Shakespeare's Wife (22 page)

There were no knights and only one esquire among the parishioners at Holy Trinity and very few gentlemen. The wives of gentlemen who had the right to a coat of arms might wear kirtles of satin, as
well as gowns of damask, tufty taffeta, plain taffeta and grosgrain, but there were hardly enough of them in Stratford to keep a single mercer busy. Mercers did sell silks and velvets to people not qualified to wear them, thus enabling them ‘playerlike, in rich attires not fitting [their] estate' to counterfeit their betters and impose upon the public.
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Mercers supplied fabrics for making up by tailors, and were so often kept waiting for their money by spendthrift gallants that the ‘mercer's book' of outstanding debts was a byword. In
Measure for Measure
, among those languishing in prison is a gallant who has been put there by the mercer because he has not paid ‘for some four suits of peach-coloured satin' (IV. iii. 8–9).

The senior Stratford mercer was Thomas Phillips who had been master of the Guild of the Holy Cross in 1536; his daughter Elizabeth would marry a mercer, Richard Quiney, son of another founding alderman, also a mercer, Adrian Quiney. Adrian Quiney, bailiff in 1559, 1571 and 1582, managed the sale of the guild chapel vestments in 1571. When Quiney was elected bailiff for the third time in 1571 John Shakespeare served under him as head alderman; in Hilary Term the next year they travelled together to London. Quiney's second wife, whom he married in 1557, was the widow of another Stratford mercer, Laurence Baynton, whose son followed his profession. Charles Baynton is described as a mercer ‘in country term', meaning that he was also a grocer and fishmonger, in partnership with William Court, who sold everything from loaf sugar to gunpowder. Country mercers seem in fact to have dealt in all kinds of wares. Baynton sold the Corporation a pound of sugar to regale the justices in 1577
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and in 1579 at the time of the muster sold them gunpowder, ‘a pint of sallet oil' and ‘a girdle and hangles' in 1580 he sold the Corporation a girdle for John the tabor player, more ‘solett oil' and thirty-nine shillings and five pence worth of sugar loaves for New Year's gifts. In 1577 Adrian Quiney supplied the New Year's gifts for the farmer of tithes of Stratford at a cost of six shillings and eight pence; in 1579 he was paid sixteen pence for two ells of Southwich cloth and twice sold the Corporation twelve pounds of red lead at three pence a pound.
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William Smith, mercer and haberdasher, also supplied the Corporation with ‘red lead'. Mistress Quiney sold the Corporation a pound of ginger for twenty pence.
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In 1581 it was Adrian Quiney's
turn to sell the Corporation ‘a pint of sollett oil'. In 1583 William Smith shared with Charles Baynton the duty of supplying sugar.
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Mercery may have been the trade these men claimed to follow, but they seem to have spent most of their time working for the Corporation, and to have been trading in land and rents rather more than in mercery. The ascription mercer was itself unstable; Humphrey Plumley, bailiff in 1562 and 1574, is described at various times as a mercer, a yeoman and a draper. One of his associates was Robert Hynd, called a chapman in 1562 and haberdasher in his will of 1588. Hynd brought goods by packhorse from Birmingham and leased a shop at Shipston on Stour. The trade of haberdasher, especially one who travelled with his wares from fair to fair and market to market, seems indistinguishable from that of chapman or pedlar. William Rogers, married to the sister of Henry Walker, mercer, who was elected Bailiff of Stratford in 1607, 1624 and 1635, is variously described as a mercer and a victualler.

The inventory of Anne Lloyd, who died in Stratford in 1617, is unusual in that it itemises articles of apparel, which have been taken by the compiler to have been her own, when usually the testator's apparel was not itemised and listed merely as such. One of the two appraisers was John Smith, son of the mercer, and it seems altogether more likely that the inventory represents Lloyd's stock in trade as a dealer. It includes a velvet cape, old taffeta and lace, a pair of silk garters, silk girdles and a grogram gown, none of which she would have been entitled to wear. Such clothing represented an important part of a gentleman's outlay and it seems that Anne worked both with the mercers and with gentlemen desirous of recouping some of the initial outlay on garments that were no longer useful. Two gentlemen owed her considerable amounts of money, amounting to nearly a third of her total estate, so she may have advanced money on the garments in her possession. In her will Lloyd left two white lace handkerchiefs to Henry Smith, mercer, who was bailiff that year, as well as two stomachers to his wife, and her brass and pewter to his daughters. She also left a scarf to Alice, wife of Francis Smith. The inventory reads like a pedlar's list, with assorted scarves, ‘a mask and tiffany', aprons, skirts, purses, girdles, gloves, aprons, ‘little books', a fiddle and fiddle cloth, and spectacles, to the considerable total value of £56 8s 10d.
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Joan Perrott seems to have been working as a dealer in mixed goods of a similar kind. In 1596 Richard Field's sister, Margaret Young, who was left with three small children when her husband died in February 1595, sued Perrott in the Court of Record claiming recompense for goods supplied to her on 25 July 1595, namely:

a woman's gown of a sad tawny colour, faced with velvet and a velvet cape, value £5, another woman's gown of rat colour faced with taffeta, with a cape of tufty taffeta and laid about with silk lace, value £3, a kirtle of broad worsted laid about with billiment lace and fringe, value 30s, a petticoat of stammel with a bodice of durance and fringed about, value 30s, a cloak of rat's colour lined with tawny baize, value 4 marks, 2 daggers, value 6s 8d, a coverlet of red, black and yellow, value 40s, and three prayerbooks, value 10s.
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Perrott sold these on 25 August, to ‘Mr Shakespeare one book, Mr Barber one coverlet, ii daggers, the three books, Ursula Field [Young's sister] the apparel and the bedding clothes, at Whitsuntide was twelvemonth'.
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The court decided that Young should be ‘damnified' to the value of £6 9s 6d, and pay 6d costs. Young seems to have been unable to cope with being left to rear three children on her own; in October 1595 she had been cited in the Vicar's Court for ‘continually quarrelling and not attending church'. She did not appear, was excommunicated and fined 2s l0d.

