Shakespeare's Wife Read online

  Item my will is (with the consent of my wife) that my eldest son Bartholomew shall have the use commodity and profit of one half-yard land with all pastures and meadowing thereto belonging with the appurtenances to be tilled, mucked and sowed at the charge of Joan my wife, he only finding seed during the natural life or widowhood of the same Joan my wife to be bestowed, severed from the other of my land for his commodity and profit. And my will is that he, the same Bartholomew shall be a guide to my said wife in her husbandry, And also a comfort unto his brethren and sisters to his power. Provided always that if the said Joan my wife shall at any time or times after my decease go about to disannul or take away from my said son Bartholomew the foresaid half yard land with the appurtenances, so that he do not enjoy the commodity and profit of the same according to the true meaning of this my last will and testament, then my will is that the said Joan my wife shall give deliver and pay unto my said son Bartholomew within one year after any such denial, or discharge the sum of forty pounds of lawful English money

  This rather cumbersome arrangement suggests that, unusually, Joan and her children would remain in Richard Hathaway’s house, rather than giving way to the son and heir; Joan would be responsible for the management of the rest of the Hathaway farmlands with Bartholomew’s help. In most parts of England in exchange for a third portion of the estate,a widow would have been expected to vacate the house but, perhaps because Thomas, Margaret, John and William were still so small, Joan was allowed to remain there. A match for Bartholomew had already been concluded; on 25 November, only three weeks after his father’s death, he married Isabel Hancocks of Tredington. Wherever he took his bride home to, it was not to Hewlands Farm, where Joan remained farming on her own account until her death in 1599. The will goes on: ‘Item: I give and bequeath unto every of my godchildren four pence apiece of them’. We don’t know who Richard’s godchildren may have been, or how many of them there were. It is possible that children of John Shakespeare may have been among them. In September 1566 John Shakespeare stood surety for Richard Hathaway in two actions, and was called on to pay debts for him to a Joan Biddle and a John Page. Later, in 1579, Hathaway and John Shakespeare would both be mentioned in the will of Roger Sadler as debtors to his estate. On 15 April 1569 the Shakespeares’ second daughter was christened Joan, perhaps after Richard Hathaway’s wife, though it seems as likely that she was named for her aunt Joan, Mary Shakespeare’s sister. In 1574 a son received the name Richard. Perhaps Richard Shakespeare too became one of the unspecified number of godchildren to whom Richard Hathaway left four pence apiece in his will. If this was indeed the case, William Shakespeare and Ann Hathaway were related to each other within the prohibited degrees of spiritual consanguinity.

  ‘Item: I give and bequeath unto Agnes Hathaway and Elizabeth Hathaway daughters unto Thomas Hathaway a sheep apiece of them’. Agnes Hathaway, not quite four years old, and Elizabeth, not quite two, were daughters of Hathaway’s nephew Thomas, the youngest of the seven children of his elder brother George, who had died eight years before, being buried in Holy Trinity on 25 September 1573. Why Richard should have singled out Thomas’s very small children for special remembrance is not known. Perhaps Thomas had been part of the workforce at Hewlands before his marriage. He must still have been sheep-farming otherwise there would have been small point in giving his little girls their own sheep. He may have become alienated from the rest of his family in the matter of religion and have found sympathy and support from his uncle. Thomas’s children and grandchildren were to remain close to Ann and her daughters all their lives, unlike Ann’s half-brothers John and William Hathaway.

  It is typical of the provident Hathaway family that spouses had been found for four of George’s children before he died. Philippa married Laurence Walker at Holy Trinity in 1567; John married Margery Round of Snitterfield in 1568; their son christened at Holy Trinity on 14 December 1573 was called Richard. George married Ann Heaton of Loxley in 1570 and Alice married Henry Smith of Banbury in 1572. The other three were also able to marry after their father’s death, which suggests that they too had been left adequate portions. Thomas married Margaret Smith (probably the sister of Henry) in 1575; in 1579 Ann married William Wilson who was to become a Stratford alderman in 1592, and a few months later Frances married David Jones, the man who produced the Whitsun pastoral that was played in Stratford in 1583; the accounts of the Corporation for that year list ‘thirteen shillings and fourpence paid to David Jones and his company for his pastime at Whitsuntide’.10 By these marriages Ann was connected to a significant proportion of the settled population of Stratford and the surrounding district.

