Shakespeare's Wife by Germaine Greer Read Free Book Online

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