Short answers, pulled from the story.
John Ward (1629-1681) was vicar of Stratford-upon-Avon from 1662 to 1681, appointed by Charles II following the Restoration. He ministered to Shakespeare's descendants and kept a set of notebooks, now famous for containing five entries about William Shakespeare.
Ward recorded five entries mentioning Shakespeare, including the claim that Shakespeare spent at the rate of a thousand pounds a year, a note that Shakespeare died of a fever after a drinking meeting with Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson, and a reminder to himself to read Shakespeare's plays so as not to seem ignorant.
Ward's diary is the only source for the account that Shakespeare died of a fever contracted at a drinking meeting with Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson. Gerald Eades Bentley wrote that the story is not necessarily accurate, but that Ward was in a better position than most to have heard an echo of the facts.
The original manuscripts of Ward's diary are now held by the Folger Shakespeare Library. They were previously in the Library of the Medical Society of London, where Charles Severn transcribed and published them in 1839.
Ward's diary extends from 1648 to 1679, spanning the later years of the Interregnum through most of his tenure as vicar of Stratford-upon-Avon.
Ward was born in 1629, came from a Royalist family whose father was captured at the Battle of Naseby, and received his Master of Arts in divinity at Oxford in 1652. He also studied medical literature at Oxford and lived in London before his 1662 appointment.