Hamnet Shakespeare

Nothing is known of the attitude of Shakespeare's parents towards the marriage, nor has anyone ever suggested how he supported himself, his wife and family, in the years before he left Stratford for London.

At the close of January 1585, his twin son and daughter, Hamnet and Judith, were born, and they were baptized at Stratford Church on February 2nd.

Whether he assisted his father in his business of glover, or helped on his farm, or whether he became assistant master at the grammar school, as sometimes suggested, is mere matter for speculation.

John Aubrey, picking up gossip at Stratford, writes, Mr. William Shakespeare was born at Stratford-upon-Avon in the county of Warwick.

He deserted his family, says a rabid Baconian, who elsewhere complains of the lack of evidence to support believers in the dramatist.

Forgetting that there is no evidence for this desertion story, only one of those many blanks in the life of this elusive man, by which it would appear that while he was reaching fame and making money in London as a playwright and an actor, he held no communication with his kith and kin.

There remains no local record of William Shakespeare at Stratford-on-Avon between the year fifteen eighty-seven, when he joined with his father in mortgaging the property at Asbies, Wilmcote, which had been his mother's marriage portion, until fifteen ninety-six, when the register of the death of Hamnet, his only son, occurs at Stratford Church on August eleventh.

But this is sheer negative evidence of his not having visited his native town for over ten years, and is on a par with the famous Baconian argument that because no scrap of Shakespeare's handwriting, except six almost illegible signatures, has survived, therefore he cannot have written the plays still attributed to him.

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Leontes was a violent-tempered man, and rather silly, and he took it into his stupid head that his wife, Hermione, liked Polixenes better than she did him, her own husband.

When once he had got this into his head, nothing could put it out, and he ordered one of his lords, Camillo, to put a poison in Polixenes' wine.

Camillo tried to dissuade him from this wicked action, but finding he was not to be moved, pretended to consent.

He then told Polixenes what was proposed against him, and they fled from the court of Sicily that night and returned to Bohemia, where Camillo lived on as Polixenes' friend and counselor.

Goneril and Regan joined their armies to fight Cordelia's army and were successful, and Cordelia and her father were thrown into prison.

Then Goneril's husband, the Duke of Albany, who was a good man and had not known how wicked his wife was, heard the truth of the whole story.

And when Goneril found out that her husband knew her for the wicked woman she was, she killed herself, having a little time before given a deadly poison to her sister Regan out of a spirit of jealousy.

But they had arranged that Cordelia should be hanged in prison, and though the Duke of Albany sent messengers at once, it was too late.