Shakespeare's Wife Read online

  Where all your friends will be seen.

  Young men and maids do ready stand

  With sweet rosemary in their hand…19

  With all this clamour anyone in the neighbourhood who didn’t already know that a marriage was toward would join the throng that was bringing the bridal pair towards the church. Such a village wedding was as public as could be, with all the neighbours, as well as the couple’s parents and the ubiquitous ‘friends’ who had made the match and drawn up any settlements, as witnesses. What happened next was ordained by the Book of Common Prayer: ‘At the day and the time appointed for solemnization of Matrimony, the persons to be married shall come into the body of the Church with their friends and neighbours…’ The main plot and all the sub-plots of As You Like It are driven by the theme of marriage; the finale of the play is a fourfold wedding at which Hymen himself officiates and everybody sings the ‘wedlock’ hymn:

  Wedding is great Juno’s crown,

  O blessed bond of board and bed.

  ’Tis Hymen peoples every town;

  High wedlock then be honourèd.

  Honour, high honour and renown

  To Hymen, God of every town. (V. iv. 139–44)

  Nearly all the marriages in Shakespeare’s plays are two-stage affairs, consisting of contract or ‘wedding’ and solemnisation or ‘matrimony’. As Fripp remarks, ‘The domestic contract was the binding ceremony, marriage in church was the concluding rite.’20 The earliest of the Shakespearean two-stage marriages is that of Katharina and Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew. The first stage, the church wedding, is thoroughly sabotaged by Petruchio. Though he himself had arranged it, he evidently doesn’t consider it a true wedding, for after it he doesn’t permit himself to exercise the rights of a husband.

  He is so late in coming to collect his bride that Katharina storms off in tears.

  He’ll woo a thousand, ’point the day of marriage,

  Make feast, invite friends, and proclaim the banns,

  Yet never means to wed where he hath wooed. (III. ii. 15–17)

  The ‘goodly company’ stays to witness Petruchio’s arrival bizarrely accoutred. He goes to ‘bid good morrow’ to his bride and together they proceed to the off-stage church, where he indulges in a bout of sacrilege.

  when the priest

  Should ask if Katharine should be his wife,

  ‘Ay, by gogs-wouns,’ quoth he, and swore so loud

  That, all amazed, the priest let fall the book,

  And, as he stooped again to take it up,

  The mad-brained bridegroom took him such a cuff

  That down fell priest and book, and book and priest.

  ‘Now take them up,’ quoth he, ‘if any list.’ (III. iii. 31–8)

  Katharina, we are told, merely ‘trembled and shook’. ‘After many ceremonies done’, Petruchio called for wine, ‘quaffed off the muscadel And threw the sops all over the sexton’s face’.

  This done, he took the bride about the neck,

  And kissed her lips with such a clamorous smack

  That at the parting all the church did echo. (50–2)

  The sound of music warns the people on stage that the bridal couple is on its way back from the church, but when he arrives Petruchio refuses to enjoy ‘the great store of wedding cheer’ and drags his rebellious wife off to the country where he refuses to consummate the marriage. The second stage of the wedding is when Petruchio, satisfied that Katharina now respects and trusts him, asks her to kiss him ‘in the midst of the street’, in coram populo, like any puritan.

  In Twelfth Night, Olivia gives Sebastian a pearl as a love-token, and then turns up with a priest, but even in this rather popish case the marriage is divided into two parts, the first private and the second public:

  Now go with me, and with this holy man,

  Into the chantry by. There before him

  Plight me the full assurance of your faith,

  That my most jealous and too doubtful soul

  May live at peace. He shall conceal it

  Whiles you are willing it shall come to note,

  What time we will our celebration keep

  According to my birth. (IV. iii. 23–31)

  The troth-plight in the chantry is clandestine, and chantries are a feature of the old religion. If Shakespeare was the Catholic so many scholars think he might have been, he might well have married Ann by the rites of the Catholic Church. For a Catholic marriage to have been valid after the Council of Trent, there would have to have been another witness besides the priest, but as there would have been no opportunity to publish the banns in a parish church, the marriage could not have been valid in English law. The only solution would have been another ceremony, with all the appropriate legal safeguards. Without these the Shakespeares’ children would have been illegitimate and Ann deprived of her rights. Probably, though not certainly, the marriage of Will and Ann was solemnised according to the ritual set out in the Book of Common Prayer.

