perhaps a little Italian as well. That his school life or
home life was closely associated with Bible reading and study is proved
by the readiness with which he turns to Scripture for graphic and
concise expression of a thought, or for the purpose of an apt
comparison. But he was destined to learn in a larger and rougher school
than that of King Edward's foundation at Stratford. His leisure came to
an abrupt end when he had just entered his teens and his father told him
to look after one of his failing businesses. So the brightest genius of
English poetry became, while yet a boy, a butcher or a butcher's
assistant, and for some four or five years passed an uneventful life in
Stratford under conditions that might well have coarsened and spoilt
him. Happily the exquisite surroundings of the little town, and his own
response to them, made a somewhat sordid occupation possible; but of his
daily life and steady growth in the most impressionable period of his
career no reliable details have reached us.

To his associates in the old Warwickshire home he was no more than the
clever, precocious eldest son of an alderman who had seen better days.
He went his own way, and may be supposed to have lived a somewhat free
life, for before he was nineteen he appears to have found himself
compelled to marry one Anne Hathaway of Shottery in the parish of Old
Stratford. Her father had died rather more than a year before her
marriage; she was twenty-six years of age, and had inherited by will a
sum amounting in the currency of the day to a little less than L7,
rather more than L50 of our money. The marriage would seem to have been
hurried and irregular, and though it may have followed a formal and
binding betrothal of a kind that had more sanction then than now, the
poet's first child--his daughter Susanna--was born less than six months
later. It was not a fortunate union. Twins were born to William and Anne
Shakespeare in 1585, and then all record of the home life closes for a
long period. Some of Shakespeare's biographers think that the poet had
run away to London before the year closed, and that for more than a
decade he did not return to the town without taking care that his
presence should not be noticed. We do not know how strained his marital
relations had become, but we may assume that his home was not a happy
one, for in the early days of his union he ran risks that most young
married men would avoid for the sake of wife and family