Self-Assessment at Eighty                 (After reading Peter Ackroyd’s Shakespeare: The Biography)   I spend the morning writing a poem. Perhaps it will go into a book. My          latest, Fifty Years: Poems 1957–2007, has had welcome reviews. In the afternoon I file my statements from Fiserv. My investments from          retirement income are doing all right. Shakespeare, in the closing years of his life, at the height of his fame, was          semi-retired from the theatre but writing King Lear. He had purchased New Place and had recently invested in tithes. He was wealthier, by the standards of his…