  The fact that Richard Hathaway made his wife rather than his eldest son his executor and residuary legatee reinforces the notion that she was a second wife and rather younger than he. Joan would remain in Shottery where she is recorded as holding a half-yardland in 1590, and running a household of six in 1595. It was not until well after her death in 1599 that Bartholomew took possession of Hewlands Farm. Historians who imagine that Ann and Bartholomew were running Hewlands Farm together after Richard Hathaway’s death are simply wrong.11

  The overseers of the will, who received twelve pence each for their pains, were Hathaway’s neighbours, forty-three-year-old Stephen Burman and thirty-year-old Fulke Sandells. The Warwickshire Corn Enquiry of 1595 lists four Burman households in Shottery of which Stephen Burman’s with a hundred acres under barley and sixty acres under peas and a household of fifteen people was the largest.12 Fulke Sandells seems to have been primarily a sheep-farmer, with only twenty acres of barley and eleven acres of peas in 1595. The will was witnessed by the curate William Gilbert, Richard Burman, John Richardson and John ‘Hemynge’. Gilbert served as under-schoolmaster at the grammar school at various times from 1561–2, and was appointed curate on £10 a year in 1576, a position that he held until his death in 1612. He was also paid £1 a year to maintain the town clocks. John Richardson was a substantial member of the Shottery community; when he died in 1594 his goods, including wheat, barley, peas, oats and hay in the barns, five cows, three heifers and a bullock, four horses and mares, and 130 sheep were appraised at £87 3s 8d. Of most interest to us is John Hemynge or Hemmings. A John Hemmings, hayward of Shottery, baptised seven children in Holy Trinity between December 1563 and September 1582, including another John. What nobody knows is in what way if at all these John Hemmingses are related to the John Hemmings who together with Henry Condell edited the Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays. Fripp believes that John Hemmings to be the son and heir of George Hemmings of Droitwich, but the evidence is rather less than conclusive.

  No servants, except the shepherd Thomas Whittington, are mentioned in Hathaway’s will. As Catherine was neither married nor buried in Stratford, it seems likely that she had gone into service. If Ann was still living in Shottery, she may have been making herself too useful for her own good. Joan Hathaway, with the running of the farm to consider, may have been only too happy to leave the cooking and washing, brewing and baking to Agnes—Ann. Indeed, we might think of Ann as in much the same situation as Cinderella, except that she is older rather than younger than the other children.

  The match between William Shakespeare and Ann Hathaway was an alliance of two substantial families in a close-knit community where everybody knew everybody else’s business. Husband and wife would remain in contact with both their extended families, who continued to live in houses that were within walking distance of each other, worshipping at the same church, christening and burying their children in the company of their own kith and kin.

  The connection of the Hathaway clan with the theatre may extend to more than the marriage of Frances Hathaway with a local impresario and the coincidence of the name Hemmings. A playwright with the same name as Ann’s father, Richard Hathaway, spelt as it is spelt in the will, ‘Hathway’, was one of the stable of playwrights retained by Philip Henslowe, owner—manager of the Rose Theatre, to furnish plays for the resident com
pany, the Admiral’s Men. Because so few of these plays found their way into print, Henslowe’s diary is virtually our sole source of information about him. The Dictionary of National Biography tells us that Richard Hathway was almost certainly connected to the Warwickshire Hathaways but can give no grounds for the belief.

