Shakespeare's Wife Read online

  but in chief

  For that her reputation was disvalued

  In levity…(V. i. 218–20)

  When Bertram in All’s Well that Ends Well is confronted by Diana who claims that he has taken her virginity, he replies:

  She’s impudent, my lord,

  And was a common gamester to the camp. (V. iii. 190–1)

  Will could have produced henchmen to swear that they had enjoyed Ann, and she would have been consigned to a life of whoredom. He could have pleaded prior contract with some other woman. He could have run away, to London, or to sea, or to the wars. He would not have been the first or the last to escape a bastard being fathered on him by doing so. If John and Mary Shakespeare had thought their son was to be married to a whore, they could have stopped the marriage dead, and sent Ann away sorrowing.

  With Shakespeare’s biographers so eager to traduce his wife, it is surprising that no one has ever alleged that the child Ann bore in May 1583 was not his. The point could never be proved, as can none of the other allegations made about Ann Hathaway, one of which is that, when he was forced to marry her, Will was actually in love with another woman. The evidence for this is an entry in the Bishop of Worcester’s register, under the date 27 November 1582, the day before the issue of the bond for Ann and Will’s marriage recording the issue of a licence for a marriage ‘inter Wm Shaxpere et Annam Whateley de Temple Grafton’, between a William Shakespeare and Ann Whateley of Temple Grafton.22 These days the entry is thought to be a scribal error. If it is it is an odd one. The bishop’s register was copied by a professional scribe from the rougher lists made by the clerk officiating at the time. The substitution of one word for another, of Whateley for Hathaway, might be a simple misreading of a scribbled original, or the carriage of a word over from another entry, but the simultaneous introduction of Temple Grafton, instead of Shottery or Stratford, does strain credulity. It may simply be that the scribe copied the beginning of one entry, getting as far as the ‘Annam’, say, and when he looked up again picked up an ‘Annam’ in the following entry, so writing the beginning of one entry and the end of another.

  There could have been two William Shakespeares in the diocese of Worcester marrying two Anns at much the same time and both in need of a special licence. This possibility did not seem incredible to Sir Sidney Lee, but it hasn’t found favour with anybody else much. There were lots of Shakespeares in Warwickshire c.1580 and lots of them were Williams. Half a dozen William Shakespeares of marriageable age can be found in Rowington in the 1580s. William was a preferred name among the Shakespeares of Oldiche too; one of the brothers of John Shakespeare the corviser (shoe-maker) who lived in Stratford for a time, and baptised three children there, was a William. William Shakespeares were common also at Wroxall. Thomas Shakespeare of Alcester left a young son William when he died in 1539; Christopher Shakespeare of Packwood names a son William as one of the overseers of his will in 1557; a William Shakespeare was named as an overseer in the will of John Pardie of Snitterfield in 1579. Other William Shakespeares there were, aplenty.

  There were also Whateleys in Warwickshire, though fewer than Shakespeares or Hathaways. A William Whateley baptised a son and a daughter at Holy Trinity in the 1560s. Alderman George Whately (or Wheatley) who acted as bridge warden for many years and was elected Bailiff of Stratford in 1583, had no connections with Temple Grafton. He was born in Henley-in-Arden, where in 1586 he endowed an elementary school for thirty children. He was buried in Holy Trinity Stratford in the pestilential summer of 1593. Whateley was a successful wool draper, whose house ‘with glass windows in the hall, parlour and upper chamber, and beehives in the garden’ stood opposite the Shakespeares’ in Henley Street.23 (He had two brothers who were Catholic priests on the run.) None of his children by his wife Joan who died in Stratford in February 1579 was christened in Stratford. On 19 May 1582 another George Whateley, almost certainly the alderman’s son, took Mary Nasson to wife at Holy Trinity. He could have had a sister or cousin Ann living in Temple Grafton. Three of George Whateley’s children were subsequently baptised in Stratford, none of them an Ann. The only other child of Alderman Whateley’s who can be traced in the Stratford records is an unmarried daughter Catherine, to whom the Corporation leased a house on the High Street in 1598.