  The rites are done, and now, as ’tis the guise,

  Love’s fast by day a feast must solemnise.

  The season for marriages has always been supposed to be the summer solstice but the register of Holy Trinity Stratford tells a rather different story. The most popular month by far for weddings in the 1580s was October, followed by November. Together these two months accounted for more than a third of the total number of weddings. May was next, on a par with January, with June rather a long way behind. From 1580 to 1590 not a single wedding was celebrated on Midsummer Day. November days are short. Ann and Will would not have had to wait out an endless twilight as the couples have to do in A Midsummer Night’s Dream before they could be bedded. If they had followed the custom, Ann would have been conducted to her bride bed and undressed by her maids, who were entitled to keep her garters. Will would have been undressed by his bride boys who would carry off his points, the ties that secured his codpiece, to keep for talismans. Perhaps none of this happened at the Shakespeares’ November wedding but, if it did not, it would not have been because the bride was pregnant or because they were in a hurry. In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet’s father decides to marry her off to Paris at a mere thirty-six hours’ notice, but the feasting is not scamped. Twenty cooks are hired, spices, dates and quinces brought from the pantry and the musicians already playing when the nurse goes to give the bride good-morrow. If Will and Ann could give their neighbours no wedding feast, it would have been simply because there was no one to pay for it. Ann’s parents were dead, Will’s parents were broke and they needed every penny they could scrape together for somewhere to live.

  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

  At the end of Shakespeare the Man (1973) A. L. Rowse has the temerity to exercise his imagination on what passed through Shakespeare’s mind as he lay dying: ‘And so back to earlier scenes, the pretty country folks in the acres of rye on the way to Shottery, bringing a bride in over the threshhold of the crowded old home in Henley Street…’1 Carrying the bride over the threshhold makes very little sense if the house you are carrying her into is not yours, and hence not hers. Rowse’s fantasy has more to do with the mores of the early-twentieth-century urban working class than with rural Warwickshire in the sixteenth century. Fripp too is almost foolhardy in his certainty that Shakespeare brought his pregnant wife to live with his parents and brothers and sister:

  It was the custom in Stratford, as elsewhere, for the eldest son to make his home under the parental roof, and if the Poet and his wife had lived elsewhere than at the Birthplace…it was contrary to custom, and we should probably have a hint of it.2

  But Fripp is wrong. It was not the custom in Stratford or anywhere else in sixteenth-century England for married children to live with or off their parents. The conclusion Laslett draws from the evidence of the Cambridge Group is quite uncompromising:

  The rule
is as follows: no two married couples or more went to make up a family group…When a son got married he left the family of his parents and started a family of his own. If he was not in a position to do this, then he could not get married, nor could his sister, unless the man who was to take her for his bride was also in a position to start a new family.3

  Despite all the work that has been done on English family building patterns since Fripp wrote, Greenblatt simply follows him, with the difference that ‘the crowded old home’ has become a ‘spacious house’:

  In the summer of 1583 the nineteen-year-old William Shakespeare was settling into the life of a married man with a new-born daughter, living all together with his parents and his sister Joan, and his brothers, Gilbert, Richard and Edmund, and however many servants they could afford in the spacious house on Henley Street.4

  John Shakespeare was not a nineteenth-century captain of industry but a Tudor artisan. The house in Henley Street may have been ‘spacious’ but if Shakespeare was still working as a glover it should also have been the site of the workshops where his workmen treated the stinking skins. The piles of skins were bulky and more room had to be found for the various pits where the skins were treated and the tubs in which they were soaked. When the skins were cut out and ready, space had to be found for the workmen and-women who sewed them. Then there were the bales of wool and other farming produce that Shakespeare dealt in. Any servants kept by the Shakespeares would have been employed in the business, not in domestic niceties. Nursemaids and ladies’ maids were not to be found in the houses of Tudor tradesmen.

