Shakespeare's Wife (5 page)

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.

If Mary Shakespeare had been an astute businesswoman she might have been able to slow down or even halt John Shakespeare's downhill career. In all discussions of the woeful succession of court cases, fines, defaultings and confusion that is John Shakespeare's professional history, he is treated as a lone man, because most scholars have assumed that in the late sixteenth century wives played no part in the family business. An Elizabethan wife was first and foremost a helpmeet.

The realm of work was…divided into two parts. What the man did was definite, well-defined, limited—let's call it A. What the woman did was everything else—non-A. So the realm of work was divided without residue…According to this, for example, if a man was a glover, his work was clearly defined and anything else that had to be done to keep the home fires burning was his wife's duty. If he became ill, and could do less and less, then she must do more and more, supervising the apprentices, seeing that the orders were fulfilled; or even by some employment, like taking in washing, she must supplement a failing business.
¹³

Deloney gives an example in his tale of a draper whose business failed.

Thus lay the poor draper a long time in prison, in which space, his wife which for daintiness would not foul her fingers, or turn her head aside for fear of hurting the set of her neckerchief, was glad to go about and wash bucks at the Thames side, and to be a char-woman in rich men's houses, her soft hand now hardened with scouring and, instead of gold rings on her lily-white fingers, they were now filled with chaps, provoked by the sharp, lye, and other drudgeries.
¹⁴

The Stratford mercer Richard Quiney was in London on Corporation business for most of the autumn of 1598. His father wrote to him on 20 October: ‘Your wife [is] careful and maketh all means she can to
satisfy both your credits.'
¹⁵
In fact Bess Quiney was sending her husband goods to sell, twenty and thirty pounds of cheeses, large and small, at a time, and tobacco, as well as homemade foods for himself. She was also borrowing and lending money, and managing her rental property. On 18 November Quiney's colleague Abraham Sturley wrote:

Also she would have you buy some raisins, currants, pepper, sugar and some other groceries if the price be reasonable and that you may have carriage reasonable…I wish you to remember you shall receive from your wife by Greenaway [the carrier] 12d. She has been selling wheat and malt and by borrowing discharged Mr Coles, Shaw and others and is very careful for to pay her borrowed money. She hath 7d but 20 shillings of Mr Parsons also she hopeth that my Lady Greville hath writ to Sir Edward concerning the £20 which he hopeth Sir Edward hath allowed you.
¹⁶

In Stratford cash was always in short supply. Nobody took the risk of carrying cash between Stratford and London; instead Stratford merchants usually bought from London merchants on credit that was reciprocated for London merchants in Stratford. Bess Quiney regularly ran out of ready money and had to borrow, and her husband did too. The difference was that they never borrowed more than they knew they could repay. John Shakespeare's situation would perhaps have been less grave if, while he was working unpaid for the Corporation, Mary had been running the gloving business, filling his orders, organising the preparing of skins and the manufacture and delivery of gloves, and keeping his accounts. If she had been playing her part, it's hard to believe that John Shakespeare could have so overstretched himself as to lose everything, including the estate she brought him. It looks very much as if, in John Shakespeare's case, nobody was minding the shop. It may have been Mary's distaste for the messy manual labour of gloving and whittawing that convinced John to earn more money faster and less filthily by dealing in wool. All the other successful businessmen in Stratford hedged their investments by diversifying, but they were careful not to neglect their core business.

Mary was certainly pregnant half the time and feeding an infant the other half, but so were all the other Stratford wives who had to run the family business when the goodman was away, including Bess Quiney. Mary may have been delicate and have struggled through her pregnancies, but the record does not support such an impression. Either Mary endured eight pregnancies over twenty-four years, or, if we discount the earlier Joan, seven pregnancies over nineteen years for five surviving children. The two who died did not die in the perinatal period; Margaret died at five months old and Ann just before her eighth birthday. As reproductive careers go, this is less intensive and shorter than most. Ann Shakespeare's friend Judith Sadler was to endure fourteen pregnancies over twenty-four years and only seven of her babies lived beyond infancy. If Mary Shakespeare did not assist her husband in the management of his affairs it was not pregnancy and childbirth that impeded her, nor yet ill health.

In 1572 John Shakespeare brought an action in the Court of Common Pleas in Westminster against a glover in Banbury who owed him £50, and won for once. When he and another were then sued by one Henry Higford of Solihull for defaulting on repayment of a loan and found liable for £30, they were unable to pay. The debt was still outstanding in 1578. Such ducking and diving may have been typical of an emerging merchant class that bought cheap often on credit and bided its time before selling dear. John Shakespeare's brother Henry was another who was extremely slow to pay his debts and he died a relatively wealthy man, but John Shakespeare was sailing far too close to the wind. By 1577 he was staying away from meetings of the council of aldermen. When the council agreed to a levy to pay for equipping soldiers, they assessed Alderman Shakespeare at a mere burgess's rate of three shillings and four pence. More than a year later he still hadn't paid it.
¹⁷
In 1578 he incurred a fine by failing to show up for the vote on election day but was excused payment.
¹⁸
When it was agreed that all the aldermen should pay four pence towards poor relief, he was excused again.
¹⁹
Everybody knew he was broke.

The presumption that Will stayed at school until he was fifteen is simply that, a presumption. The records of the King's New School of Stratford-upon-Avon have not survived. Schoenbaum's ‘reasonable
enough supposition that William was apprenticed in his father's shop' after he left school is not as reasonable as it might seem.
²⁰
There was little point in giving a boy a grammar school education if the ultimate intention was to apprentice him to a manual trade. Will was unlikely to have been apprenticed to his father, because the master was expected to exercise a degree of rigour in dealing with his apprentices that was incompatible with fatherly feeling. Apprentices were often whipped or beaten; it would not have done for the child's mother to be a witness to such correction. It seems moreover that in 1579, when his son was fifteen, John Shakespeare, being a defaulting debtor, was in no position to take an apprentice. If Will had been apprenticed to a fellow glover, he would have been indentured for seven years, during which time he was not free to pay his addresses to any woman. As a junior apprentice he would have been held to a full-time regimen of menial tasks and could not have been wandering off to Shottery whenever he felt like it—supposing his father had been able to find him a master in Stratford and had had the cash needed to pay for the indentures and for his board and lodging, which he probably didn't. There is never any suggestion at any point in the Shakespeare family history of Mary's participation in deciding her children's futures. What is odd is that there appear to have been no decisions made. The family seems to have been left to drift.

In 1576 or so, with his world crashing round his ears, John Shakespeare made an application for a grant of arms. He had been Master Shakespeare ever since his election as an alderman, but this did not entitle his wife to the title Mistress, which as a descendant of the Park Hall Ardens she may have believed she deserved. One of Mary's motives for urging Shakespeare to put so much time into working for the Corporation could have been her awareness that, according to the experts,