Playwright’s rags-to-riches story exposed as a myth by new research into Shakespeare family’s financesThe story of how William Shakespeares father slipped from wealth to bankruptcy,leaving his impoverished son to struggle to establish himself as a poet and actor before making his own wealth in the London theatre, has long been an established fragment of the mythology surrounding the playwright. But a new study of the family’s trade in the wool trade suggests this is far from an accurate account.
David Fallow, or 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