Life of William Shakespeare of his plays, presumably as a selling point. There is a tradition that Shakespeare, in addition to writing many of the plays his company enacted and concerned with business and financial details as part-owner of the company, continued to act in various parts, such as the ghost of Hamlet's father, Adam in "As You Like It", and the Chorus in "Henry V". He appears to have moved across the River Thames to Southwark sometime around 1599. In 1604, Shakespeare acted as a matchmaker for his landlord's daughter. Legal documents from 1612, when the case was brought to trial, show that
Characters of Shakespear's Plays chapter "Poems and Sonnets". While he liked a few of the sonnets, for the most part Hazlitt found Shakespeare's nondramatic poetry to be artificial, mechanical, and, overall, "laboured, uphill work." On the whole, wrote Hazlitt, "Our idolatry of Shakespear [...] ceases with his plays." "Characters of Shakespear's Plays" argues against a century and a half of criticism that saw Shakespeare as a "child of nature", deficient in art and full of faults. To anchor his position, Hazlitt makes an observation by the poet Alexander Pope—despite Pope's being one of those very critics—his unifying theme: "every single character in Shakespear, is