The first of five clues. Each one below gives a little more away.
I invented, or first wrote down, around seventeen hundred English words.
Six of my signatures survive, spelled three different ways.
I left my wife my second-best bed.
Thirty-seven plays, more or less, and one hundred and fifty-four sonnets.
Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet.
Shakespeare
Assassination. Lonely. Bedroom. Eyeball. All first written down by him. We are still speaking in his leftovers.
Nothing survives in his hand except six signatures and possibly a few pages of a collaborative play. Half of what we have exists only because two colleagues assembled the First Folio seven years after his death; without it there would be no Macbeth, no Tempest, no Twelfth Night. The vocabulary claim needs care — he is often the first recorded user rather than the inventor — but the printed record still credits him with around seventeen hundred first appearances. The second-best bed left to his wife was probably the marital one; the best bed was for guests.
Reading five clues at once is not the game. In the real thing they arrive one at a time and every wrong guess costs an hour. Play mystery #26 · today's mystery · the vault
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