  The atmosphere in the Shakespeare house cannot have been improved by the fact that John Shakespeare had been on bad terms with his neighbours for years. We shall probably never know what convoluted set of circumstances led to his punishment by the Court of Queen’s Bench in 1580—if indeed it was he. In Trinity Term a ‘John Shakespeare of Stratford, yeoman’ was fined the swingeing sum of £20 when he failed to appear to provide surety for ‘keeping the peace towards the Queen and all her people’ he also forfeited sureties of £10 each for two other men, John Audeley of Nottingham, hatmaker, and Thomas Cooley of Stoke, yeoman.5 Michael Wood thinks that what connected the three was religion, and that they had been singled out as Catholic recusants.6 The matter remains mysterious; we don’t know why John Shakespeare preferred to jettison so much money, as much as he had made on the mortgaging of the principal part of his wife’s inheritance, rather than show his face in the Court of Queen’s Bench. Nor do we know why he was referred to as a ‘yeoman’ when he was supposed to be a glover.

  In Trinity Term 1582 John Shakespeare was obliged to petition in the Court of Queen’s Bench for sureties of the peace against four of his neighbours, Ralph Cawdrey, William Russell, Thomas Logging and Robert Young ‘for fear of death and mutilation of his limbs’.7 Ralph Cawdrey, then serving as Bailiff of Stratford, had been running his butcher’s business in Bridge Street since 1541. In 1559 he had been fined for fighting with Mary Shakespeare’s brother-in-law Alexander Webbe of Bearley, and in 1560 he was fined for an affray with one ‘Greene of Wotton’. Why he should have been one of the people threatening to cudgel John Shakespeare in the summer of 1582 we shall probably never know. Rowse assumes that he owed them all money.8 By September the affair seems to have blown over, for Cawdrey was present when John Shakespeare attended the council meeting on 5 September and voted for his friend John Sadler to be chosen bailiff, his first appearance in the council chamber in six years.

  Some time before July 1582 one of John Shakespeare’s properties had been leased to William Burbage who, finding the arrangement unsatisfactory, demanded to be released from the contract and the return of the £7 he had paid for the lease.9 The Court of Common Pleas appointed three Stratford businessmen as arbitrators. Two lived in Henley Street: one, Alderman Nicholas Barnhurst, a rambunctious puritan woollen draper, represented John Shakespeare, the other, Alderman William Badger, a Catholic woollen draper, represented Burbage. The third, neutral member of the committee was John Lytton. The three met at St Mary le Bow in London and found for Burbage. It was decided that John Shakespeare should present himself at the Sign of the Maiden Head in Stratford on Saturday 29 September between the hours of one and four in the afternoon, to sign the quittance and repay the money. He did not show up. The debt was to remain unpaid for ten years.10

  Fripp believes that the difficulties with the letting were caused directly or indirectly by Will and Ann’s wedding:

  To his father’s house in Henley Street, according to the custom in Stratford and elsewhere, Shakespeare would bring his wife. In anticipation of this additional household, changes were made which seem to have been disturbing to the tenant (as we have supposed) of part of the house on the west, William Burbage.11

  Despite his tireless examination of the Stratford records Fripp had no idea which of John Shakespeare’s properties was leased to Burbage; he had deduced that Burbage had leased part of Henley Street because he already assumed that Will and Ann would have been expected to live there and interpreted the difficulty that arose in 1582 as a result of their need for accommodation. He also recognises that Will and Ann constituted an ‘additional household’ and his way of reconciling that is to assume that a self-contained apartment was set aside for the newly-weds and it was this that incommoded Burbage. If this was already understood before July 1582, Will and Ann must have been already betrothed, which does seem unlikely. As well as the ‘fine’ or fee for the lease, Burbage would have been expected to pay ten shillings a year in rent, on part of one or other of Shakespeare’s properties. The fact that two of the arbiters had Henley Street connections is the best evidence that the premises involved were there. In 1592 when Shakespeare was finally forced to give Burbage back his money, he was required to pay thirty-six shillings in damages as well. The likeliest cause of the litigation is that Burbage considered that the conditions of his lease had been breached and the arbitrators in the case obviously agreed with him. The ground for the confusion probably lies in the fact that the lease to Burbage was not the only lease demised by Shakespeare on the Henley Street property. Robert Bearman, who probably knows more about the Stratford archives than anyone else on earth, makes another observation that really does knock the idea of the ‘spacious house in Henley Street’ firmly on the head. Referring back to the litigation with Burbage, he observes:

