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precociousness of the little Duke of York as the effect of his mother’s influence.
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    O, ’tis a parlous boy,
    Bold, quick, ingenious, forward, capable.
    He is all the mother’s, from the top to toe.
    Richard III , III. i. 154–6
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    Mary Shakespeare was the person who taught the most eloquent Englishman who ever lived the use of his native tongue. The first metres Shakespeare ever heard were chanted by her. As a young woman her charm was sufficient to win her father’s most valuable property, to the disadvantage of her seven elder sisters, but by 1582, when Ann Hathaway would have encountered her as a prospective mother-in-law, the bitterness of Mary’s disappointment may well have eclipsed her charm.
    In the 1550s when he first came a-wooing John Shakespeare seemed the ideal choice for an eventual paterfamilias. First and foremost he was a glover, a trade protected by law. The incorporation of Stratford in 1553 afforded local tradesmen great opportunities for accumulating power. By 1556 John Shakespeare was already one of two official ale-tasters, whose job it was to check not only that the ale and beer on sale were wholesome but also that loaves were the correct weight. In 1558 he was sworn one of the four constables responsible for law and order. The next year he took on the job of setting fines at the Court Leet, and soon after was elected a burgess. In 1561 he was elected one of two chamberlains who administered borough property and revenues, a job he held for years, even through the visitation of the plague in 1564, when he was elected alderman. John Shakespeare married late—he was past seventy when he died in 1601, and the earliest we can date his marriage is about 1557. 1 The bride he chose was Mary Arden, youngest daughter of his father’s landlord in Snitterfield. Misogynist tradition can be relied upon to credit a mother with all the qualities that a wife lacks. Mary Shakespeare is therefore assumed to have been comely, virtuous and adoring. When she married John Shakespeare, Mary Arden was much younger than her husband, and, as her father’s favourite, with a succession of older sisters to indulge her, she was probably spoiled rotten.
    Though Mary Shakespeare’s father, Robert Arden, described himself as a husbandman, he built up a considerable estate. To the freehold he inherited in Snitterfield, he added another that he acquired from the heirs of William Harvey, and latterly the lands brought to him by Agnes Hill, the young widow of John Hill of Bearley, whom he married in 1548. The relevant records of Arden’s parish church, St John the Baptist in Aston Cantlow, have notsurvived, but we know from Arden’s will that he had children by a former wife or wives; at the time of his death he had eight daughters of his own, and four rather younger stepchildren. 2 In 1550 (probably at the time of his marriage to Agnes Hill), Arden conveyed the house and land in Snitterfield to trustees; he and his wife were to have the use of it for their lives, whereafter it was to be divided among three of his married daughters, Joan Lambert, Agnes Stringer and Katherine Edkins. 3 Joan was married to Edmund Lambert and was living at Barton on the Heath (fifteen miles south of Stratford), where she would remain for the rest of her life. Her husband was buried at Barton in April 1587, and she in November 1593. Agnes Arden had been the widow of John Hewyns of Bearley when she married Thomas Stringer (also of Bearley) in October 1550. She died before 1569. Katherine Arden was married to Thomas Edkins of Wilmcote. The Harvey freehold was also placed in a trust to be divided in due course between three of his younger daughters, Margaret Webbe and Joyce and Alice Arden. Margaret was married to her father’s brother-in-law, Alexander Webbe of Bearley.
    The preamble of Robert Arden’s will drawn up in November 1556, has been interpreted as an indication that the Snitterfield