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

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 themarket. 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 calledall 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