3-075-007 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Table supposed to have belonged to Shakspeare at Stratford-On-Avon, 1890. 'Antiquarian relics of literary biography demand strict scrutiny before we admit them to be genuine articles; this little round oak table, with its stout central leg standing on three crazy toes, may or may not be of Elizabethan date, and Shakspeare may or may not have used it among the furniture of his house at Stratford-on-Avon. All we know, at present, is that John Wheeler, aged eighty, late an inmate of the Warwick Union, who seems at some time to have cut his initials irreverently on the sacred relic, has deposed on oath before a Justice of the Peace that it was long the property of his family, and known among them, at least, as "Shakspeare's table"; and that he remembered hearing his grandmother say that she purchased it from a woman who had bought it at a sale at Shakspeare's house in Henley-street. This evidence will satisfy those who like to believe in it, and will amuse those who do not'. From "Illustrated London News", 1890.