CHAPTER TWO
introducing the Shakespeare family, with particular attention to the Bard’s mother and her role in the oft-told story of the downfall of John Shakespeare
Most accounts of Shakespeare’s family concentrate on the catastrophic downhill career of his father, from its high point in 1568 when he was Bailiff of Stratford to its nadir when he was unable to put his nose outside the house for fear his creditors would seize his body in lieu of payment and drag him off to prison. In the reign of Elizabeth, if the existence of a debt had been proved in a court of law, and the debtor still refused payment, creditors had the right of summary arrest of the debtor who would languish in prison till he found someone who could pay what he owed or until he died, whichever happened sooner. This right was seldom exerted, because most people realised that a man in gaol can do little to satisfy his creditors. Even so, John Shakespeare spent years under virtual house arrest; having turned all his assets into ready cash, which sank into a morass of debt and defalcation, he had barely a house to hide his head in.
John Shakespeare’s tortuous tale is well known; no one has ever looked at those events from the point of view of his wife. Studies of genius tell us that for gifted boys mothers are far more influential than fathers. Richard III explains the precociousness of the little Duke of York as the effect of his mother’s influence.
O, ’tis a parlous boy,
Bold, quick, ingenious, forward, capable.
He is all the mother’s, from the top to toe.
Richard III, III. i. 154–6
Mary Shakespeare was the person who taught the most eloquent Englishman who ever lived the use of his native tongue. The first metres Shakespeare ever heard were chanted by her. As a young woman her charm was sufficient to win her father’s most valuable property, to the disadvantage of her seven elder sisters, but by 1582, when Ann Hathaway would have encountered her as a prospective mother-in-law, the bitterness of Mary’s disappointment may well have eclipsed her charm.
In the 1550s when he first came a-wooing John Shakespeare seemed the ideal choice for an eventual paterfamilias. First and foremost he was a glover, a trade protected by law. The incorporation of Stratford in 1553 afforded local tradesmen great opportunities for accumulating power. By 1556 John Shakespeare was already one of two official ale-tasters, whose job it was to check not only that the ale and beer on sale were wholesome but also that loaves were the correct weight. In 1558 he was sworn one of the four constables responsible for law and order. The next year he took on the job of setting fines at the Court Leet, and soon after was elected a burgess. In 1561 he was elected one of two chamberlains who administered borough property and revenues, a job he held for years, even through the visitation of the plague in 1564, when he was elected alderman. John Shakespeare married late—he was past seventy when he died in 1601, and the earliest we can date his marriage is about 1557.1 The bride he chose was Mary Arden, youngest daughter of his father’s landlord in Snitterfield. Misogynist tradition can be relied upon to credit a mother with all the qualities that a wife lacks. Mary Shakespeare is therefore assumed to have been comely, virtuous and adoring. When she married John Shakespeare, Mary Arden was much younger than her husband, and, as her father’s favourite, with a succession of older sisters to indulge her, she was probably spoiled rotten.
Though Mary Shakespeare’s father, Robert Arden, described himself as a husbandman, he built up a considerable estate. To the freehold he inherited in Snitterfield, he added another that he acquired from the heirs of William Harvey, and latterly the lands brought to him by Agnes Hill, the young widow of John Hill of Bearley, whom he married in 1548. The relevant records of Arden’s parish church, St John the Baptist in Aston Cantlow, have not survived, but we know from Arden’s will that he had children by a former wife or wives; at the time of his death he had eight daughters of his own, and four rather younger stepchildren.2 In 1550 (probably at the time of his marriage to Agnes Hill), Arden conveyed the house and land in Snitterfield to trustees; he and his wife were to have the use of it for their lives, whereafter it was to be divided among three of his married daughters, Joan Lambert, Agnes Stringer and Katherine Edkins.3 Joan was married to Edmund Lambert and was living at Barton on the Heath (fifteen miles south of Stratford), where she would remain for the rest of her life. Her husband was buried at Barton in April 1587, and she in November 1593. Agnes Arden had been the widow of John Hewyns of Bearley when she married Thomas Stringer (also of Bearley) in October 1550. She died before 1569. Katherine Arden was married to Thomas Edkins of Wilmcote. The Harvey freehold was also placed in a trust to be divided in due course between three of his younger daughters, Margaret Webbe and Joyce and Alice Arden. Margaret was married to her father’s brother-in-law, Alexander Webbe of Bearley.
