The first biography of William Shakespeare in 1709 describes the playwright's father as ‘a considerable dealer in wool’ (Rowe 1709, p. ii). Winnow out the subsequent speculative or anecdotal descriptions of John Shakespeare and what emerges is a successful self-made man, active in the business that then dominated the nation's economy. He lived almost two decades longer than his famous son, dying in 1601 aged 71 or so, still litigating on business debts in his final years.

John Shakespeare's apparent standing in the Stratford community changed over his lifetime, but there were solid financial reasons for this as legislation and regulation sought to restrict those who dealt in wool. Both father and playwright son died wealthy landed gentlemen, and the similarities in their handling of money rather than the differences in career choices have, remarkably, been largely ignored. Sufficient records exist to show how the Shakespeare fortune was accumulated, and understanding the economic necessities of their business illuminates much of the family's lives. William Shakespeare was never the romantic poor boy from an impoverished family. To better comprehend the son, we must understand the father. William Shakespeare's ‘works’ are poems and plays; John Shakespeare's ‘work’ was broking wool and lending money. Here I present a revisionist view of the father's business success through reference to Stratford-upon-Avon's borough records, his court cases and an analysis of English woolbroking in the sixteenth century. John Shakespeare was, in reality, a successful and astute individual who voluntarily left public life when his woolbroking business was threatened. Through an analysis of the social, political and economic contexts surrounding the 1576 Royal proclamation against woolbrokers or ‘broggers’, it can be shown that the Shakespeare family never experienced any economic adversity. This has significant implications for understanding William Shakespeare‘s prosperity, shifting the onus away from his artistic endeavours to the family business.

Ideas about the performance of early music have changed radically over the past forty years. There has been considerable research on the vocal and instrumental forces Monteverdi is likely to have had in mind. For most baroque music, we now prefer an athletic and transparent texture to the lush, full sound of yesteryear. Different views of tempo go hand in hand with these ideas; in fact, in some ways they flow almost inevitably from them. Those in their turn lead to a questioning of earlier assumptions about form and design. Pitch, pitch-standards and intonation have similarly been examined exhaustively in a historical context, with results that have a fundamental impact on the performer's approach. In the particular case of Monteverdi's 1610 Vespers there has been enormous discussion of how far it is really to be seen as a single work, whether liturgical material needs adding, and if so how much. Few of these areas of discussion have led to unanimously accepted conclusions: that is often the way with historical investigation, in music as much as in anything else. And not all conductors have shown themselves equally informed or equally prepared to accept the latest conclusions at any one time. But the range of areas in which attitudes have changed means that each performance is to some extent a child of its time. The date of a recording is important.

Not that the date of itself says much about the quantity of musical pleasure to be derived from a particular recording. Most musicians would accept that there are qualities of musicianship which retain their power irrespective of historical purity.