th, married Thomas Quiney
on February 10, 1616, with such haste and informality as led to the
imposition of a fine by the ecclesiastical court at Worcester. In the
previous month Shakespeare had a draft of his will drawn up by Francis
Collins, a solicitor of Warwick, and after certain changes this was
signed in March. On the twenty-fifth of April the Registers show the
burial of "Will. Shakespeare gent." The monument over his grave gives
the day of his death as April 23 (Old Style). He was buried in the
chancel of Stratford Church, and on the grave may still be read the much
discussed lines:

Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbeare
To dig the dust enclosed heare;
Bleste be the man that spares these stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones.

William Hall, who visited Stratford in 1694, records the tradition that
the poet himself composed the lines in a style calculated to impress
sextons and prevent them from digging up his bones and throwing them
into the adjacent charnel house. However this may be, the grave has
remained unopened.

[Page Heading: Death and Burial]

Seven years later, thirty-six of Shakespeare's plays were collected by
two of his former colleagues of the theater, Heming and Condell, whom he
had remembered in his will, and published in the famous First Folio.
The preliminary documents in this volume, printed in our appendix, close
significantly the contemporary records of the man, and bind together the
burgess of Stratford with the actor of London and the dramatist of the
world.

Of Shakespeare's handwriting nothing that can be called his with
complete assurance has survived except six signatures; one to the
deposition in the matter of the Mountjoy marriage; one to the deed of
the house he bought in Blackfriars in 1613, one to the mortgage-deed on
the same house, executed on the day after the purchase, and one on each
of the three sheets of paper containing his will, the last of which has
in addition the words "By me." All six are somewhat crabbed specimens of
the old English style of handwriting, which is the character he would
naturally acquire in such a school as that at Stratford in the sixteenth
century, as we learn from surviving examples of the copy-books of the
period. The manuscripts of his plays have gone the way of all, or almost
all, the autographs of the men of letters of his time, nor is it likely
that future research will add materially to what we have. The exact
s