  Ann Hathaway could have been living in Temple Grafton, three and a half miles to the west of Shottery, and a good five miles from Stratford, but not for the reasons adduced by Park Honan:

  Gossip and rumour, in themselves, could cause an alert court to summon a pregnant woman and her lover, and as Anne’s condition became obvious it could have attracted attention, so she may have left Hewlands by November. But the evidence is unclear, in any case: her November locale is given as ‘Temple Grafton’, in a Worcester entry that errs with her surname…If she huddled there William perhaps felt obliged to ask for his father’s consent to marry, and his mother’s willingness to share a home with his bride.24

  Honan begins by assuming that the William Shakespeare of the entry in the Bishop of Worcester’s register is identical with our William Shakespeare; the possibility of two William Shakespeares seeking special licences at the same time is not to be considered. Then, he assumes that in copying the original register the scribe made a single mistake, getting the name wrong but the place right. It is actually harder to do this than to join half of one line to half of another. For the eye to return to the right line and not note the mistaken surname is almost impossible. For Honan Ann Whateley is a mistake for Ann Hathaway but Temple Grafton is not a mistake. Temple Grafton is the hamlet where she is to be found ‘huddled’. A small hamlet in Elizabethan Warwickshire was not an easy place to hide in; as a stranger newly arrived in the district Ann would have been conspicuous. Any suspicion that she might be pregnant would have brought her to the attention of the authorities. A woman in search of anonymity and invisibility in 1582 would have had to travel a lot further than three or four miles.

  If Ann Hathaway was living in Temple Grafton, it places her courtship by William Shakespeare in a very different light. It is usually assumed, and, given the fact that the men who acted for her in the securing of the licence were the same men of Shottery who witnessed her father’s will, it is most likely, that she was until her marriage a member of the Hathaway household in Shottery. If she was not, it would not have been because she was in the early stages of pregnancy, but because she was working to support herself. It was quite usual in Tudor England for children to be sent away from home, to live and work in the households of relatives or even of complete strangers. About half the children apprenticed to learn crafts and trades in London in this period were girls. Instead of working as an unpaid farm servant for her own family in Shottery, Ann could have been apprenticed to a skilled craftswoman or artisan somewhere else, but it is more likely to have been in a busy market town like Stratford than in sleepy Temple Grafton. At twenty-six Ann would have been long out of her indentures.

  One scholarly tradition treats the entry in the Bishop of Worcester’s transcript as evidence that Ann and Will were married in Temple Grafton. The parish registers of the ancient church of Temple Grafton, built by the Knights Templar in Saxon times, do not begin until 1612. The Vicar of Temple Grafton in 1582 was John Frith, who was, according to a puritan survey of the Warwickshire clergy, ‘an old priest and unsound in religion. He can neither preach nor read well. His chiefest trade is to cure hawks that are hurt or diseased, for which purpose many do usually repair to him.’25 In 1580 Bishop Whitgift’s officers had had to require Frith to indemnify the church against any litigation arising out of marrying without licence anyone ‘at any times prohibited by the ecclesiastical laws’. If Frith was a Catholic and married Will and Ann as Catholics, we might wonder why they put themselves through the laborious business of the bond in the first place. It seems rather that Ann Whateley of Temple Grafton has nothing to do with the case.

  If Ann Whateley is another Ann altogether but the William the same, we could dec
ide that Ann Hathaway rescued her lover before he made a terrible mistake, and found himself yoked for life to the wrong Ann. For all their frantic fantasising, this possibility never occurs to the Shakespeareans, who have never swerved in their conviction that it was the woman Shakespeare married who was the wrong one. For them ‘Ann Whateley’ must have been the love of his life, simply because she got away. Anthony Burgess lets his fantasy rip.

  It is reasonable to believe that Will wished to marry a girl called Anne Whateley…Sent on skin-buying errands to Temple Grafton, Will could have fallen for a comely daughter, sweet as May and shy as a fawn. He was eighteen and highly susceptible. Knowing something about girls he would know that this was the real thing. Something, perhaps, quite different from what he felt about Mistress Hathaway of Shottery.

