In 1603, an edition of Hamlet was published, though very different from the present form of the play.  The next year, 1604, the finished Hamlet was published; the title-page containing the words, “enlarged to almost as much again as it was.”  Of Measure for Measure we have no well-authenticated notice during the Poet’s life; though there is a record, which has been received as authentic, of its having been acted at Court on the 26th of December, 1604.  That record, however, has lately been discredited.  Of Timon of Athens and Julius Caesar we have no express contemporary notice at all, authentic or otherwise.  Nor have we any of Troilus and Cressida till 1609, in which year a stolen edition of it was published.  Nevertheless, I have no doubt that these plays were all written, though perhaps not all in their present shape, before the close of 1604.  Reckoning, then, the four last named, we have twenty-eight of the plays written when the Poet was forty years of age, and had probably been at the work about eighteen years.  Time has indeed left few traces of the process; but what a magnificent treasure of results!  If Shakespeare had done no more, he would have stood the greatest intellect of the world.  How all alive must those eighteen years have been with intense and varied exertion!  His quick discernment, his masterly tact, his grace of manners, his practical judgment, and his fertility of expedients, would needs make him the soul of the establishment; doubtless the light of his eye and the life of his hand were in all its movements and plans.  Besides, the compass and accuracy of information displayed in his writings prove him to have been, for that age, a careful and voluminous student of books.  Portions of classical and of continental literature were accessible to him in translations.  Nor are we without strong reasons for believing that, in addition to his “small Latin and less Greek,” he found or made time to form a tolerable reading acquaintance with Italian and French.  Chaucer, too, “the day-star,” and Spenser, “the sunrise,” of English poetry, were pouring their beauty round his walks.  From all these, and from the growing richness and abundance of contemporary literature, his all-gifted and all-grasping mind no doubt greedily took in and quickly digested whatever was adapted to please his taste, or enrich his intellect, or assist his art.

I have mentioned the Poet’s purchase of New Place at Stratford in 1597.  Thenceforward he kept making other investments from time to time, some of them pretty large, the records of which have lately come to light.  It appears by a subsidy roll of 1598, that he was assessed on property valued at L5 13s. 4d, in the parish of St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate, London.  In May, 1602, was executed a deed of conveyance whereby he became the owner of a hundred and seven acres of arable land in the town of Old Stratford, bought of William and John Combe for the sum of L320.