Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Josephine Paolucci, Janet Blenkinship and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net. (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries.) SHAKESPEARE'S FAMILY [Illustration] [Illustration: William Shakespeare from the Drocshout painting now in the Shakespeare Memorial Gallery at Stratford-on-Avon.] SHAKESPEARE'S FAMILY BEING A Record of the Ancestors and Descendants of William Shakespeare WITH _SOME ACCOUNT OF THE ARDENS_ BY MRS. C. C. STOPES AUTHOR OF "THE BACON-SHAKESPEARE QUESTION ANSWERED," "SHAKESPEARE'S WARWICKSHIRE CONTEMPORARIES," "BRITISH FREEWOMEN," ETC. LONDON ELLIOT STOCK, 62, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C. NEW YORK JAMES POTT & COMPANY 1901 Transcriber's note: Minor typos have been corrected. Footnotes have been moved to the end of the chapter. Letters that are preceeded by a caret (^) are superscripted in the text. PREFACE When I was invited to reprint in book-form the articles which had appeared in the _Genealogical Magazine_ under the titles of "Shakespeare's Family" and the "Warwickshire Ardens," I carefully corrected them, and expanded them where expansion could be made interesting. Thus to the bald entries of Shakespeare's birth and burial I added a short life. Perhaps never before has anyone attempted to write a life of the poet with so little allusion to his plays and poems. My reason is clear; it is only the genealogical details of certain Warwickshire families of which I now treat, and it is only as an interesting Warwickshire gentleman that the poet is here included. Much of the chaotic nonsense that has of late years been written to disparage his character and contest his claims to our reverence and respect are based on the assumption that he was a man of low origin and of mean occupation. I deny any relevance to arguments based on such an assumption, for genius is restricted to no class, and we have a Burns as well as a Chaucer, a Keats as well as a Gower, yet I am glad that the result of my studies tends to prove that it is but an unfounded assumption. By the Spear-side his family was at least respectable, and by the Spindle-side his pedigree can be traced straight back to Guy of Warwick and the good King Alfred. There is something in fallen fortune that lends a subtler romance to the consciousness of a noble ancestry, and we may be sure this played no small part in the making of the poet. All that bear his name gain a certain interest through him, and therefore I have collected every notice I can find of the Shakespeares, though we are all aware none can be his descendants, and that the family of his sister can alone now enter into the poet's pedigree with any degree of certainty.