  As Hathway’s professional career is rather more typical than Shakespeare’s, it makes sense to give a detailed account of it. We first hear of Hathway in 1598 when he writes an entry dated 11 April in Henslowe’s ‘diary’ (actually a memorandum book) acknowledging receipt of twenty shillings as an advance for ‘The Life of Arthur King of England’, ‘to be delivered on Thursday next following after the date hereof’.13 This, the only play for which Hathway was solely responsible, secured his membership of Henslowe’s crew of writers; he was paid not, as some think Shakespeare was, by being given shares in the company but in cash. The full sum was lent to the company by Henslowe the following day. ‘Lent unto the company the 12 of April 1598 to pay Master Hathway in full payment for his book of King Arthur the sum of four pounds’.14 Henslowe did not give the title ‘Master’ to all his playwrights; it seems to have been reserved, though not consistently, for playwrights who were ‘sharers’, that is, shareholders in the theatre.

  Hathway is supposed then to have worked with Anthony Munday on ‘Valentine and Orson’. In January 1599 he, Robert Wilson, Michael Drayton and Munday received a payment of £4 on account to produce a play called ‘Owen Tudor’. On 16 October 1599 Thomas Downton acknowledged receipt of £10 ‘to pay Master Munday, Master Drayton, Master Wilson and Hathway for the first part of the life of Sir John Oldcastle and in earnest of the second part for the use of the company’. So successful in performance was The First Part of the true and honourable history of Sir John Oldcastle, the good lord of Cobham that Henslowe gave ten shillings to ‘Master Munday and the rest of the poets’ ‘as a gift’.15 This is the only play associated with Hathway that ever found its way into print. When Sir John Oldcastle was licensed by the Stationers’ Company in August 1600, though a ‘second part’ was mentioned in the entry, all that the licensee, Thomas Pavier, managed to print was a first part, originally issued anonymously, and then reissued with Shakespeare’s name on the title-page. Ironically enough, when seven new plays were added to the second issue of the 1664 edition of the Shakespeare Folio, The First Part of the true and honourable history of Sir John Oldcastle was one of them.

  In 1600 Hathway contributed a fluent if rather uninteresting encomium ‘Of the Book’ to Belvedere or the Garden of the Muses, a printed commonplace book compiled for John Bodenham, a wealthy London tradesman who furnished funds for the collection and publication of poems in anthologies.

  The sundry beams proceeding from one sun,

  The hive where many bees their honey bring,

  The sea to which a thousand rivers run,

  The garden where survives continual spring,

  The trophy hung with diverse painful hands,

  Abstract of knowledge, brief of eloquence,

  Aiding the weak, preserving him that stands,

  Guide to the soul and ruler of the sense,

  Such is this volume, and the freight hereof,

  However Ignorance presume to scoff.16

  On 14 June 1600 Hathway with Munday, Drayton and Thomas Dekker furnished Henslowe with the script of the first part of ‘The Fair Constance of Rome’ for a full payment of forty-four shillings, and received an advance of twenty shillings to write a second part. Henslowe records an advance of forty shillings to Masters Rankins and Hathway on 3 January 1601 for ‘a book called Hannibal and Scipio’17 Hathway’s receipt of the same date also appears: ‘Received by us Richard Hathway and William Rankins in part of payment for the play of “Hannibal and Scipio” the sum of forty shillings’.18 Also that year the duo produced ‘The blind Beggar of Alexandria’ featuring Henry VIII’s clown Scoggins and the poet John Skelton as characters, against an advance of thirty shillings paid on 26 January, and further payment of forty shillings on 25 February and a final payment of eighteen shillings on 8 March.19

  Sixteen days later Hathway was commissioned with Rankins to write ‘a play called The Conquest of Spain’ with an advance of ten shillings, was paid a further five shillings on 4 April, twenty shillings on 11 April and another four shillings on 16 April, all of which seems to indicate that he was delivering the play in dribs and drabs. This play was eventually rejected by the company: the entries relating to it in the ‘diary’ are cancelled. An undated letter to Henslowe from Samuel Rowley that can be found among the Alleyn MSS at Dulwich College throws a rather disturbing light on the situation:

  M Henslowe, I pray you let Master Hathway have his papers again of the play of John of Gaunt and, for the repayment of the money back again, he is content to give you a bill of his hand to be paid at some certain time as in your discretion you shall think good. Which done you may cross it out of your book and keep the bill or else we’ll stand so much indebted to you and keep the bill ourselves.20

