Shakespeare

In the broad class of English surnames that grew out of nicknames rather than trades or holdings, Shakespeare sits among the boldest. The reading usually given takes the two elements at face value and points to spear-work: militia display, muster drill, perhaps rough stage combat. A second reading treats the first syllable as scribal drift around French or Middle English forms for shaking or brandishing. Specialists disagree, and no Stratford document settles it either way.

What is not in dispute is why a household needed such a tag. Given names in early modern England were crowded to the point of uselessness: of the boys born in London in 1510, 24.4 per cent were christened John, 13.3 per cent Thomas and 11.7 per cent William. By 1400 most English families had already taken hereditary surnames, and compulsion was resisted in the late Middle Ages because a fixed name was associated with tax. A martial nickname did work three Williams in one street could not do for themselves.

Richard Shakespeare (1490 to about 1561), the playwright's paternal grandfather, was carrying the name in Warwickshire long before anyone of it wrote for money. In the county it was ordinary trade-town currency, and the parish and borough clerks who wrote it down felt no obligation to spell it the same way twice. Shakespere, Shaxper and Shakespeare all attach to the same household inside a single generation of Stratford registers.

That variation is not evidence of separate families. It is evidence that spelling was the clerk's business rather than the bearer's, and that nothing had yet forced a decision. Print made the decision later: the 1623 folio put one spelling on a title page, and the Warwickshire households that had been Shaxpers in the registers found their name standardised for them.

John Shakespeare (about 1531 to 1601) was a glover and a whittawer, which put him at the white-leather end of a trade every town preferred to keep at arm's length. Tanning was classed as an odoriferous trade and pushed to the edge of settlement among the poor; where the old methods survive, the tanneries are still set apart from the towns they serve. Skins arrived stiff and dirty with soil and gore.

The work behind one pair of gloves was foul and skilled in equal measure. Hair was loosened by soaking the skin in urine, by painting it with an alkaline lime mixture, or by letting it putrefy for months and then dipping it in salt, before the tanner scraped it away with a knife. The hide was then bated soft by pounding in dung, dog or pigeon for preference, or by soaking it in animal brains: a fermentation driven by the bacteria the dung carried.

Only then came tanning proper, drawing tannin from oak bark; the medieval Latin tannum behind the craft's name means the bark itself. A whittawer worked the other branch, tawing rather than tanning, dressing skins with alum and salts to get the pale, supple leather a glove needs.

Glovers were slow to control their own trade in England. By 1440 they had become members of the Dubbers, the bookbinders' guild, and there they stayed until they broke away during the reign of Elizabeth I; the Glovers' Company was not incorporated until 1613, after John Shakespeare's death. Paris was two centuries ahead: a corporation of gantiers existed there from the thirteenth century, working in skin and in fur.

John's working life fell in the century when gloves reached their greatest elaboration. Elizabeth I set the fashion for wearing them embroidered and jewelled, and for drawing them on and off during audiences to draw attention to her hands; the 1592 Ditchley portrait shows her holding a pair of leather gloves. Regulation followed the money, Bologna legislating against samite gloves in 1294 and Rome against perfumed gloves in 1560.

John Shakespeare was more than a craftsman. He dealt in wool, held a burgess's place in the borough and sat as one of Stratford's aldermen, and he married Mary Arden of the Wilmcote Ardens (about 1537 to 1608), an heiress to Arden land. The household mixed glove-making, tenant farming and minor municipal office: prosperous enough to matter locally, nowhere near a great estate.

That standing bought a schooling. The son baptised at Holy Trinity on 26 April 1564 went through the King's New School, the Stratford grammar, on the standard Tudor humanist syllabus of Latin grammar with Ovid, Virgil, Plautus, Terence and Cicero read in the original. Every classical reference in the later plays rests on what a corporation town gave the children of its aldermen.

The money travelled back the other way in 1597, when that son bought New Place, the second-largest house in Stratford, and added the lease of the town tithes and a Warwickshire freehold through the 1600s.

John and Mary's other children carried the name through the same streets. Gilbert (1566 to about 1612) is a name and two dates in the record and nothing more. Joan (1569 to 1646) married William Hart the saddler, and Hart branches remained in Stratford for centuries afterwards. Edmund, the youngest (1580 to 1607), was an actor, and was dead before he was thirty.

The women of the family outlasted the men. Anne Hathaway (about 1556 to 1623) kept New Place for seven years after her husband's death. Susanna (1583 to 1649) married the physician John Hall; Judith (1585 to 1662), the surviving twin, married Thomas Quiney in February 1616 and lived on into her seventies. Their descendants are kin to the poet's blood, but the surnames they carry are Hall, Quiney and Hart.

The Stratford line thinned fast. Hamnet died in August 1596, aged eleven, and no other son followed. Judith's three sons were born and buried in infancy between the spring of 1616 and the next winter, and Susanna's daughter Elizabeth died in 1670 leaving nobody to carry the name on. By 1670 there was no Shakespeare of that house left to point at, which is why genealogists reach for the same correction whenever a direct line is advertised.

The surname itself was never at risk, only that branch of it. It was ordinary Warwickshire currency in Richard Shakespeare's day and it stayed in England long after the Stratford line ended, carried by households that shared the old nickname rather than a proven descent. Fame fixed one spelling in print; it did not multiply one line of blood.

Later bearers made their own way under the most quotable name in the language. William Shakespeare (1849 to 1931) was an English singer, teacher and composer. Olivia Shakespear (1863 to 1938) was a British novelist and playwright who carried the name unfixed. Percy Shakespeare (1906 to 1943) was a British painter, and William Harold Nelson Shakespeare (1883 to 1976) kept the name in the county game as an interwar cricketer for Worcestershire.

Emigration took it further out. James Shakespeare (about 1840 to 1912) was an organist in South Australia; Thomas Mitchell Shakespeare (1873 to 1938) was an Australian newspaperman and politician; and Joseph A. Shakspeare (1837 to 1896), carrying yet another spelling of it, served as mayor of New Orleans.

A baronetcy carried the name through the twentieth century. Sir Geoffrey Shakespeare (1893 to 1980), a British Liberal politician, was created first Baronet Shakespeare of Lakenham; his son William Geoffrey (1927 to 1996) held the title as a general practitioner in Aylesbury, and the third baronet, Tom Shakespeare, is a geneticist and sociologist. Craig Shakespeare (1963 to 2024) took it onto an English football touchline as player and manager.