Shakespeare's Wife Read online

  If Mary Shakespeare had been an astute businesswoman she might have been able to slow down or even halt John Shakespeare’s downhill career. In all discussions of the woeful succession of court cases, fines, defaultings and confusion that is John Shakespeare’s professional history, he is treated as a lone man, because most scholars have assumed that in the late sixteenth century wives played no part in the family business. An Elizabethan wife was first and foremost a helpmeet.

  The realm of work was…divided into two parts. What the man did was definite, well-defined, limited—let’s call it A. What the woman did was everything else—non-A. So the realm of work was divided without residue…According to this, for example, if a man was a glover, his work was clearly defined and anything else that had to be done to keep the home fires burning was his wife’s duty. If he became ill, and could do less and less, then she must do more and more, supervising the apprentices, seeing that the orders were fulfilled; or even by some employment, like taking in washing, she must supplement a failing business.13

  Deloney gives an example in his tale of a draper whose business failed.

  Thus lay the poor draper a long time in prison, in which space, his wife which for daintiness would not foul her fingers, or turn her head aside for fear of hurting the set of her neckerchief, was glad to go about and wash bucks at the Thames side, and to be a char-woman in rich men’s houses, her soft hand now hardened with scouring and, instead of gold rings on her lily-white fingers, they were now filled with chaps, provoked by the sharp, lye, and other drudgeries.14

  The Stratford mercer Richard Quiney was in London on Corporation business for most of the autumn of 1598. His father wrote to him on 20 October: ‘Your wife [is] careful and maketh all means she can to satisfy both your credits.’15 In fact Bess Quiney was sending her husband goods to sell, twenty and thirty pounds of cheeses, large and small, at a time, and tobacco, as well as homemade foods for himself. She was also borrowing and lending money, and managing her rental property. On 18 November Quiney’s colleague Abraham Sturley wrote:

  Also she would have you buy some raisins, currants, pepper, sugar and some other groceries if the price be reasonable and that you may have carriage reasonable…I wish you to remember you shall receive from your wife by Greenaway [the carrier] 12d. She has been selling wheat and malt and by borrowing discharged Mr Coles, Shaw and others and is very careful for to pay her borrowed money. She hath 7d but 20 shillings of Mr Parsons also she hopeth that my Lady Greville hath writ to Sir Edward concerning the £20 which he hopeth Sir Edward hath allowed you.16

  In Stratford cash was always in short supply. Nobody took the risk of carrying cash between Stratford and London; instead Stratford merchants usually bought from London merchants on credit that was reciprocated for London merchants in Stratford. Bess Quiney regularly ran out of ready money and had to borrow, and her husband did too. The difference was that they never borrowed more than they knew they could repay. John Shakespeare’s situation would perhaps have been less grave if, while he was working unpaid for the Corporation, Mary had been running the gloving business, filling his orders, organising the preparing of skins and the manufacture and delivery of gloves, and keeping his accounts. If she had been playing her part, it’s hard to believe that John Shakespeare could have so overstretched himself as to lose everything, including the estate she brought him. It looks very much as if, in John Shakespeare’s case, nobody was minding the shop. It may have been Mary’s distaste for the messy manual labour of gloving and whittawing that convinced John to earn more money faster and less filthily by dealing in wool. All the other successful businessmen in Stratford hedged their investments by diversifying, but they were careful not to neglect their core business.

  Mary was certainly pregnant half the time and feeding an infant the other half, but so were all the other Stratford wives who had to run the family business when the goodman was away, including Bess Quiney. Mary may have been delicate and have struggled through her pregnancies, but the record does not support such an impression. Either Mary endured eight pregnancies over twenty-four years, or, if we discount the earlier Joan, seven pregnancies over nineteen years for five surviving children. The two who died did not die in the perinatal period; Margaret died at five months old and Ann just before her eighth birthday. As reproductive careers go, this is less intensive and shorter than most. Ann Shakespeare’s friend Judith Sadler was to endure fourteen pregnancies over twenty-four years and only seven of her babies lived beyond infancy. If Mary Shakespeare did not assist her husband in the management of his affairs it was not pregnancy and childbirth that impeded her, nor yet ill health.

