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calls ‘Unfortunate Generall French History’ on 7 and 10 January 1603 and two more of forty shillings on 16 and 19 January to Hathway, Smith and Day for the same play. 27 We last hear of Richard Hathway, playwright, as one of the authors of the second part of ‘The Black Dog of Newgate’ with ‘John Day and Master Smith and the other poet’, for a total of £7 paid on 29 January and 3 February.
    Then Hathway disappears from the record, annihilated possibly by the plague of 1604. He would not be the only kinsman of William Shakespeare who struggled to make a living in the London theatre and failed. What chills is the recollection that, in 1598, Francis Meres in Wit’s Treasury had named Richard Hathway as one of the best comedy-writers of his day. Though he had a hand in no fewer than nineteen plays Hathway is nowadays utterly forgotten. Henslowe became a very wealthy man, while his writers toiled ceaselessly toavoid destitution and imprisonment for debt, often without success. In 1600 Henslowe was obliged to lend Hathway’s colleague William Haughton ten shillings to secure his release from imprisonment in the Clink. Henry Chettle was continually in debt to Henslowe and in 1599 was imprisoned in the Marshalsea for debt. On 3 March 1607 he was so desperate for money that he pawned his playscript and gave Henslowe the pawn ticket instead.
    A week before the Shakespeares were granted their special licence from the Consistory Court at Worcester, a similar licence was granted by the Bishop of London to the Curate of St Bartholomew near the Royal Exchange for the marriage of Richard Hathway of the parish of St Lawrence Jury, gentleman, and Ann Maddox of London, maiden, with only one announcing of the banns. 28 A gentleman who was of an age to marry in 1582 is frankly unlikely to have taken to writing for the stage sixteen years later, but in 1598 Meres wrote as if Hathway was already an established writer. It is not impossible, of course, that Richard Hathway, gentleman, came down in the world and was eventually forced to make use of his education in writing for the stage. This is after all what befell Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe. A good deal more work would have to be done tracing the Hathaways and their affines before we could rule out—or in—a connection of the Warwickshire Hathaways with the stage. What is curious is that most commentators are so convinced that the playwright Hathway could have no connection whatever with Shakespeare’s wife that they do not trouble themselves to eliminate the possibility, which remains.

 
    CHAPTER TWO
    introducing the Shakespeare family, with particular attention to the Bard’s mother and her role in the oft-told story of the downfall of John Shakespeare
    Most accounts of Shakespeare’s family concentrate on the catastrophic downhill career of his father, from its high point in 1568 when he was Bailiff of Stratford to its nadir when he was unable to put his nose outside the house for fear his creditors would seize his body in lieu of payment and drag him off to prison. In the reign of Elizabeth, if the existence of a debt had been proved in a court of law, and the debtor still refused payment, creditors had the right of summary arrest of the debtor who would languish in prison till he found someone who could pay what he owed or until he died, whichever happened sooner. This right was seldom exerted, because most people realised that a man in gaol can do little to satisfy his creditors. Even so, John Shakespeare spent years under virtual house arrest; having turned all his assets into ready cash, which sank into a morass of debt and defalcation, he had barely a house to hide his head in.
    John Shakespeare’s tortuous tale is well known; no one has ever looked at those events from the point of view of his wife. Studies of genius tell us that for gifted boys mothers are far more influential than fathers. Richard III explains the