Shakespeare's Wife by Germaine Greer Read Free Book Online Page A

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 thewife 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:
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    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
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    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 wasbaptised 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