  Hathway had clearly been paid the money and spent it, for he was obviously unable to return it when the play was rejected. Henslowe must have been satisfied with his IOU for Hathway continued to write for the Admiral’s Men, but then Henslowe was only too happy to keep his playwrights in debt to him, because it increased the pressure on them to produce playtexts on demand. In October Henslowe paid advances totalling forty-three shillings for ‘The Six Clothiers of the West’, to Hathway, William Haughton and Wentworth Smith.21 An undated entry in Hathway’s hand records receipt of a payment ‘in earnest’ of forty shillings for a second part ‘of the six clothiers’.22 On 6 January 1602 Henslowe paid a first advance of fifty shillings to Hathway and Smith for ‘Too Good to be True, or the Poor Northern Man’, but by 7 January Henry Chettle had joined them for a further £3 10s in full payment.23 On 17 November 1602, Hathway, Day and Smith received £6 in full payment for ‘A Book called as Merry as May be’.24 On 4 November 1602 Henslowe paid Hathway an advance of forty shillings for ‘The Black Dog of Newgate’, but a marginal note records it as ‘John Day’s Comedy’ and the second payment of forty shillings is recorded as to Hathway, Day, Smith ‘and the other poet’. A final payment of forty shillings was made on 20 December.25 ‘The Black Dog of Newgate’, part 1, was acted by Worcester’s Men in 1602, while ‘The Boast of Billingsgate’ on which Hathway worked with Day (for two payment of forty shillings) in March 1603 was played by the Admiral’s Men.26 Hathway seems to have had some part in ‘The Fortunate General: a French History’ acted by Worcester’s Men that year, and worked with Day and Smith on a companion piece, ‘The Unfortunate General’, acted early in 1603. Henslowe records two payments of thirty shillings to Hathway and Smith ‘in earnest’ of a play he calls ‘Unfortunate Generall French History’ on 7 and 10 January 1603 and two more of forty shillings on 16 and 19 January to Hathway, Smith and Day for the same play.27 We last hear of Richard Hathway, playwright, as one of the authors of the second part of ‘The Black Dog of Newgate’ with ‘John Day and Master Smith and the other poet’, for a total of £7 paid on 29 January and 3 February.

  Then Hathway disappears from the record, annihilated possibly by the plague of 1604. He would not be the only kinsman of William Shakespeare who struggled to make a living in the London theatre and failed. What chills is the recollection that, in 1598, Francis Meres in Wit’s Treasury had named Richard Hathway as one of the best comedy-writers of his day. Though he had a hand in no fewer than nineteen plays Hathway is nowadays utterly forgotten. Henslowe became a very wealthy man, while his writers toiled ceaselessly to avoid destitution and imprisonment for debt, often without success. In 1600 Henslowe was obliged to lend Hathway’s colleague William Haughton ten shillings to secure his release from imprisonment in the Clink. Henry Chettle was continually in debt to Henslowe and in 1599 was imprisoned in the Marshalsea for debt. On 3 March 1607 he was so desperate for money that he pawned his playscript and gave Henslowe the pawn ticket instead.


  A week before the Shakespeares were granted their special licence from the Consistory Court at Worcester, a similar licence was granted by the Bishop of London to the Curate of St Bartholomew near the Royal Exchange for the marriage of Richard Hathway of the parish of St Lawrence Jury, gentleman, and Ann Maddox of London, maiden, with only one announcing of the banns.28 A gentleman who was of an age to marry in 1582 is frankly unlikely to have taken to writing for the stage sixteen years later, but in 1598 Meres wrote as if Hathway was already an established writer. It is not impossible, of course, that Richard Hathway, gentleman, came down in the world and was eventually forced to make use of his education in writing for the stage. This is after all what befell Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe. A good deal more work would have to be done tracing the Hathaways and their affines before we could rule out—or in—a connection of the Warwickshire Hathaways with the stage. What is curious is that most commentators are so convinced that the playwright Hathway could have no connection whatever with Shakespeare’s wife that they do not trouble themselves to eliminate the possibility, which remains.