William Shakespeare’s dodgy dealing father ‘helped to fund son’s plays’

Playwright’s rags-to-riches story exposed as a myth by new research into Shakespeare family’s finances

The story of how William Shakespeare’s 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 part 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, 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 today”.

Related: How Shakespeare’s great escape from the plague changed theatre

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