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
The Portrait of Mr. W. H. he did believe it. Samuel Butler accepted some aspects of it, regarding the name "Will Hughes" as a "plausible conjecture". Wilde's story may have been an influence on John Masefield, whose book "Shakespeare and Spiritual Life" (1924) suggests that the Fair Youth was an actor who was delicate and small enough to play parts such as the boy-servant Moth in "Love's Labours Lost" and the sprite Ariel in "The Tempest". He believed that he may even have been a kind of symbol to Shakespeare for his own creative genius. In James Joyce's novel "Ulysses" a character called Mr. Best says