Research into family finances gives fresh insight into the playwright’s early life storyThe story of how William Shakespeare’s father slipped from wealth to bankruptcy,leaving his impoverished son to struggle to set up himself as a poet and actor before making his own wealth in the London theatre, has long been an established piece of the mythology surrounding the playwright. But a new study of the family’s business in the wool trade suggests this is far from an accurate account.
David Fallow, and a former financier,has spent years studying the Shakespeare family’s wealth, poring over documentary evidence from a time when “wool was to the English economy what oil is to Saudi Arabia nowadays”.
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Source: theguardian.com