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 Servant of Two Masters a stock character (usually accentuated by a mask) and plays it to perfection throughout his career. The actors had a list of possible scenarios, each with a very basic plot, called a "canovaccio", and throughout would perform physical-comedy acts known as "lazzi" (from Italian "lazzo", a joke or witticism) and the dialogue was improvised. The characters from "The Servant of Two Masters" are derived from stock characters used in "commedia dell'arte". True "commedia dell'arte" is more or less improvised without a script, so "The Servant of Two Masters" is not true "commedia". The stock characters were used as guides for