  In 1572 John Shakespeare brought an action in the Court of Common Pleas in Westminster against a glover in Banbury who owed him £50, and won for once. When he and another were then sued by one Henry Higford of Solihull for defaulting on repayment of a loan and found liable for £30, they were unable to pay. The debt was still outstanding in 1578. Such ducking and diving may have been typical of an emerging merchant class that bought cheap often on credit and bided its time before selling dear. John Shakespeare’s brother Henry was another who was extremely slow to pay his debts and he died a relatively wealthy man, but John Shakespeare was sailing far too close to the wind. By 1577 he was staying away from meetings of the council of aldermen. When the council agreed to a levy to pay for equipping soldiers, they assessed Alderman Shakespeare at a mere burgess’s rate of three shillings and four pence. More than a year later he still hadn’t paid it.17 In 1578 he incurred a fine by failing to show up for the vote on election day but was excused payment.18 When it was agreed that all the aldermen should pay four pence towards poor relief, he was excused again.19 Everybody knew he was broke.

  The presumption that Will stayed at school until he was fifteen is simply that, a presumption. The records of the King’s New School of Stratford-upon-Avon have not survived. Schoenbaum’s ‘reasonable enough supposition that William was apprenticed in his father’s shop’ after he left school is not as reasonable as it might seem.20 There was little point in giving a boy a grammar school education if the ultimate intention was to apprentice him to a manual trade. Will was unlikely to have been apprenticed to his father, because the master was expected to exercise a degree of rigour in dealing with his apprentices that was incompatible with fatherly feeling. Apprentices were often whipped or beaten; it would not have done for the child’s mother to be a witness to such correction. It seems moreover that in 1579, when his son was fifteen, John Shakespeare, being a defaulting debtor, was in no position to take an apprentice. If Will had been apprenticed to a fellow glover, he would have been indentured for seven years, during which time he was not free to pay his addresses to any woman. As a junior apprentice he would have been held to a full-time regimen of menial tasks and could not have been wandering off to Shottery whenever he felt like it—supposing his father had been able to find him a master in Stratford and had had the cash needed to pay for the indentures and for his board and lodging, which he probably didn’t. There is never any suggestion at any point in the Shakespeare family history of Mary’s participation in deciding her children’s futures. What is odd is that there appear to have been no decisions made. The family seems to have been left to drift.

  In 1576 or so, with his world crashing round his ears, John Shakespeare made an application for a grant of arms. He had been Master Shakespeare ever since his election as an alderman, but this did not entitle his wife to the title Mistress, which as a descendant of the Park Hall Ardens she may have believed she deserved. One of Mary’s motives for urging Shakespeare to put so much time into working for the Corporation could have been her awareness that, according to the experts,

  If any person be advanced into an office or dignity of public administration, be it either ecclesiastical, martial or civil, the herald must not refuse to devise to such a public person, upon his instant request, and willingness to bear the same without reproach, a coat of arms, and thenceforth to ma
triculate him, with his intermarriages and issues descending, in the register of the gentle and noble.21

  Though this first attempt was abandoned, Robert Cook, the Clarenceux King of Arms, drew a paper ‘pattern’ or sketch of the Shakespeare coat which would show a spear of gold ‘steeled argent’ on a bend sable on a field of gold; the crest was a silver falcon gentle ‘displayed’, that is, with wings spread, holding a spear or on a wreath of gold plaited with sable. A copy of the paper sketch was probably to be seen somewhere in the house at Henley Street, while the children were regularly regaled with tales of the Shakespeares’ ‘valiant service’ under Henry VII, and how closely they were related to the grand Ardens of Park Hall. The more desperate their circumstances, the more Mary would have clung to her dream of gentility.

  Mary would have been feeling dark enough in November 1578 when her husband was obliged to mortgage part of her inheritance, the house and fifty-six acres of land in Wilmcote, without the galling awareness that the person who lent them the £40 on the property was her eldest sister’s husband, Edmund Lambert. As Lambert and Edward Cornwell, Mary’s sister Margaret’s second husband, had already gone surety for Shakespeare for £5 borrowed from Roger Sadler, which he had failed to repay, Lambert was probably confident that when the repayment date came around Shakespeare would default, the property would be forfeit and he, Lambert, would remain in possession. At the same time the Shakespeares conveyed another eighty-six acres to associates of Robert Webbe, son of another of Mary’s sisters, for a set period after which it was to be returned for the use of the heirs of Mary’s body. In 1579 the Shakespeares also surrendered their ninth part of the two houses and a hundred acres in Snitterfield, which they sold to Robert Webbe for £4.