  Burgess has decided that Ann Whateley, about whom we know nothing, is beautiful, sweet and shy; he calls Ann Hathaway ‘Mistress’ for no other reason than that it makes her sound forbidding, spinsterish, schoolmarmy even. The ‘something different’ that Shakespeare feels is ‘the real thing’. The argument could as easily be reversed; Ann Hathaway could have been the real thing, Ann Whateley the decoy. Burgess and most of his ilk prefer to believe that Shakespeare married the wrong girl. ‘But why, attempting to marry Anne Whateley had he put himself in the position of having to marry the other Anne? I suggest that, to use the crude but convenient properties of the old women’s-magazine morality stories, he was exercised by love for the one and lust for the other…’

  Burgess is not at all troubled by the thought that Will had had sex with Ann Hathaway without loving her, and he clearly doesn’t care whether Ann loved Will, as I’m sure she did. Burgess thinks that Ann Hathaway allowed Will to make love to her simply because she was easy, and that Will took advantage simply because he was incontinent.

  I consider that the lovely boy Will probably was—auburn hair, melting eyes, ready tongue, tags of Latin poetry—did not, having tasted Anne’s body in the spring, go eagerly back to Shottery through the early summer to taste it again. Perhaps Anne had already said something about the pleasures of love in an indentured bed, away from cowpats and the pricking of stubble in a field, and the word marriage frightened Will as much as it will frighten any young man.26

  Burgess’s calendar is askew. Ann’s baby, born in May, must have been conceived in the third or fourth week of August. The association of stubble with spring or early summer is not one a country person would make. Cowpats are found in stubble only after the cows have been let into the fields after the harvest. If Titania could find a bank where the wild thyme grows, we might conclude that Ann and Will could too. England was not then farmed every inch; all around Stratford there were hay and water meadows, and grazing commons, and fallow land, plus wilderness and wood. Shakespeare loved the summer meadows, where the young courting couples wandered in the deep grass and lay down together.

  When daisies pied and violets blue

  And lady-smocks all silver-white

  And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue

  Do paint the meadows with delight…

  When shepherds pipe on oaten straws

  And merry larks are ploughmen’s clocks,

  When turtles tread and rooks and daws,

  And maidens bleach their summer smocks…27

  Burgess prefers his imaginary Anne Whateley, ‘chaste, not wanton and forward’. He is neither the first nor the last to stigmatise Ann Shakespeare as promiscuous. She has been accused of adultery with two of her brothers-in-law, and a visiting preacher, on no evidence whatsoever. ‘Will gave in, with bitter resignation, and was led to the slaughter, or the marriage bed. The role of the honourable Christian gentleman was being forced on him.’ We may wonder how flattering Shakespeare would have found Burgess’s estimate of his character. If any of this had been said in his hearing, he would have been obliged to challenge Burgess in defence of his own honour, to say nothing of his wife’s.

  CHAPTER SIX

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

  At some stage in the wooing, wedding and bedding of Ann Hathaway, the couple committed themselves by taking each other’s right hand and uttering the words of marriage in the present tense, Will saying ‘I take thee Ann to be my wife’ and Ann ‘I take thee William to be my husband’. Once they had done this they were married, whether the event had been witnessed or not. There were other sacramental signs, the exchange of rings and other tokens, the kiss, but the words were what constituted the sacrament. Even if consummation did not follow, the mere saying of the words between two parties was sufficient to render them ineligible for a match with any other party. If the couple cohabited after a handfasting or troth-plight, regardless of whether they had said the words in the present tense or mistakenly in the future tense, they were fast married:

  If the parties betrothed do lie together before the condition be performed; then the contract for the time to come is without further controversy sure and certain, for…it is always presupposed that a mutual consent as touching marriage, has gone before.1

  Scholars annotating the passage in The Winter’s Tale in which Leontes suggests that his virtuous wife Hermione deserves a name ‘As rank as any flax-wench, that puts to it Before her troth-plight’ have generally failed to understand the importance of that ‘before’. The difference between ‘before’ and ‘after’ was the difference between fornication and matrimony.

