XXXI. DEATH OF SHAKESPEARE’S FATHER (1601).
Stratford Burial Register.
1601 Septemb. 8 Mr. Johannes Shakspeare.
Note. On his father’s death the poet, as eldest son, inherited the double house in Henley Street in which he had been born. His mother continued to live there until her death, as did also his married sister, Mrs. Joan Hart, and her family.
XXXII. A CAMBRIDGE ANECDOTE OF SHAKESPEARE AND BEN JONSON (1601–1602).
From the Second Part of The Return from Parnassus, acted at Cambridge, probably in December, 1601, or January, 1602. One scene (IV. v.) represents Shakespeare’s actor colleagues, Kempe and Burbage coming to Cambridge to get student recruits for their company. They talk together:
Kempe. Few of the university pen plays well. They smell too much of that writer, Ovid, and that writer, Metamorphosis, and talk too much of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why, here’s our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down; ay, and Ben Jonson too. O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow: he brought up Horace giving the poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him beray his credit.
Burbage. It is a shrewd fellow indeed . . .
Note. Kempe left Shakespeare’s company (the Lord Chamberlain’s) in 1600, and joined Worcester’s Men in 1602. The passage refers to the so-called ‘War of
