SHAKESPEARE'S DEATH.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 94, 21 April 1928, Page 1 (Supplement)

SHAKESPEARE'S DEATH.

LAID TO OVERDRINKING. WHAT AM ENGLISH DIARY SAYS. The Council of the Medical Society of London expected bidding for the autograph diary of the Rev. John Ward, Vicar of Stratford-on-Avon, to reach a high figure. Although most of the contents of the sixteen little pocket volumes are notes and comments on events between 1648 and 1679 of no particular importance, some others refer to conversations with persons who had known Shakespeare intimately as well as the members of his circle in both London and Stratford.

For example, here is a piece in the 1661-3 volume: "Shakespeare, Drayton and Ben Jhonson had a merry meeting, and it seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a feavour there contracted."

Dr. Charles Severn, the Registrar "to the Medical Society, who examined the diary in 1839, ana left comments oh certain of its entries, wrote that "it seems reasonable to suppose that this was a matter concerning which the Rev. John Ward would have made inquiries, whenever circumstances brought the history of Shakespeare into conversation."

In another place tlie diarist says that "Shakespeare's allowance for two plays a year was so large that he spent at the rate of £1000 a year."

The diarist is credited by Dr. Severn with having possessed a copy of the folio edition—which issue is not clear — with the autograph "W. Shakespeare," written on a slip of paper and pasted in. Dr. Severn suggested that it was probably a genuine autograph obtained by Mr. Ward.

In all, there are about twenty pages, for the most part containing anecdotes and episodes concerning the poet, which came to Mr. Ward at second hand and some of them within twenty years after Shakespeare's death. The following entries show how certain curious subjects were regarded at Stratford in the middle of the seventeenth century:—

"Dr. Conyers dissected a person not long since that died for love in London, and they found (at least as they fancied) the impression of a face made upon Me heart."