The Shakespeares

This chapter uses new evidence to put John Shakespeare’s business career into a national political context for the first time, presenting a completely new narrative of his well-known Exchequer Court cases. It explains the overlooked limitations of the Exchequer documents previously used to describe his prosecutions for wool-dealing and usury from 1569 to 1572, and introduces an entirely different series of documents, the Exchequer writ files, which reveal that two significant cases against John continued into the 1580s. Other records show that by 1572 John had defaulted on a bond to the Exchequer for £133. Though they require careful interpretation, and through losses may underestimate the extent of John’s problems, the writ files connect his troubles to a national and parliamentary political scandal, which prompted Lord Burghley and others to seek to ‘reform’ the corrupt informer system, against the opposition of vested interests at Court, including the queen, and in the Exchequer. Really designed to protect the queen’s financial interests, Burghley’s administrative changes deepened John’s financial predicament by diminishing his chances of bribing his way out of trouble. By 1577 John was publicly identified as a Crown debtor, unable to pay his bond and therefore unable to participate in the local credit system, which led to his social and political decline in Stratford. Records from the early 1580s, when William became an adult, show how far his father had declined under assault from a system intended to protect the interests of the wealthy and powerful rather than equitable justice.