Shakespeare: A Life by Park Honan

with a father's wishes is not enough. Cordelia's mere
dutifulness drives Lear to rage, and Desdemona's cold subservience
numbs her father's heart, before we hear that grief 'shore his old
thread in twain' ( V. ii. 213) when she defies him to marry the Moor.
Filial love motivates Prince Hal, but it compounds Hamlet's anguish, and
Macbeth's crime is the worse for its implicit and terrible element of
parricide.
    Moreover, no son is immune to a father's particular, idiosyncratic
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influence, and John Shakespeare was an impressive and versatile man.
By and large, he pulled himself up by his bootstraps. His father
Richard Shakespeare was probably born a few miles to the north, either
at Balsall, Baddesley Clinton, Wroxall, or Rowington, the last a hive
of Catholics and the home of more sixteenth-century Shakespeares than
any other Warwickshire parish. It is certain that by 1529 Richard was a
husbandman at Snitterfield -- his name is copied as 'Shakstaff' four
years later -- and that he rented a house of Robert Arden that 'doth
abut on the High Street'. 5 After his death his goods in 1561 were valued at £38 17 s. o d. (a sum befitting a prudent farmer) and his estate's administration
went to his son John, who was relying on his own acumen and skill. Our
earliest report of John in connection with a craft (when he is called 'Johannem Shakyspere de Stretforde, in comitatu Warwicensi,
glover', on 7 June 1556, at the Court of Record) suggests that he was
by then independent of his father. A glover acquired a fine touch
after seven years' apprenticeship; cutting soft leather 'tranks' is an
art, and holed leather is not repairable. John had to be shrewd to be
free for civic duties, and his town service suggests an almost feudal
commitment. He broadened his money-making ventures, as many craftsmen
did, while competing with master glovers at Stratford and indirectly
at Worcester and Oxford; in fact, in records of 1573 and 1578 he is
also described as a 'whyttawer'. A whittawer (or white-tawyer) would
buy pelts from butchers or other sellers, boil some of his sheepskins
to make size to fill pores, tan the skins of goats, deer and other
animals with salt and alum (aluminium sulphate), hang them out in his
drying-sheds, and then shave them with paring knives and 'stake' the
skins to render them soft -- all before cutting, sewing, and finishing
a product.
    Without helpers, John
could not have turned a profit, and his son had a chance to learn that
success in a craft depends on co-operation as well as painstaking
care. Tudor boys were made to emulate, and almost to revere, skilled
male and female artisans, ★ and a wealth of
____________________
★
But a skilled female sewer of leather tranks, for example, often earned
appreciably less than a male sewer; it has been estimated that about
half of London's apprentices in the crafts and trades were female.
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gloving images in the plays suggests that William knew his father's craft well. In The Merry Wives ,
Slender swears 'by these gloves', and Mistress Quickly enquires of
him, 'Does he not wear a great round beard, like a glover's
paring-knife?', Romeo exclaims to his lady aloft, 'O, that I were a
glove upon that hand', and Romeo's rash, wittiest friend understands
the pliable, soft quality of kid-skin -- or cheveril -used for the best,
costliest gloves: 'O, here's a wit of cheveril, that stretches from
an inch narrow to an ell broad', says Mercutio. 'Hang nothing but a
calf's skin', mocks the Bastard in King John, and allusions to
sheep-skin, lamb-skin, fox-skin, dog-skin, and deer-skin in the plays
might conjure up a whittawer's drying-shed.
    Any craft demanded all of the self, very strong commitment or le cœur au métier for a part of the day, a principle not quite inconsistent with John
Shakespeare's occupying himself, too, with grain, timber, and wool.
Tudor work was suffused with spiritual significance and William was to
plunge