Shakespeare's Wife Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction considering the poor reputation of wives generally, in particular the wives of literary men, and the traditional disparagement of the wife of the Man of the Millennium

  Chapter One introducing the extensive and reputable family of Hathaway alias Gardner of Shottery together with the curious fact that one of their kinsmen was a successful playwright for the Admiral’s Men

  Chapter Two introducing the Shakespeare family, with particular attention to the Bard’s mother and her role in the oft-told story of the downfall of John Shakespeare

  Chapter Three of Ann Hathaway’s looks and demeanour, of age at marriage in the 1580s, the courtship of older women by younger men and whether Shakespeare’s wife could read

  Chapter Four of what is likely to happen when a town boy with nothing to his name beyond a way with words woos a serious young woman of good prospects

  Chapter Five of the making of a match, of impediments to marriage and how to overcome them, of bonds and special licences and pregnancy as a way of forcing the issue, of bastards and bastardy, and the girl who got away

  Chapter Six of handfasts, troth-plights and bundling, of rings, gauds and conceits, and what was likely to happen on the big day

  Chapter Seven considering how and where the Bard and his Bride set up house, of cottages and cottaging, and of how they understood their obligations to each other

  Chapter Eight of pregnancy, travail and childbirth, of christening and churching, and the society of women

  Chapter Nine pondering how and when it was that young Shakespeare quit Stratford, leaving wife and children to fend for themselves, and whether he dared risk his health and theirs by consorting with prostitutes

  Chapter Ten suggesting that, having sent her boy husband to seek his fortune, with three small children to look after, Ann Shakespeare found work she could do indoors, and with the help of her haberdasher brother-in-law might even have prospered

  Chapter Eleven of how one Stratford boy became a leading printer, and another wrote a sexy poem that became a notorious best-seller, being literally read to pieces, and Ann buried her only son

  Chapter Twelve treating of the curious circumstances of the grant of arms made to William Shakespeare, and the acquisition of a compromised title to a rambling and ruinous house in a town he spent little or no time in

  Chapter Thirteen of hunger and disorder, introducing the villain of the piece, Sir Edward Greville, who contrived the foul murder of the Bailiff of Stratford, and Ann’s friend and ally the young lawyer Thomas Greene

  Chapter Fourteen of Susanna and her match with a gentleman of London and a midsummer wedding at last

  Chapter Fifteen of Ann’s reading of the sonnets

  Chapter Sixteen of the poet’s younger daughter Judith and the Quiney family, of Ann as maltster and money-lender, and the deaths of Mary and Edmund Shakespeare

  Chapter Seventeen in which Shakespeare returns to the town some say he never left and lives the life of an Anglican gentleman while Ann continues to live the life of a puritan townswoman

  Chapter Eighteen of Shakespeare’s last illness and death and how Ann Shakespeare handled the situation

  Chapter Nineteen of Shakespeare’s lop-sided will and Ann’s options—dower right, widow-bed or destitute dependency

  Chapter Twenty of burials, and monuments, widows’ mites and widows’ work, and the quiet death of the quiet woman of Stratford

  Chapter Twenty-One in which the intrepid author makes the absurd suggestion that Ann Shakespeare could have been involved in the First Folio project, that she might have contributed not only papers but also money to indemnify the publishers against loss and enable them to sell a book that was very expensive to produce at a price that young gentlemen could pay

  Notes

  Works Cited

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Germaine Greer

  Copyright

  To Professor Anne Barton

  ‘Whose every work…

  Came forth example and remains so, yet’

  INTRODUCTION

  considering the poor reputation of wives generally, in particular the wives of literary men, and the traditional disparagement of the wife of the Man of the Millennium

  Anyone steeped in western literary culture must wonder why any woman of spirit would want to be a wife. At best a wife should be invisible, like the wives of nearly all the great authors schoolboys used to read at school. If Homer, Aesop, Plautus, Terence, Virgil, Horace and Juvenal had wives they have been obliterated from history. The wives who are remembered are those who are vilified, like Socrates’ Xanthippe and Aristotle’s Phyllis. Until our own time, history focussed on man the achiever; the higher the achiever the more likely it was that the woman who slept in his bed would be judged unworthy of his company. Her husband’s fans recoiled from the notion that she might have made a significant contribution towards his achievement of greatness. The possibility that a wife might have been closer to their idol than they could ever be, understood him better than they ever could, could not be entertained.