  This situation could only too easily be manipulated by unscrupulous people anxious to set aside valid marriages or to evade their responsibilities. The only remedy was the setting aside of clandestine matches whether valid in the sight of God or not, and requiring marriage to be celebrated publicly according to the laws of God and man before it could be accepted as legally binding. The Council of Trent, acting on the certainty that de occultis non scrutantur, ‘what is secret may not be examined’, demanded the presence of two witnesses as a condition of valid matrimony. For English protestants the situation remained confused until the Hardwick Marriage Act of 1754. Till then ‘making all sure’ in marriage required a belt-and-braces approach.

  The action of Cymbeline, one of Shakespeare’s most mysterious plays, known to us only from the Folio, turns on a ‘handfast’. Imogen, destined by her father for marriage with the brutish son of his second wife, takes pre-emptive action by handfasting herself to Posthumus Leonatus, ‘a poor but worthy gentleman’.

  She’s wedded,

  Her husband banished, she imprisoned. All

  Is outward sorrow…(I. i. 7–9)

  The courtier who gives us this information at the beginning of the play is anxious that we should understand that Imogen is truly married: when he refers to Posthumus as ‘he that hath her’ he immediately corrects himself—‘I mean that married her…’ (18). The queen plots against Posthumus’ loyal servant Pisanio, because he is ‘the remembrancer’ who will remind Imogen ‘to hold The handfast to her lord’ (I. vi. 77–8). With Posthumus out of the way, Imogen is treated by her father and stepmother as if she were still eligible. She and Pisanio are the only ones aware that Cloten is ‘A foolish suitor to a wedded lady That hath her husband banished’ (I. vi. 2–3). Cloten upbraids Imogen:

  Your sin against

  Obedience, which you owe your father, for

  The contract you pretend with that base wretch,

  One bred of alms, and fostered with cold dishes,

  With scraps o’th’court, it is no contract, none,

  And though it be allowed in meaner parties

  (Yet who than he more mean?) to knit their souls

  (On whom there is no more dependency

  But brats and beggary) in self-figurèd knot,

  Yet you are curbed from that enlargement, by

  The consequence o’the crown…(II. iii. 108–18)

  Those who comb Shakespeare’s work for possible disparagement of his life with Ann might snatch at the hint that they had noth
ing but ‘brats and beggary’, but the person making the judgment is not Shakespeare but Cloten, the brutish villain of the piece.

  In Romeo and Juliet, when Juliet inadvertently declares her love to Romeo, and he returns it, she describes what has passed between them as a contract. Some of the things she has said could be construed as constituting a troth-plight:

  be but sworn my love,

  And I’ll no longer be a Capulet…

  Romeo, doff thy name,

  And for thy name which is no part of thee

  Take all myself. (II. i. 77–8, 89–91)

  Romeo replies with a version of the words of the handfast: ‘I take thee at thy word’ (91). Juliet has committed herself unwittingly, thinking herself to be alone. Nothing about this interchange could possibly bind either of them, except perhaps Juliet’s belief that she is so bound:

  Fain would I dwell on form, fain, fain deny

  What I have spoke, but farewell compliment.

  Dost thou love me? I know thou wilt say ‘Ay’,

  And I will take thy word. At lovers’ perjuries

  They say Jove laughs. O gentle Romeo,

  If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully…(130–5)

  Romeo attempts to swear and fails; nevertheless Juliet considers herself contracted:

  Well, do not swear. Although I joy in thee

  I have no joy in this contract tonight.

  It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden…(158–60)

  As she turns to go, Romeo stops her: ‘O wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?’ (167). She replies, ‘What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?’ (168). He explains: ‘Th’exchange of thy love’s faithful vow for mine’ (169). Juliet believes that her vow has already been given. ‘I gave thee mine before thou didst request it…’ (170). When she returns she instructs him to arrange the solemnisation of their wedding.