  The arbiters have instructions that the money should be paid back ‘at the sign of the Maiden Head’ (‘apud signum de le maiden hedd’) in Stratford, the inn name by which part of the Henley Street property later became known. It could be, then, not only that John, hard pressed for cash, had mortgaged part of his main residence for cash but also that part of it had been leased for use as an inn.12

  If this is so, then, even if John, Mary, Joan, Gilbert, Richard and two-year-old Edmund were still rattling around in the double house in Henley Street in November 1582, plans were already afoot to turn the freehold into cash. By 1590 the house in Greenhill Street was gone as well, so we should probably guess that within a few months of their son’s untimely marriage the Shakespeares were reduced to roosting in a pair of rooms at the back of the Maiden Head, hard by the Gild Pits (the town dump). Turning the property into an inn was not as bad an idea as it might seem. Inns were where all business was transacted; as a wool brogger Shakespeare needed to meet clients from all over England and beyond, and an inn, where messages and goods could be left and collected, where the scriveners based themselves, which functioned on occasion as a bank, would serve his turn. As it was someone else’s business to run it and keep it clean, John Shakespeare could concentrate on his business, if in November 1582 he still had any business.

  The Maiden Head, which was leased to Lewis Hiccox, was no hole in the wall. The inventory made after Hiccox’s death in 1627 lists no fewer than thirteen beds, variously disposed in a ‘hall’, a ‘parlour’, a ‘lodging chamber’, a ‘room over the cellar’, a ‘best chamber’, a ‘stairhead chamber’,
a ‘three-bed chamber’, a ‘servants’ chamber’, a ‘further parlour’ and a ‘room overhead’. Even more significant is that the unexpired remainder of the lease is valued as part of the estate: ‘Item one chattel and lease of the houses in Henley Street of the demise and grant of William Shakespeare gent. for 63 years…’13 It would seem from his inventory that Hiccox occupied rather more than half of the double property, and the high value of the lease confirms such an impression. The lease sold to Hiccox in 1601 must have been for ninety-one years; what should surprise those people who believe that by 1601 William Shakespeare was a very rich man is that once he had become the owner of the freehold he apparently made no attempt to rescind the lease and restore the house to his mother and brothers. There may have been very little he could do, if the terms of the original lease had been faithfully observed by the tenant and his rent paid on time. If this was the case, then John Shakespeare had effectively disinherited his son. If, on the other hand, Shakespeare offered Hiccox a new long lease and pocketed the fine himself, we should probably infer that he needed the money.

  One of Will’s reasons for getting married at the age of eighteen might have been a profound desire for a quiet home of his own where he could think straight.14 Philoponus, in Philip Stubbes’s Anatomy of Abuses, lamenting the irresponsibility of boys who marry young, takes it for granted that even the youngest would set up housekeeping on their own:

  And besides this you shall have every saucy boy of ten, fourteen, sixteen or twenty years of age, to snatch up a woman and marry her, without any fear of God at all, or respect had, either to her religion, wisdom, integrity of life, or any other virtue, or, which is more, without any respect how they may live together with sufficient maintenance for their callings and estate. No, no—it maketh no matter for these things. So he have his pretty pussy to huggle withal, it forceth not, for that is the only thing he desireth. Then build they up a cottage, though but of elder poles, in every lane end, almost, where they live as beggars all their life…15