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
History of the Shakespeare authorship question had suggested Shakespeare was an Irishman, a certain Patrick O'Toole of Ennis.. Thomas Fingal Healy, writing for "The American Mercury" in 1940, picked up the idea, claiming that many of the plays draw on Irish folklore. Shakespeare was forced to conceal his Irish background because the Irish were considered a "rebel race" by Queen Elizabeth. Healy found numerous references in the text of "Hamlet" to clothes which, he thought, showed that the Dane was based on a legendary Irish tailor called Howndale. The distinguished Meath historian Elizabeth Hickey writing under the pen name of Basil Iske, claimed in 1978 that