  If Xanthippe had never existed, bachelor dons would have had to invent her. Among the scant references to her is the story told in the Phaedo of how, when she came with Socrates’ three sons to visit him when Socrates had been sentenced to death for corrupting the youth of Athens and ordered to commit suicide by drinking hemlock, she so annoyed the great man with her lamentations that he sent her home again, so that his last hours could be spent in rational discussion with his disciples. No historian has ever shown the slightest interest in what became of Xanthippe and her three small children after Socrates’ suicide. Such mundane matters are beneath the consideration of great men and their biographers. To protest that Socrates’ chosen martyrdom brought catastrophe on the four innocent people who depended on him would be merely womanish.

  As Lisa Jardine pointed out in 1983: ‘Renaissance scholars from Richard Hooker to Francis Bacon are credited with scolding wives. Society seems to find it irresistible to characterise the “unworldliness” of the male intellectual and academic in terms of his failure to control the women in his life.’1 Hooker and Bacon did rather well out of their wives, who were both wealthy. By 1588, when Richard Hooker married Jean Churchman, the protestant reformers had all but succeeded in eliminating the Pauline notion of wedded life as inferior to virginity. Even so, the woman who bore Richard Hooker six children, and brought him the financial security that made it possible for him to become the leading apologist of the Anglican Church, is known to us only as a scold.

  Bacon was married in 1606, when he was forty-five, to a fourteen-year-old heiress called Alice Barnham, whom he had singled out for the purpose when she was only eleven years old. It was well known that Francis Bacon preferred boys to women, and kept a series of young male menials for his pleasure. In the circumstances, the young Viscountess St Albans could be thought to have had every right to behave badly. She seems to have endured her grotesque marriage without complaint until she became involved with John Underhill. A ‘Mr Underhill’ is listed in 1617 as a ‘Gentleman-in-Waiting’ at York House, where Viscount St Albans and his childless wife lived in state. In 1625, when Bacon was revising his will, in which he left the princely sum of £200 to a young Welsh servingman called Francis Edney, he added a codicil, revoking his legacies to Alice ‘for just and great causes’ and leaving her ‘to her right only’. In a pointed gesture, a mere fortnight after Bacon’s death, Alice Bacon married John Underhill in a public ceremony at St Martin’s in the Fields.2 Of the miserable story of the marriage of a trusting child to a middle-aged pederast, all that has come down to us is Bacon’s view of marriage: ‘He that hath a wife and c
hildren hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or of mischief.’3

  Some such idea lies behind the almost unconscious certainty shared by all (male) observers that, if a man of genius is to realise his potential, he must put his wife away. Shakespeare could not have been great if he had not jettisoned his wife, but if he is to be great, she must be shown to have got her just deserts. Many English men of genius followed the example of the earliest-known Greek philosopher:

  Thales Miletus was…held to be the first man that had the name of wise attributed unto him, being afterwards reckoned one of those seven who only were of the Grecians called wise men; he being importuned by his mother Cleobulina to take a wife whilst he was young, always answered her that it was yet time enough; and afterward, being grown in years and urged by her more earnestly, he told her, that it was (then) past time, and too too late, this grave man meaning hereby that it was not good to marry at all.4

  This advice was reiterated in every generation. While the church ruled the academic establishment, all teachers were necessarily celibate but, even after the Reformation, when the reformers preached that it was a man’s duty to his maker to take a wife, many artists and intellectuals chose, or perhaps were constrained by their poverty, to remain unmarried, if not exactly celibate. Literature was a particularly laddish enterprise, the province of young bachelors who usually gave it up when—or if—they married. Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Nashe, Michael Drayton, all died unmarried. Any literary figure who bucked the trend and took a wife is usually commiserated, beginning with Geoffrey Chaucer who, we are told, ‘could not have been happy in his marriage’.5

  Thomas Moore, writing in defence of his friend Byron’s appalling treatment of his clever wife, is one of the first to decide on little or no evidence that Shakespeare hated his wife.