The preamble of Robert Arden’s will drawn up in November 1556, has been interpreted as an indication that the Snitterfield Ardens were Catholics.
The document gives a picture of traditional rural society only a few years before William was born, and is thoroughly Catholic with its appeal to the Angels and the Virgin Mary ‘and all the blessed company of saints’. Henry VIII’s reformation had so far touched this part of Warwickshire only lightly. In keeping with most of her friends and neighbours, Mary Arden would have been brought up in a highly ritualised, old-fashioned English country Catholicism.4
This is part of Michael Wood’s version of the elaborate argument that seeks to prove that Shakespeare was as Catholic as the pope. This ‘part of Warwickshire’ had in fact been transformed by ‘Henry VIII’s reformation’ the dissolution of the monasteries had destroyed a complex system of land tenure and ancient traditions of land use, leaving tithelands and many common pastures vulnerable to annexation by neighbouring landlords, and the poor unprotected. The Catholic college and guild of Stratford had been replaced by a corporation in 1553; the Corporation was a closed oligarchy of sturdy protestants, into which no professed papist could dream of intruding. In 1559 the Corporation refused to pay the Vicar of Holy Trinity because of his popish practices; he retired to Wiltshire and for two years the cure lay vacant.5 More important, as far as doctrine went, than ‘Henry VIII’s reformation’ (which remained doctrinally incoherent) was the consolidation of the church under the clerics and the earnest reforming boy king, Edward VI. In 1556, however, everyone who was not prepared to play the heroic martyr was a Catholic. If the wording of Arden’s will had been unusual, we might have to give it special significance, but in fact it is the formula in use in the third year of the reign of Bloody Mary. Suffice it to point out amid all the modish brouhaha about Shakespeare’s Catholicism that John and Mary Shakespeare baptised all their children in Holy Trinity Church and all of them, bar one, were buried there. John may have been presented for failing to attend church, but the reason was understood at the time to be ‘fear of processes’, that is, fear of arrest for debt.6
Mary Arden, Robert Arden’s youngest child, was left the estate in Wilmcote, which was called Asbyes, and ‘the crop upon the ground sown and tilled as it is’, as well as the traditional ten marks in cash for her dowry. Arden also appointed Mary one of his two executors, which was less ‘a clear sign of her ability’ than a response to the fact that she was present, whereas her elder sisters were either married or in service. As an executrix she was in a better position to carry out the precise provisions of the will despite any disgruntlement on the part of her in-laws. As we shall see, the Lamberts and the Webbes soon managed to reclaim the Wilmcote properties for themselves. It may be that the will was contrived this way because negotiations were already in hand for Mary’s marriage with John Shakespeare; Shakespeare’s acquisitions of freehold property in Stratford may also have been made with an eye to a marriage. In the same year that Arden made his will, Shakespeare bought a freehold ‘garden and croft’ in Greenhill Street and a house and garden in Henley Street, which became the Woolshop, the eastern part of the ‘birthplace’.
Arden was relatively well off; after his death in 1556
his goods, which were valued at £77s 11s 10d, included oxen, bullocks, kine, weaning calves, horses, sheep, swine, poultry and bees, as well as ‘the bacon in the roof’. Agnes Arden remained at Wilmcote, where she died in 1580. After Richard Shakespeare’s death, the Webbes lived in the house at Snitterfield having leased it from Agnes Arden in 1561. When Alexander died in 1573, Margaret was made his executrix; John Shakespeare and Agnes Arden’s son John Hill were overseers of Webbe’s will and drew up his inventory. Margaret Webbe then married a second husband, Edward Cornwell. Elizabeth would eventually marry a man called Scarlett; she had a son John who was old enough to sell his share of the land in Snitterfield to Robert Webbe in March 1581, by which time Elizabeth was dead. In 1595 John Scarlett was head of a household of fifteen persons in Aston Cantlow. The next to youngest daughters, Joyce and Alice Arden, probably died unmarried, for their sisters eventually inherited their reversionary rights in the Snitterfield estate.
