Shakespeare in Leather

Abstract

William Shakespeare was born into leather. Biographers have noted as much since 1821, the year in which Edmond Malone’s Life of William Shakspeare saw posthumous publication. The Life — which, on his deathbed a decade earlier, Malone had asked the younger Boswell to edit — was frankly revisionist in intent, and proceeded by identifying and correcting the errors of earlier scholars. Among those errors was the matter of Shakespeare’s father’s job. Whereas John Shakespeare had previously been identified as a butcher or a dealer in wool, Malone’s scrupulous research yielded no evidence to support either claim.¹ Nor could the biographer at first shed any new light on the question, and his Life records that “after a very tedious and tiresome search” he “began to despair” of an advance — until, to his relief, he found in the Stratford archives a legal document from 1556 which “furnished me with the long-sought information, and ascertains that the trade of our great poet’s father was that of a glover.”² Malone went on to explain what a profitable business gloving was in Elizabethan England: gloves were ubiquitous articles, essential to fashion and ceremony, ranging in style from the serviceable to the elaborate. Though London was the center of the trade, Malone found at least five glovers were at work in late sixteenth-century Stratford, and he argued that their wares extended beyond gloves to such workaday items as “leathern hose, aprons, belts, points, jerkins, pouches, wallets, satchels and purses.”³ This information changed forever our picture of William Shakespeare’s childhood, and in this respect as in many others the 1821 Life achieved “a quantum leap forward in Shakespeare studies.”⁴