Two years ago, at the request of the editors of the Youth's Companion, I wrote for that periodical a series of four familiar articles on the boyhood of Shakespeare. It was understood at the time that I might afterwards expand them into a book, and this plan is carried out in the present volume. The papers have been carefully revised and enlarged to thrice their original compass, and a new fifth chapter has been added.

The sources from which I have drawn my material are often mentioned in the text and the notes. I have been particularly indebted to Halliwell-Phillipps's Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, Knight's Biography of Shakspere, Furnivall's Introduction to the "Leopold" edition of Shakespeare, his Babees Book, and his edition of Harrison's Description of England, Sidney Lee's Stratford-on-Avon, Strutt's Sports and Pastimes, Brand's Popular Antiquities, and Dyer's Folk-Lore of Shakespeare.

I hope that the book may serve to give the young folk some glimpses of rural life in England when Shakespeare was a boy, and also to help them—and possibly their elders—to a better understanding of many allusions in his works.

W. J. R.

Cambridge, June 10, 1896.