Shakespeare’s Family Shakespeare’s Family Author Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

Unless otherwise noted, intellectual copyright in EMEE Anthology pages is held by Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Kate McPherson, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Daily Life Children Inheritance Money Parents Published file. Updated metadata proofed added figure and biblio updated author respStmt. Added date, pubPlace, and publisher tags to sources Created File. Michael Best Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

 Leah Hamby Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

 Navarra Houldin Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

 Kate McPherson Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

 LEMDO Team The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors. University of Victoria https://www.uvic.ca/
A print depicting a family sat around the dinner table. There is four adults on the far side of the table and two smaller figures representing children on the near side. One of the small figures, a girl in a dress, stands on a stool to reach the food. Various dishes are placed around the table. A prosperous early modern family with children. Figure taken from the Roxburghe Ballads, Volume 1(1873). Courtesy of the University of Victoria. Public Domain.
Father, John Shakespeare (1531–1601)

Although few records exist for Shakespeare’s youth, a fair amount of information has survived about his father, a glove-maker who also held a number of public offices over a twenty-year period, ranging from borough ale-taster to alderman (like a city council member) to high bailiff (the equivalent of mayor). Stratford was a market center for the county of Warwickshire in the rural heartland of England and a major center for the wool trade, England’s most profitable product, so holding the position of high baliff was an important marker of respect and influence.

Records of his business dealings and legal transactions indicate that John Shakespeare became a prosperous man through buying and selling wool, hides, leather, and land, as well as investing in property that he leased. He was twice fined for usury, meaning he charged interest on loans greater than the law allowed. His ability to lend large sums of money in the 1570s (£220, the equivalent of tens of thousands of pounds) indicates his success as a businessman.

About 1577, when William was 13, John Shakespeare suffered financial setbacks and ceased to play a part in local government. In 1575, John Shakespeare was wealthy enough to buy two houses, but by 1577 he had stopped attending council meetings, although he was an alderman. In 1578, he mortgaged a property of his wife’s and sold her share in another. Later, he faced various fines and lost his position as alderman. In 1592, he was listed among those who failed to attend church for fearre of process for debtte, although other reasons for church avoidance may be possible.

Some scholars assert that John Shakespeare’s wool trade prospered from the mid-1580s onward, which may have supplied William’s funding for his purchase of a share in the Lord Chamberlain’s men. Some speculation exists that ties William’s move to London to the family’s thriving wool business.

In 1596, John Shakespeare applied for and was granted a coat of arms, which made him and his family members of the gentry. In 1597, William bought the splendid house New Place on the main street of Stratford. It seems likely that William’s success as a shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in London allowed him to restore some of his father’s fortunes.

Some doubts exist about John Shakespeare’s religion, specifically about whether he truly converted to the Church of England as was required by law in 16th century England. In 1757, a six-page document with his signature on each page was found in the rafters of the Henley Street house in which William was born and the family lived for decades. It is a Catholic testament of faith. The document was examined at the time by the scholar Edmund Malone and he asserted it was a Tudor document, but doubted it belong to the playwright’s father. The original document was subsequently lost and most scholars came to believe it a forgery. However, in the 20th century, versions of similar documents with identical wording were discovered, one in Spanish and another printed version in English from 1634 of a testament written by a Spanish cardinal. John’s signature, combined with these other copies of similar testaments, seems to indicate that John Shakespeare’s failure to attend church in the early 1590s may have been because he wanted to avoid taking Holy Communion in a Protestant church.

John Shakespeare died in 1601 in the same town in which he’d been born and lived.

Mother, Mary Arden (1537–1608)

Shakespeare’s mother was born Mary Arden, the daughter of a well-to-do landowner in a lesser branch of an aristocratic family. The family gave its name to the nearby Forest of Arden, the setting of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. She was raised in Wilmcote, a few miles outside Stratford. She later inherited the family’s farmhouse there, a home built in 1514 and altered significantly since that time. That house and a neighboring, larger property, Palmer’s Farm (once called Mary Arden’s House), are owned by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. They are operated as museums demonstrating 16th century rural and agricultural life.

She married John Shakespeare when she was about 20 years old and bore him eight children. Little else is known about her, and no portrait of her has been identified. It is typical of the period that, though many references to John Shakespeare’s business and legal activities survive, only the date of Mary Shakespeare’s burial (9 September 1608) was recorded. She left no will.

Siblings: Joan, born 1558, died before 1569. Margaret, born 1562, died 1563 (aged 5 months). William, born 1564, died 1616. Gilbert, born 1566, haberdasher, died 1612. (A haberdasher sells hats, clothes, thread, ribbons, etc.) Joan, born 1569, married William Hart, died 1646. William left his sister all his wearing Apparrell and the house with the appurtenances in Stratford wherein she dwelleth. Anne, born 1571, died 1579. Richard, born 1574, occupation unknown, died 1613. Edmund, born 1580, player, died 1607.
Key Print Sources Bearman, Robert. John Shakespeare: A Papist or Just Penniless? Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 4, Winter 2005, pp.411–433. The Shakespeare Circle: An Alternative Biography. Ed. Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells. Cambridge University Press, 2015. Wood, Michael. Shakespeare. Basic Books, 2003.
Key Online Sources Bearman, Robert. Parish Register Entry Recording John Shakespeare’s Burial. Shakespeare Documented, 22 May 2020, https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/node/465. Bearman, Robert. Parish Register Entry Recording Mary Arden Shakespeare’s Burial. Shakespeare Documented, 22 May 2020, https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/node/469. Best, Michael. Shakespeare’s Family. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/life/childhood/family.html. Accessed 3 Mar. 2023. Sheir, Rebecca and Brian Cummings, hosts. The Story of My Life from Year to Year. Shakespeare Unlimited, Episode 22, Folger Shakespeare Library, 8 Apr. 2015, Folger Shakespeare Library, https://www.folger.edu/podcasts/shakespeare-unlimited/shakespeare-unlimited-episode-22/.
Key Image Sources Hinley, Charles. Print of a Family Around a Table. Roxburghe Ballads. Vol. 1. Reeves and Turner, 1873. 116.