William of Stratford Part 1: 'To You Your Father Should Be As a God’

**Philip Rowe** (0:09)
Welcome to The History Of European Theatre podcast, and thanks for joining me on this journey through millennia of theatrical history. Episode 117, William Of Stratford, Part 1, To You Your Father Should Be As A God.
Last time, with the Shakespeare timeline, I completed the introductory episodes to this season. Now it's into the detail, with a series of episodes on the life of William Shakespeare. Many people find it difficult to reconcile the greatest grammatist of England being the son of the countryside, rather than a metropolitan or a well-travelled scion of the gentry. So it's worth having a look back as far as we can into William Of Stratford's family and his origins.
In previous episodes, I have talked about the many very significant changes that were happening in society through the upheavals that began in the reign of Henry VIII and continued up to and beyond the interregnum. And I will touch on some of those again here, but if you need a reminder of the detail, you could flip back to the early episodes of Season 5 William was born into a changing world and in many respects a troubled one, where core beliefs and traditions were being questioned and overturned. But these changes also affected his father's and his grandfather's generations. Thankfully, we can start before William's birth in 1564, as there are some records that point to his ancestry. A few miles from Stratford is the village of Snitterfield, where William's grandfather, Richard, kept livestock on rented land. He was born in 1490, in the north of the county, but spent his working life in Snitterfield. Records there suggest that he was settled in the small community by 1529, where he had to pay a fine of two pence for not maintaining his hedges in proper order. This was not a particularly serious offence. There are many records of farmers being fined for not maintaining their boundaries properly. But had he not paid the fine, he would have had to travel to the semi-annual court in Warwick, some six miles away, to answer for his actions.
He's also recorded as being present as a witness to value goods of deceased locals, a role taken when the deceased person was in debt to the appraiser, and as a jury member in a local land dispute. So it seems fair to say that he was at least comfortably off and off some standing in the local community. When he died in February 1561, his own estate was valued at 38 pounds, a respectable enough sum to leave behind you at the time, perhaps being equivalent to 15,000 pounds today. But certainly nowhere anywhere near the super-rich heights that his grandson would reach.
Richard had two sons, the elder of whom, John, born about 1531, would marry the daughter of Robert Arden, the man who Richard rented his family home and attached farmlands from. The other son, Henry, appears to have been a troubled man, who turns up in the records several times being fined for offences relating to the upkeep of his boundaries of his farmland that he rented, for a brawl, for trespass, for refusing to join locals charged with maintaining the highway, and for wearing a hat rather than a cap to church. That last one might sound petty, but the Suntory laws were strict and there could have been an element of protest about his choice of wearing the wrong sort of hat to church. This was at a time when laws were introduced enforcing the wearing of caps in an effort to support the English wool trade. Many of Puritan leanings objected to the enforcement and hence the protests. Henry was, nevertheless, a successful farmer and died relatively wealthy.
John Shakespeare elected not to farm and sometime around 1550 moved to Stratford and became a glover, not formally an apprentice as there was no Glovers Guild at the time, but no doubt training under an expert in the creation of gloves from soft leather that was specially cured for the purpose. As a dresser of white leather, he would have prepared the hides of deer, sheep and horses after the initial tanning process to further soften them. He would then cut and sew the leather not only into gloves, but into aprons and belts and other soft leather goods. The trade was probably a good one, and a steady one, appealing to higher end customers as well as providing for some more day to day needs of the townsfolk. The trade was protected by Act of Parliament, so it didn't suffer any of the foreign competition that was a problem for some other trades.
We know that John was in Stratford by 1552 because it was then that he was fined for not maintaining his household spoil in the communal middenheap. The records of the Leit Court translated from Latin say, Item, the jurors present under their oath that Humphrey Reynolds, Adrian Quinney and John Shakespeare make a middenheap in the place called Henry Street against the ordinance of the court, therefore they are fined as so it appears. And against each name appears the sum of twelve pence. John and the others were not alone in that offence. Many Stratford residents were fined in a similar way over the years, but this has been taken as one of the indications that John could turn a blind eye to the rules.