Free Shakespeare: A Life by Park Honan Page A

'excepted' and had to pay only 3 s. 4 d. (just half the amount levied on other aldermen). He was excused from
paying a fine for being absent on election day, in 1578, and excused
again that November from paying 4 d. weekly towards poor relief. 'm r John shaxpeare', it was ordered, 'shall not be taxed to paye any thinge'. 19 It would be wrong for us to suppose that he avoided council meetings only because he feared trouble as a Catholic, at any rate. Incurring debts
and lacking cash, he was able to raise £40 in 1579 by mortgaging a
house and 56 acres at Wilmcote to his wife's brother-in-law Edmund
Lambert, to whom he owed money. When the borrowed £40 fell due, John
could not pay it -- and so Lambert held the property until he
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died, after which John tried in vain to recover it from Lambert's heir,
whom he sued at the court of the Queen's Bench. Later he renewed his
effort in the court of Chancery, but John and Mary Shakespeare never
did get back their land, which was a part of the Arden inheritance.
    John had dealt illegally in a wool trade that relied much on credit. It
is clear from borough records that he lacked ready cash to pay
creditors after the assault on broggers, and that his colleagues freed
him from fines, cut normal levies, and dropped him as an alderman
after his nine years' absence (during which he appeared once to vote
for his friend John Sadler as bailiff): 'm r , Shaxpere dothe not Come to halles when they be warned nor hathe not done of Longe tyme', as a clerk wrote in 1586. 20 John was concerned with self-preservation, and his long avoidance of
halls may not be wholly attributable to a fear of debt. He kept his
head down, it would seem, partly because he feared questions about his
beliefs and background; and he was disgraced by absences before the
town council expelled him. Yet he was not sent to ruin. He was in
business or speculating after being dropped by the council, and in his
last years was looking into toll-corn or pursuing Lambert's heir. As
late as 1599 he tried to recover a thirty-year-old debt for 21 tods
(588 lb.) of wool from John Walford, a clothier of Wiltshire and thrice
mayor of Marlborough; and he was slow to give up a glover's shop.
    Shakespeare 'was a glovers son', Thomas Plume, Archdeacon of
Rochester, records around 1657 (and is thus more accurate than early
biographers in identifying the poet's father's trade), ' -- Sir John
Mennis saw once his old Father in his shop -- a merry Cheekd old man
-- that said -- Will was a good Honest Fellow, but he durst have crakt
a jeast [or jest] with him at any time'. 21 ( Mennis was born in 1599 and could not have recalled a glover who died
in 1601, but may have quoted someone else who heard and recalled John
Shakespeare.)
    That report of a
merry-cheeked old man who jests with his son is credible, and John was
not broken in 1576. In between William's twelfth and thirteenth
birthdays, the father's behaviour simply changed. After being an
honoured town servant, John became an absentee, plagued by threats of
creditors and informers, and needing help rather than giving it. He
was in shadow, and his household had less money but more mouths to
feed. William's parents had named a
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second child Joan Shakespeare on 15 April 1569. She was the only one
of their four daughters to survive childhood. Their last daughter,
Anne, was baptized on 28 September 1571, and buried at the age of 7.
Their son Richard was taken to the baptismal font at Holy Trinity on
11 March 1574, and their last child, Edmund, on 3 May 1580.
    These births accentuated an eldest son's pride of place, and, far
from being displaced in the family, William thrived. His well-being
appears in his later dedicatory letters to his patron and also in light
jokes and allusive, affectionate mockery -- all of which seem to point
back to happiness, self-love, and his family pride in the Stratford
years. No deep distaste for Stratford would