twenty-five to sixty dollars - equivalent in present values to two hundred and fifty and six hundred dollars; his salary as an actor, which was probably not less than five hundred dollars a year, or about three thousand dollars in present values; the returns from the sale of his poems, which ran through many editions, and the profits of which his publisher undoubtedly divided with him on some acceptable basis; and, most important of all, his revenue from his shares in the Blackfriars and Globe theatres.

The Globe Theatre provided room for an audience of about two thousand people, and for a number of years before its destruction by fire in 1613 was almost continuously prosperous. The transference of public interest to the boy actors, though long enough to send Shakespeare's company into the provinces, was comparatively short-lived. It is estimated that the annual receipts of the Globe Theatre did not fall below the very considerable sum of two hundred thousand dollars in current values. After providing for the maintenance of the theatre, there must have remained a substantial profit. This profit was divided among the shareholders, among whom were Shakespeare, Burbage, Condell, Heminge, and Philips; all were actors and members of the company, and combined personal interest and practical knowledge in theatrical management. The profits of the Blackfriars Theatre were smaller. Shakespeare's great popularity after 1598 or 1600 probably enabled him to secure much larger returns from the sale of new plays than were paid to the majority of playwrights; while the fees always distributed at Court performances must have amounted, in his case, to a very considerable sum. From these various sources Shakespeare probably received, during the later years of his life, not less than fifteen thousand dollars a year in current values. Mr. Lee, who has made a thorough investigation of the subject, thinks there is no inherent improbability in the tradition, reported by a vicar of Stratford in the following century, that Shakespeare "spent at the rate of a thousand a year."

The poet had become the owner of various properties at Stratford or in its neighbourhood. The houses in Henley Street had come into his possession. The house at New Place, in which he took up his residence, was a commodious and substantial building; and the grounds, with the exception of a thin wedge of land on Chapel Lane, extended almost to the Avon. His circumstances were those of a country gentleman of ample income.

When Shakespeare left London, he probably withdrew from participation in the management of the two theatres in which he was a shareholder, but his plays continued to be presented. His popularity suffered no eclipse until the fortunes of the stage began to yield to the rising tide of Puritan sentiment. During the festivities attending the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth, seven of his plays were presented at Whitehall. That he made the three days' journey to London at short intervals and kept up his old associations is practically certain.

His son Hamnet had died in the summer of 1596; his father died in the early autumn of 1601, and his mother in September, 1608. When he took up his residence in Stratford in 1611, his wife and two daughters constituted his family. The eldest daughter, Susannah, had married, in June, 1607, Dr. John Hall, a physician of unusual promise, who became at a later day a man of very high standing and wide acquaintance in Warwickshire. The house in which he lived is one of the most picturesque buildings which have survived from the Stratford of Shakespeare's time. Dr. Hall's daughter, Elizabeth, the only granddaughter of the poet, was born in 1608. Mrs. Hall made her home in her later years at New Place; there, in 1643, she entertained Queen Henrietta Maria; and there, in 1649, she died. In the inscription on her grave in the churchyard of Holy Trinity both her father and husband are described as "gentlemen." Of her it was written :

Witty above her sexe, but that's not all,
Wise to Salvation was good Mistress Hall.
Something of Shakespeare was in that, but this
Wholly of him with whom she's now in blisse.

Her daughter Elizabeth married Thomas Nashe, a Stratford man of education, and, after his death, John Barnard, who was knighted by Charles II. soon after the Restoration. Lady Barnard, who was the last direct descendant of the poet, died in 1670. She had come into possession, by various bequests, of New Place, the Henley Street houses, the land in the neighbourhood of Stratford, and a house in Blackfriars purchased by Shakespeare in 1613. The houses in Henley Street passed at her death into the possession of the grandson of Shakespeare's sister Joan, and remained in the family, as reported in a previous chapter, until the present century. New Place was sold after Lady Barnard's death, and subsequently came again into the hands of the Clopton family.

Judith Shakespeare married, shortly before her father's death in 1616, Thomas Quiney, a wine-dealer of Stratford, and lived for thirty-six years in a house still standing at the southeast corner of High and Bridge streets in Stratford. It was known at that time as The Cage, because it had been used at an earlier period as a prison. The foundation walls of this ancient house are four feet in thickness; books and Shakespearean souvenirs of every kind are now sold in the shop on the ground floor. Judith Shakespeare had three sons, all of whom died in infancy or early youth. She survived her family and her sister Susannah, and died in 1661, at the age of seventy-six.

The records show that after his retirement to Stratford Shakespeare continued to give careful attention to his affairs and to take part in local movements. In 1613 he bought the house in Blackfriars, not far from the theatre, which subsequently passed into the possession of Lady Barnard. The deeds of conveyance, bearing Shakespeare's signature, are still in existence. Comment has sometimes been made on the fact that the poet spelled his name in different ways, and that other people spelled it with complete disregard of consistency, and it has been inferred that he must have been, therefore, an ignorant person. A little investigation would have shown that in the poet's time there was great variation in the spelling of proper names. Men of the eminence of Sidney, Spenser, Jonson, and Dekker were guilty of the same latitude of practice in this matter, and even Bacon, on one occasion at least, spelled his name Bakon.

Shakespeare's friend John Combe, at his death in 1614, left the poet a small bequest in money and a legal entanglement. The attempt of Combe's son to enclose certain fields at Welcombe which had long been common was vigorously opposed by the corporation of Stratford. Both as the owner of neighbouring property and as joint owner of the tithes of old Stratford, Welcombe, and Bishopton, Shakespeare had an interest in the matter which arrayed him at the start in active opposition to the plan to enclose the property. A record in the diary of Thomas Greene, the town clerk of Stratford, shows that Shakespeare was an influential person in the dispute, and that he was in London in the autumn of 1614.

There is reason to believe that Puritanism had gained many adherents in Stratford, and that the poet's son-in-law, Dr. Hall, was in sympathy with the movement. The town records indicate that in 1614 a clergyman was entertained at New Place; the entry is suggestive of hospitality: "Item, for one quart of sack and one quart of clarett wine geven to a preacher at New Place, xxd." It is probable that the preacher was a Puritan, but the fact furnishes no clew to Shakespeare's ecclesiastical leanings. Aside from the bent