Short answers, pulled from the story.
John Shakespeare was an English businessman and leather worker born in the late 1520s in Warwickshire. He is historically significant as the father of playwright William Shakespeare and for his own career as a glover, wool dealer, property investor, and mayor of Stratford-upon-Avon in 1568.
John Shakespeare held a sequence of civic posts beginning with borough ale taster in 1556, then borough constable in 1558, affeeror in 1559, chamberlain in 1561, alderman in 1565, and finally high bailiff, equivalent to mayor, in 1568. As high bailiff he served simultaneously as almoner, coroner, escheator, and clerk of the market.
The precise reasons for John Shakespeare's financial decline are unknown. From January 1577 onward he stopped attending council meetings, which scholars interpret as evidence of debt, since a debtor could avoid arrest by staying in his home. In the years 1578-9 he mortgaged, sold, and rented out properties, and by January 1586 bailiffs reported he had nothing that could be seized to satisfy his creditors.
Mary Arden was a member of the Ardens of Warwickshire, a local gentry family, and reportedly a niece of John Shakespeare's father Richard. She married John around 1557. Together they had eight children, five of whom survived into adulthood, including William Shakespeare, baptised on the 26th of April 1564.
John Shakespeare was granted a coat of arms on the 20th of October 1596 by William Dethick of the College of Arms. An earlier application in 1569 had been withdrawn. Most historians believe his son William, by then successful in London, re-opened the application and paid for it, five years before John's death in September 1601.
The question is unresolved. A tract apparently signed by "J. Shakespeare" pledging Catholic loyalty was found in the eighteenth century in the rafters of the Henley Street house, but it subsequently disappeared. Scholar Matthew Steggle argued the document cannot chronologically belong to John and may instead have been written by his daughter Joan, with the discoverer John Jordan having forged the first page and misread the name.