richard the 3, Henry the 4, King John, Titus Andronicus, and his Romeo and Juliet." Barnfield in the same year harps on the "honey-flowing vein" of the author of Venus and Lucrece, and "honey-tongued" is again the opening epithet of John Weever's epigram "Ad Gulielmum Shakespeare" (1599), in which "Romeo" and "Richard" share the praises with the narrative poems. From this time on, publishers of the plays recognize Shakespeare's reputation by generally placing his name on the title-page: a form of compliment which the author probably did not appreciate when it was extended, as in the case of The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), to pirated works, some of which were meant to be private, and others were not by him at all.
Reminiscences or references to his works are frequent in contemporary literature. Among these are several passages in two plays, The Return from Parnassus, acted in St. John's College, Cambridge, about 1601. In one passage, Kempe, the famous actor, speaks slightingly of the acting qualities of the plays by university pens and continues, "Why here's our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down, ay, and Ben Jonson too,"—Contemporary Allusionsanother identification of the actor and the dramatist Shakespeare. Another character in these plays prefers Shakespeare to Chaucer, Gower, and Spenser. Less enthusiastic though sincerely appreciative is John Webster, who, in the address to the Reader prefixed to The White Devil, 1612, acknowledges his indebtedness to his predecessors, Chapman, Jonson, Beaumont, and Fletcher and to "the right happy and copious industry of Master Shakespeare, Master Dekker, and Master Heywood." Though of widely varying significance and interest, the numerous allusions to Shakespeare or to his plays give further testimony to his growing reputation.
While it is probable that the sale of Shakespeare's poems brought him in some financial return, he is not likely to have profited from the publication of his plays. The playwright at that time sold his product to the manager or company, and thereby gave up all rights. To the end of the sixteenth century managers usually paid from £5 to £11 for a new play, adding a bonus in the case of success, and sometimes a share of the proceeds of the second performance. During the first decade of Shakespeare's activity as a dramatist, then, we may calculate that he obtained for about twenty-one plays an average of about £10 each, which, making the usual allowance for the greater purchasing power of money, would be equivalent to about $400, or an annual income of about $800. During his second decade the prices for plays had so risen that he may be estimated to have received about twice as much from this source as in the early half of his career.
More profitable than playwriting was acting. Lee estimates Shakespeare's salary as an actor before 1599 at £100 a year at least, exclusive of special rewards for court performances, and we know that by 1635 an actor-shareholder, such as Shakespeare latterly was, had a salary of £180. Besides this, he became about 1599 a sharer, with Heming, Condell, Philips, and others, in the receipts of the Globe Theater, erected in 1597-8 by Richard and Cuthbert Burbage. The annual income from a single share was over £200, and Shakespeare may have had more than one. In 1610 he became a sharer also in the smaller Blackfriars Theater, after it had been acquired by the Burbages.