Avice Clarke, a single woman and a ‘stranger' who died in Stratford in 1624, was a pedlar. Her inventory lists the contents of her pack, all of it haberdashery:

 

 

Avice kept a servant called Mary Beddson, whom she remembered in her will, and she made a small legacy to Peter Woodhouse, ‘chapman of small wares', who seems to have been her colleague. Such rare and precious documents give us our only glimpses of women working alongside mercers, haberdashers and pedlars. The wares that were cried by women up and down the streets of London include:

 

Bands, shirts or ruffs,

Handkerchiefs or cuffs,

Garters, knives or purses

Or Muscova silken muffs
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For an Elizabethan working girl a visit from a pedlar was one of very few opportunities for retail therapy. In the jest book of Sir Nicholas Le Strange we read of ‘a gentlewoman [who] loved to bubble away her money in bone-laces, pins and such toys, often used this short ejaculation, “God love me as I love a pedlar.”'
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Somewhere in an intricate and elastic web of retail trading of small wares, Gilbert Shakespeare plied the haberdasher's trade. It
seems unlikely that he was himself a chapman or a pedlar, but equally unlikely that he kept a shop in competition with the mercery mafia who controlled Stratford. Of 232 aldermen elected to the Corporation between its institution and the Civil War, 71 were Quineys or Quiney connections; the trading network extended through the west midlands, to Coventry and Birmingham to the north and southwards to London. We have no record of Gilbert as a shopkeeper in Stratford or in London. Besides, the stock in trade of a mercer was costly, and the Shakespeares were broke. It seems more likely that Gilbert traded in a modest way in wares of local manufacture that he sold on in London, and bought imported wares in London for resale in the provinces. He seems more likely to have organised, supplied and co-ordinated groups of chapmen than actually to have been himself a pedlar.

The haberdasher's stock in trade was affordable. Most of the items in Avice's pack were made by women in their homes, who had to be supplied with their materials, and with patterns to enable them to follow the current fashion. The finished work had also to be collected and conveyed to the nearest or best market to be sold on. The matter was not as straightforward as it might seem; the overseer of this female cottage industry had to make sure that the work was clean, saleable and of good quality, and that he could hold his own against those who peddled cheap and gaudy imports at a lower price. This is the level at which one can see Gilbert Shakespeare finding his niche, especially if one of the women who was making and organising the making of merchandise for him was his sister-in-law.

Shakespeare's Autolycus in
The Winter's Tale
is a thief, stealing linen from the hedges, picking pockets, ‘a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles', a haunter of ‘wakes, fairs and bear-baitings'. At the sheep-shearing feast he impersonates a pedlar, equipping himself with typical haberdashery, including a large range of gloves:

no milliner can so fit his customers with gloves…He hath ribbons of all the colours i'the'rainbow; points [the tags that finished the ends of the laces attaching bodices, sleeves and hose]…inkles [linen tapes], caddisses [worsted tapes used for tying up stockings], cambrics, lawns…

Autolycus sings his wares in rather more high-falutin' fashion:

 

Lawn as white as driven snow,

Cypress black as ne'er was crow,

Gloves as sweet as damask roses,

Masks for faces, and for noses,

Bugle-bracelet, necklace amber,

Perfume for a lady's chamber,

Golden quoifs and stomachers

For my lads to give their dears,

Pins and poking sticks of steel…

 

Autolycus himself is neither pedlar nor haberdasher, so Shakespeare cannot be accused of pillorying his haberdasher brother as a rogue. The role he assumes as a pedlar is an attractive one that could have been an affectionate remembrance of a younger brother's brilliant career as an uncommonly gifted travelling salesman.

We have no indication at all that Shakespeare was ever aware of his brother, or ever in his brother's company as an adult, but we do know that from about 1604 Shakespeare lived in the house of a Huguenot tiremaker called Christopher Mountjoy, on the corner of Monkswell and Silver Streets in Cripplegate. This was the haberdashers' quarter; the Haberdashers' Hall was close by on the corner of Staining Lane and Maiden Lane. Tires were ornamental headdresses of twisted wire, and as such part of the haberdashers' stock in trade. Mountjoy's, which were top of the range, being of gold and silver and studded with gems, were made to order, but tires of cheaper materials would have been offered on street stalls and by travelling chapmen. It is usually thought that Shakespeare was introduced to the Mountjoys by Richard Field. Field, the original printer of
Venus and Adonis
and
The Rape of Lucrece
, was married to the widow of the Huguenot printer Vautrollier. They lived close by in Wood Street and worshipped at the French Church. If Field was embarrassed by the association with the notorious author of a mildly pornographic best-seller, it seems more likely that, ten years after their successful collaboration had come to its rather swift end, neither Field nor Mrs Field was often in contact with Shakespeare, which leaves his brother the haberdasher as the possible connection with Mountjoy.

If Ann had provided for her children during their father's absence by becoming involved in the textile industry, she would have done nothing unusual. In
The Shoemakers' Holiday
(1600), when newly married Rafe Damport, journeyman to the master shoe-maker Simon Eyre, is pressed for a soldier, his young wife wails: ‘What shall I do when he is gone?' Eyre rallies her: ‘Let me see thy hand, Jane. The fine hand, this white hand, these pretty fingers must spin, must card, must work. Work you bombast cotton-candle-quean, work for your living with a pox to you!'
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