Life of William Shakespeare of the Lord Chamberlain's Men. In 1985 E. A. J. Honigmann proposed that Shakespeare acted as a schoolmaster in Lancashire, on the evidence found in the 1581 will of a member of the Houghton family, referring to plays and play-clothes and asking his kinsman Thomas Hesketh to take care of "William Shakeshaft, now dwelling with me". Honigmann proposed that John Cottam, Shakespeare's reputed last schoolmaster, recommended the young man. Another idea is that Shakespeare may have joined Queen Elizabeth's Men in 1587, after the sudden death of actor William Knell in a fight while on a tour which later took
The Plays of William Shakespeare another in the dark." Raleigh then admitted that he "soon falls into the habit, when he meets with an obscure passage, of consulting Johnson's note before the others." T. S. Eliot wrote that "no poet can ask more of posterity than to be greatly honoured by the great; and Johnson's words about Shakespeare are great honour". Walter Jackson Bate, in his 1977 biography on Johnson, wrote: the edition of Shakespeare – viewed with historical understanding of what it involved in 1765 – could seem a remarkable feat; and we are not speaking of just the great "Preface" To see it