If my interpretation of the coincidence of Robert Arden’s legacy and John Shakespeare’s investment in property is correct, John Shakespeare and Mary Arden were probably married in the church of St John the Baptist in Aston Cantlow in the spring of 1557. Nothing is known of the wooing of Mary Arden by the son of her father’s tenant, nor is there any indication of why the farmer’s daughter chose an artisan to marry rather than a farmer. If she had the skills expected of a farmer’s daughter, they would have stood her in small stead when it came to helping her husband run his gloving business. Perhaps it was Mary’s dearest ambition to escape from the tedium of the country into the bustle of the town. In town Mary could dress to be seen and go gadding with her gossips. Emanuel van Meteren wrote of city wives in the 1580s: ‘They are well-dressed, fond of taking it easy, and commonly leave the care of household matters and drudgery to their servants. They sit before their doors, decked out in fine clothes, in order to see and be seen by the passersby.’ Their time was spent:
walking and riding, in playing, at cards and otherwise, in visiting their friends and keeping company, conversing with their equals (whom they term gossips) and their neighbours, and in making merry with them at child-births, christenings, churchings and funerals; and all this with the permission of their husbands as such is the custom.7
Compared to the heavy workload shouldered by a farmer’s wife, life as a glover’s wife should have been easy. Instead of Mary’s having to rise early to milk her cows or (more likely) ewes, milk, along with butter, cheese and eggs, would have been brought to her door. With alehouses and bakeries in every street, she had no need to brew or bake. When it was time to wash the beds, three or four times a year, the laundress would have come to collect the linen. In Stratford Mary would have seen her sisters and their families more often than if she had been living in the country, whenever they came in from Aston Cantlow or Snitterfield or Wilmcote to market and her country cousins would have been only too happy to accept a job in her household or the glover’s shop if it meant living in town. When her husband became an alderman in 1565, Mary’s happiness must have been complete. She had lost her first two children, Joan and Margaret, but her third, William, was a bonny boy who had survived the visitation of plague that raged for six months of the first year of his life.
The fact that John Shakespeare held high office in the Corporation has been treated as a sign of his success in business, when it was more probably the cause of his failure. Other Stratford businessmen did not share his eagerness for promotion and preferred to pay a fine rather than give their time and energy unpaid to the Corporation. William Smith, haberdasher and mercer, refused to take up the alderman’s place vacated by John Shakespeare in 1586, and would not pay the fine of £3 6s 8d either.8 Thomas Dixon alias Waterman, keeper of the Swan Inn, was sued in Chancery in 1571 for refusing to serve as an alderman and when he did accept an alderman’s place in 1584 and was elected bailiff, he once again refused the office and incurred another fine.9 Shakespeare’s neighbour Abraham Sturley twice refused to serve on the Corporation.10 John Shakespeare took on a succession of onerous public offices, and overstretched himself in business to the point of breaking; perhaps his courtship of his father’s landlord’s daughter is of a piece with the temerity that made him acquire freehold property before he had a wife, and to indulge in wool-dealing on a large scale rather than concentrating on his gloving business.
The marriage manuals warned men against marrying a woman richer and better connected than themselves on the ground that the wife who had come down in the world would never rest easy but would be constantly comparing her present state with what might have been. The woman John Shakespeare chose for his wife was proud of her descent from one of the oldest Warwickshire families, the Ardens of Park Hall, but her pride seems misplaced, for no direct relationship with the Arden Hall family can be traced. Mary Shakespeare may have been something of a social climber, goading her husband to seek gentility rather than agreeing to work beside him at his chosen trade.
Whittawing and glove-making was a smelly, messy business. When glover William Hobday died in Stratford in December 1601, his inventory included:
202 dozen of sheep’s leather in the pits…
[that is, softening in a solution of dung or urine]
19 of bucks’ leather in the pits…
16 calfskins in the pits…
ten doeskins in the hair…
six horsehides ready dressed…
two dozen of deer’s leather and 15 Irish skins
13 dozen of calves’ leather ready dressed
104 dozen of sheep’s leather and 104 dozen of lambs’ leather ready dressed
five dozen and odd of sheep’s leather that is tanned
Half an hundred of sheep’s leather in the alum and eight dozen of lining with seventeen dogskins and other broken leather…11
Suppose that Mary gradually weaned Shakespeare off the whittawing and glove-making business and encouraged him to deal in wool instead, neither of them was experienced enough in commerce to realise that the world was changing. The wool trade was gradually and rather patchily coming under government control; stern punishments would soon be meted out to traders who were found to have evaded government regulation.
