e his knowledge in the law may have grown from
the large part his father had, either as magistrate or as litigant, in
legal transactions. I am sure he either studied divinity or else had a
strange gift of knowing it without studying it; and his ripeness in
the knowledge of disease and of the healing art is a standing marvel
to the medical faculty.

Knight has speculated rather copiously and romantically upon the idea
of Shakespeare's having been a spectator of the more-than-royal pomp
and pageantry with which the Queen was entertained by Leicester at
Kenilworth in 1575. Stratford was fourteen miles from Kenilworth, and
the Poet was then eleven years old. That his ears were assailed and
his imagination excited by the fame of that magnificent display cannot
be doubted, for all that part of the kingdom was laid under
contribution to supply it, and was resounding with the noise of it;
but his father was not of a rank to be summoned or invited thither,
nor was he of an age to go thither without his father. Positive
evidence either way on the point there is none; nor can I discover any
thing in his plays that would fairly infer him to have drunk in the
splendour of that occasion, however the fierce attractions thereof may
have kindled a mind so brimful of poetry and life. The whole matter is
an apt theme for speculation, and for nothing else.

The gleanings of tradition apart, the first knowledge that has reached
us of the Poet, after his baptism, has reference to his marriage. Rowe
tells us that "he thought fit to marry while he was very young," and
that "his wife was the daughter of one Hathaway, said to have been a
substantial yeoman in the neighbourhood of Stratford." These
statements are borne out by later disclosures. The marriage took place
in the Fall of 1582, when the Poet was in his nineteenth year. On the
28th of November, that year Fulk Sandels and John Richardson
subscribed a bond whereby they became liable in the sum of L40, to be
forfeited to the Bishop of Worcester in case there should be found any
lawful impediment to the marriage of William Shakespeare and Anne
Hathaway, of Stratford; the object being to procure such a
dispensation from the Bishop as would authorize the ceremony after
once publishing the banns. The original bond is preserved at
Worcester, with the marks and seals of the two bondsmen affixed, and
also bearing a seal with the initials R.H., as if to show that some
legal representative of the