Life of William Shakespeare of sheep, hide tanning and wool trading, as well as for malting to supply brewers of ale and beer. His parents were John Shakespeare, a successful glover originally from Snitterfield in Warwickshire, and Mary Arden, the youngest daughter of John's father's landlord, a member of the local gentry. The couple married around 1557 and lived on Henley Street when Shakespeare was born, purportedly in a house now known as Shakespeare's Birthplace. They had eight children: Joan (baptised 15 September 1558, died in infancy), Margaret (bap. 2 December 1562buried 30 April 1563), William, Gilbert (bap. 13 October 1566bur. 2 February 1612),
History of the Shakespeare authorship question Shaksper argument: it is all gone for me-all up the spout. The Shaksper case is about closed." In 1891 the archivist James H. Greenstreet identified a pair of 1599 letters by the Jesuit spy George Fenner in which he reported that William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby was "busy penning plays for the common players." Greenstreet proposed Derby as the real hidden author, founding the Derbyite theory. Greenstreet's theory was revived by the American writer Robert Frazer, who argued in "The Silent Shakespeare" (1915) that the actor William Shakespeare merely commercialised the productions of more elevated authors, sometimes adapting older