  By whatever austerity of temper or habits the poets Dante and Milton may have drawn upon themselves such a fate, it might be expected that, at least, the ‘gentle Shakespeare’ would have stood exempt from the common calamity of his brethren. But, among the very few facts of his life that have been transmitted to us, there is none more clearly proved than the unhappiness of his marriage.6

  There is no evidence that Dante’s wife, Gemma Donati, who was better connected than he, made his life miserable; it is simply assumed that he would have been happier with his muse, Bice Portinari—as if it were the job of a muse to run a household and produce children. Gemma bore Dante at least four children; we should not be surprised to find that neither she nor they inspired a single line of poetry. When Dante was exiled in 1302, his wife of seventeen years chose to remain with her children in Florence.

  Milton’s marital infelicity is legendary in every sense of the word; he was thirty-four when he married seventeen-year-old Mary Powell, a few weeks before the outbreak of the Civil War. His wife’s family were royalists, and she judged it best to return to them until the future should be less uncertain. This perfectly sensible response to a confused and dangerous situation is supposed have prompted Milton to write The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and therefore it is assumed that, when Mary returned to the marital household in 1645, he wished she hadn’t and that their life together thereafter was miserable. Whatever the case, conjugal relations were promptly resumed. Mary’s first child was born in July the next year; a few days after bearing her fourth in May 1652, she died. Milton’s first experience of marriage was not so disastrous that he did not contemplate a second; he was already losing his sight when he married Katherine Woodcock in November 1658 and fifteen months later she died in childbirth. So far marriage to Milton would seem far more punishing for his wives than for him. Milton married a third time at the advanced age of fifty-five because he was in need of a live-in carer. The woman chosen for him by his doctor was a poor relation of his own, twenty-four-year-old Elizabeth Minshul, who lived to spend the inheritance which was her only reward, and probably inadequate to support her for the fifty-three years that remained of her life after the poet’s death in 1674.

  By doing the right thing, by remaining silent and invisible, Ann Shakespeare left a wife-shaped void in the biography of William Shakespeare, which later bardolaters filled up with their own speculations, most of which do neither them nor their hero any credit. Her given name and approximate birth date were known from her tomb in Holy Trinity Church Stratford; Shakespeare’s first biographer, Nicholas Rowe, supplied her maiden surname, and there matters rested until 1790.

  Previous biographers had not worried much about the poet’s conjugal relations, nor (when they did evince curiosity) had they necessarily assumed his disaffection with Anne. In The Modem Universal British Traveller, which antedates Malone’s Supplement by one year, the ‘Biography of Warwickshire’ confidently informs us that Shakespeare ‘lived very happy’ with his wife, and, after he made some money minding horses, fetched her to London.7

  It was in 1790 that Edmond Malone published an observation originally made by William Oldys in the margin of the entry on Shakespeare in his copy of Langbaine’s Account of the English Dramatic Poets (1691) that Sonnets 92 and 93 ‘seem to have been addressed by Shakespeare to his beautiful wife on some suspicion of her infidelity’.8 William Oldys, who was born in 1696, had no special knowledge; his impression was based on his reading of Sonnets 92–5 which in the edition of 1640 bore the sub-title ‘Lover’s Affection’.9 Oldys had as little reason to believe that Ann was beautiful as later commentators to believe that she was plain. At this early stage it looks as if Ann is being recruited into the ranks of the beautiful faithless wives; the allegation of infidelity would be made again and again, but for most scholars the mere fact of her being older than her husband made her unattractive.

