his stepfather, Sir Thomas Henneage, who had succeeded Sir Christopher
Hatton in 1589[146] as Vice-Chamberlain of the Royal Household, he was
able to assist the players, and Shakespeare is for the first time
recorded as having played twice before the Queen, at Greenwich on St.
Stephen's Day, December 26, 1594, and on Innocents' Day, December 28 of
the same year.[147] On the latter day at night, amid the turmoil of the
Gray's Inn revels, Shakespeare's play of the "Comedy of Errors" was
represented by his company, doubtless through the interest of the Earl
of Southampton, then a student at Gray's Inn. At his coming of age in
October, 1594, the young nobleman would be the better able to assist his
poet. Tradition has reported that he gave Shakespeare a large sum of
money, generally said to be L1,000.

[Illustration: THE GUILD CHAPEL, FROM THE SITE OF NEW PLACE.

_To face p. 67._]

However it was, the tide of Shakespeare's fortunes turned with his
introduction to the Earl of Southampton, and his exertions during the
remaining years of the century began to tell in financial returns. It is
significant that the first known use to which he put his money was the
application for the _coat of arms_. In that same year fortune gave him a
cruel buffet in the death of his only son.[148] Nevertheless, he went on
with his purchase of the largest house in his native town; so that, if
the bride of his youth had waited long for a home of her own, he did
what he could to make up for the delay by giving her the best he could
find.[149] That he was cautious in his investments was evident. He had
seen too much suffering through rashness in money affairs not to benefit
by the experience. Thereby he made clear his desire for the
rehabilitation of himself and family in the place where he was born. By
1598 we have irrefragable testimony to the position he had already
taken, alike in the world of letters as in the social life of Stratford.
In the autumn of that year appeared the perennial advertisement of
Meres, the Professor of Rhetoric at Oxford, Master of Arts of both
Universities, who ranks him among the first of his day, as an epic and
lyric poet, and as a writer of both tragedy and comedy. "As the soule of
Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweet wittie soul of
Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare.... As Plautus
and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the
Latins, so Shakespeare ..