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 Trusty Servant hands and about his person, the whole signifying a most valuable character." Strictly speaking, the Trusty Servant is not a hircocervus, which is a combination of a goat and a stag: Coxe is using the term loosely to mean a composite animal in general. The painting of "The Trusty Servant" had a didactic function: it is accompanied by allegorical verses that associate the servant's various animal parts with distinctive virtues that the students of Winchester College were meant to follow. The Latin verses have been translated into English as: <poem> A trusty servant's picture would you see, This figure well