Wednesday, 23rd December 1615, Mid-winter Day, St Thomas’s Day

Christmas is almost with us. The garlands are made, the larder filled with puddings and jellies and all kinds of fancies, the ale brewed, my cellar filled with Rhenish wine and French too. Pheasants and hares and bitterns hang in the larder, ripening. The house smells of meat, even if we may not yet eat of it.

My wife has ordered the Yule log, and it is a good one, wide and heavy, and sure to burn through all the days of Christmas if she do ensure the maids bank it well with ashes each night.

Today there has been much airing of beds and quilts, and fires roaring in every room. Garlands are hung about the hall.

Tomorrow our guests will arrive: Richard, still a friend after all these years, and John Heminges and Henry Condell, with cheer and company and talk from London.

And may the snow fall and ice blacken the paths, that none may walk out to see William Shakespeare, gentleman, at play with players once again, with wit and friendship foreign to this town and my estate. For tomorrow I will have companionship beyond this book, for what is a friend but someone who knows your closest nature? And that for me is ‘wordsmith’, whether it be for coin or sport, or in times past, for love.

Dinner: Advent fare, which is all the greatest playwright in England might say of it.