  Shakespeare’s will was published as early as 1752, in the third volume of Theobald’s Works of Shakespeare; as it became better known, it too was interpreted as evidence of Ann’s utter failure as a wife. James Boswell, struggling with the mass of material left by Malone, is probably the first to suggest that Shakespeare’s ‘affections were estranged from her either through jealousy or some other cause’.10 For others the disparity in age was enough in itself to discredit her. In Shakespeare: A Biography (1823), Thomas De Quincey, the first rhapsodist of bardolatry, remarked: ‘Neither do we like the spectacle of a mature young woman, five years past her majority, wearing the semblance of having been led astray by a boy who still had two years and a half to run of his minority.’11

  Ann made no ‘spectacle’ of herself and offered no ‘semblance’ whatsoever. With such semantics De Quincey turns her into a designing woman. He also decides that Shakespeare went to London to escape ‘the humiliation of domestic feuds’. When the marriage bond of Will Shakespeare and Ann Hathaway with its tell-tale date only six months before the christening of their first child was found and published in 1836, bardolaters were scandalised. To the early Victorians Ann stood revealed as a lustful, designing woman who entrapped an innocent young man.

  [John] Britton entertains grave misgivings about Anne’s morals. He points to the burial on 6 March 1590, of ‘Thomas Green alias Shakspere’ and, supposing without good reason that this Green was a child, adds: ‘The inference of which this circumstance is susceptible must be obvious.’ To Britton, apparently, belongs the distinction of being the first to suggest that the woman who bore the dramatist three children also mothered a bastard.12

  Everybody who meddles with Shakespeare biography readily accepts that the Bard was unfaithful to his wife and excuses him for it, but infidelity on the part of his wife is sufficient to justify estrangement.

  When Shakespearean master-sleuth Halliwell-Phillipps published the entry of a marriage licence between a William Shakespeare and Ann Whateley of Temple Grafton in 1887 it was immediately assumed that (old, ugly) Ann Hathaway prevented William from marrying his (young, lovely) true love. The plays were trawled for evidence that Shakespeare bitterly regretted his marriage, and so little was found that
scholars from De Quincey to Stephen Greenblatt were constrained to parrot Orsino in Twelfth Night:

  Then let thy love be younger than thyself,

  Or thy affection cannot hold the bent…(II. iv. 36–7)

  —as if Shakespeare were no smarter than Orsino and the whole play was not about the wooing of a woman by a boy.

  Moore interprets the scant details of Shakespeare’s domestic life as evidence that he disliked his wife:

  The dates of the birth of his children, compared with that of his removal from Stratford,—the total omission of his wife’s name in the first draft of his will, and the bitter sarcasm of the bequest by which he remembers her afterwards—all prove beyond a doubt both his separation from the lady early in life, and his unfriendly feeling towards her at the close of it.13

  Joseph Hunter credits the misery of living with Ann Shakespeare as the motive force of the Bard’s entire career: ‘It seems but too evident, that this was a marriage of evil auspices, and it may have been one principal cause of that unsettled state of mind in which the poet left Stratford, about four years afterwards.’14

  No one has ever undertaken a systematic review of the evidence against Ann Shakespeare, while every opportunity to caricature and revile her has been exploited to risible lengths. In Joyce’s Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus dreams of an Ann Shakespeare disfigured by age and guilt: ‘And in New Place a slack dishonoured body that once was comely, once as sweet, as fresh as cinnamon, now her leaves falling, all, bare, frighted of the narrow grave and unforgiven.’15 Cinnamon is not used fresh and women don’t grow leaves. In Nothing Like the Sun Anthony Burgess has a sexually experienced Ann taking advantage of a drunken boy who is then forced to marry her: ‘Armed with a dildo this Anne lures her boy husband into strange sexual rites and later cuckolds him with his brother Richard on the second-best bed.’16 Journalist Anthony Holden, retelling the story in 1999, prefers his Ann ‘homely’.