Mary Shakespeare Mary Shakespeare Mary Shakespeare, née Arden, (c. 1537–1608) was the mother of William Shakespeare. She was the daughter of Wilmcote gentleman farmer Robert Arden, a cadet of the Arden family prominent in Warwickshire since before the Norman Conquest. She was the youngest of eight daughters, and when her father died in 1556 she inherited land at Snitterfield and Wilmcote from her father as a dowry. The house was left to her stepmother Agnes Hill. Richard Shakespeare, the father of John Shakespeare, was a tenant farmer on land owned by her father in Snitterfield. As the daughter of Richard's landlord, she
History of the Shakespeare authorship question she had identified the Irish Shakespeare as the rebel and adventurer William Nugent. She asserted that there were numerous distinctively Irish idioms in Shakespeare's work. Sigmund Freud, before adopting the Edward de Vere identification, toyed with the notion that Shakespeare may not have been English, a doubt strengthened in 1908 after he believed he had detected Latin features in the Chandos portrait. On the basis of a suggestion by a Professor Gentilli of Nervi, Freud came to suspect that Shakespeare was of French descent, and his name a corruption of "Jacques Pierre". The case for an Italian, either Michelangelo Florio