The Holy Trinity parish register shows the baptism of a ‘Joan Shakespeare daughter to John Shakespeare’ on 15 September 1558. It also shows another ‘Joan the daughter of John Shakespeare’ who was baptised on 15 April 1569. The explanation usually given is that the older Joan must have died and her name been recycled for a later-born sister, as was not uncommon. But the burial of the older Joan does not appear in the register. Another explanation could be that there were two Joans born eleven years apart to two Johns, one of whom moved away. Further support for this view comes from the fact that the elder Joan’s christening on 15 September 1558 is followed by a gap of more than four years in births to anyone called John Shakespeare. Margaret Shakespeare, christened on 2 December 1562, may have been our John Shakespeare’s first-born child; she is followed by William in April 1564, Gilbert in October 1566, Joan in April 1569, Ann in September 1571, Richard in March 1574, and then a hiatus before Edmund in 1580. Six births in the first twelve years of marriage, with a seventh after six years, is a fairly typical reproductive career of the period, when lactation was the usual limiting factor, either because it depressed ovulation or because abstinence was practised while a mother was breast-feeding, or both. A longer interval, caused by the mother’s declining fertility, is more likely to appear between the second-last and the last child than between the first and the second. If our suspicions about the two Joans are correct, Shakespeare’s parents could have married at any time after Mary’s father’s death in November 1556 and before Margaret’s birth at the end of November 1562. If Mary was of age when she proved her father’s will in 1556 she must have been born in about 1540. She was thus only eighteen years older than her eldest son’s wife, and she was at least ten years younger than her husband who was probably born before 1530, given the fact that he became a
householder in 1552.
We can only imagine Mary’s terror for her newborn son William when, within two months of his birth, plague broke out in Stratford and raged until the end of the year. Somehow the Shakespeare family escaped the mortality. What followed seems to have been a happy time, as John Shakespeare’s affairs prospered and he rose steadily through the ranks of the Corporation. In 1568 he was elected to the highest office, that of bailiff. With it came the rank of justice of the peace, with the task of issuing warrants, investigating and deciding cases of debt and violation of by-laws, and negotiating with the lord of the manor. He was also almoner, coroner, escheater and clerk of the market. In Dekker’s play, The Shoemakers’ Holiday, when Simon Eyre becomes Sheriff of London, he gives up shoe-making, saying to his wife:
See here, my Maggy, a chain, a gold chain for Simon Eyre. I shall make thee a lady. Here’s a French hood for thee. On with it! On with it! Dress thy brows with this flap of a shoulder of mutton to make thee look lovely. Where be my fine men? Roger, I’ll make over my shop and tools to thee. Firke, thou shalt be the foreman. Hans, thou shalt have an hundred for twenty…How dost thou like me, Marjorie? Prince am I none, yet I am princely borne…12
When it was John Shakespeare’s turn to step down as bailiff, he went on giving his time to the Corporation, serving as deputy to the new bailiff. In January 1572 he rode with him to London on Corporation business, which suggests that he was not spending much time in his glover’s shop.
Perhaps because he had borrowed money to purchase the freeholds that were part of his marriage settlement, John Shakespeare put himself under pressure to make money fast. In his eagerness he cut too many corners. In 1570 he was prosecuted for usury because he had illegally lent two sums, £80 and £100, at a swingeing £20 interest in each case. In 1572, on information supplied by a criminal and professional informer called John Langrake, John Shakespeare was prosecuted for dealing in wool. As a whittawer, who bought sheepskins to whiten and soften for sewing, he also had access to fleeces, which he had been storing in his woolshop and selling on for twenty years. By 1572 he had built up a considerable business, unmindful of the fact that, as dealing in wool was the monopoly of the Merchants of the Staple, he had been trading illegally. He was charged with buying two and a half tons of wool in Westminster for £140 and a ton and a quarter in Snitterfield at the same rate. Three of the four charges remained unproven—but the cumulative effect of the prosecution and subsequent process on John Shakespeare’s business career was to be disastrous. Wool shortages in the 1570s had led to a suspicion that illegal traders were buying up the clips and withholding them from the market until prices rose. In October 1576 the Privy Council called all wool brokers to testify before it, with the result that in November all dealing in wool was suspended. Traders identified as illegal were ordered to post bonds of £100 as surety against any further infringement of the law. John Shakespeare was ruined.
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