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 a play to be read, and he noted that by his time it had already been so often read as to have become part of the common culture. "This is that Hamlet the Dane, whom we read of in our youth". One might say, he observes, that Hamlet is just a character in a play: "Hamlet is a name; his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the poet's brain." Yet Shakespeare gives those sayings a reality in the mind of the reader, making them "as real as our own thoughts." Of all Shakespeare's plays, this one is "the