  At Michaelmas 1580 Shakespeare failed to repay the £40 borrowed on Asbyes and the Lamberts remained in possession. It was tough enough for Mary to realise that her inheritance was all but gone, without the knowledge that the £40 raised from the mortgage had disappeared as well when the Court of Queen’s Bench fined Shakespeare the huge sum of £20 for failing to appear to find security for keeping the Queen’s Peace, and then made him pay up another £20 when two men for whom he had gone surety failed to appear.22 John Shakespeare may have been unwise in both his borrowings and his lending, but in normal times he would have got away with it. What made the difference was that by 1580 the midlands were sliding into economic recession. The most likely cause of John Shakespeare’s inability to pay his debts was that his clients had defaulted on debts owed to him; clearly his colleagues still considered him an honourable man, for they gave him every chance to recover, and did not remove him from the list of aldermen and elect another in his place until September 1586. This by the way is proof, if proof were needed, that John Shakespeare was not a Catholic but a full member of the reformist brotherhood. No tolerance whatever was extended by the Corporation to papists who defaulted.

  Six or seven years before Mary needed to begin worrying about having no property to offer with a son in hopes of making a good match, Will pre-empted her by impregnating Ann Hathaway and marrying her forthwith. William’s marriage was probably felt by Mary as a severe blow. She and her children were slipping in the world, as her sisters’ families prospered, some of them at her expense. In 1587 Edmund Lambert died, still in possession of Asbyes. John then embarked on legal action, not to recover the property from the heir, John Lambert, but for an additional £20 which he said had been promised him in return for delivery of unencumbered title. The unpleasantness would drag on almost to the end of his life; in 1597 the case was heard in Chancery, and again in 1599. Such legal action was costly, not only in money (for both sides) but also in ill feeling.

  Marriage was far from universal in Elizabethan England but, even so, the Shakespeares’ making no attempt to find a wife for any one of three boys, especially after their son and heir had made what might be regarded as an unsuitable match, is peculiar. Gilbert would have attained his majority in October 1587; unless his father really and truly had no money whatsoever Gilbert must have been a worthwhile marriage prospect for someone. If Mary had been on good terms with her sisters and their progeny, she would have had hundreds of possible candidates from whom to choose a likely girl for her boys. If on the other hand her sisters and their husbands regarded John Shakespeare as a jumped-up wastrel who had impoverished his wife and children, they would have been reluctant to match any of their daughters or nieces with any of his sons. Mary Shakespeare was to find wives for none of her sons; her daughter was left to find a husband for herself.

  Most of Shakespeare’s heroes and heroines are motherless. The few mothers who do appear in Shakespeare’s plays are anything but motherly, from the cannibal mother Tamora in Titus Andronicus to the neurotically affected mother of Juliet, the mother of Richard III who curses her womb and the Countess of Rossillion in All’s Well who simply dislikes her son. At best mothers are ineffectual, like Queen Elizabeth in Richard III, Lady Faulconbridge in King John and Lady Macduff, and at worst depraved, like Gertrude and Lady Macbeth.

  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

  We know from the stone over Ann Shakespeare’s grave that she was born eight years before her husband. What we shall never know is how or when she and Shakespeare met, though we do know that their parents had known each other since the 1550s. It is assumed that she was the mover in the courtship, simply because she was older.To Katherine Duncan-Jones,

  it seems more likely that her father’s death left the unmarried Agnes or Anne…without much parental care or control, and as a mature and spirited country girl she exploited her freedom to consort with the local youth. A combination of boredom with the sexual curiosity natural to his years led to Shakespeare’s dalliance with her, and to what was probably his first experience of sex.

  For some reason Duncan-Jones chooses to exaggerate Shakespeare’s immaturity: ‘In the early modern period puberty occurred, on average, four or five years later than it does today. Some boys of eighteen or nineteen were still able to sing treble.’ There is, of course, no reason to believe that Shakespeare’s vocal cords were undeveloped or that the boys she refers to were not singing falsetto. Will did impregnate Ann after all, and, according to Duncan-Jones, in very short order. ‘Ann was unlike many young women of her age not only in being unmarried, but also in being to some extent free and independent.’1

  Ann was also like many young women of her age in being unmarried. About 20 per cent of her female contemporaries would die without ever having been married, so spinsters of twenty-six were not at all rare. Unmarried women over the age of twenty-one were all ‘free’, in the sense that they could earn money and keep or spend it as they chose, as married women could not, and they could marry without waiting on their parents’ wishes. In Elizabethan England there were probably more women over the age of twenty-one who were fatherless than whose fathers were still living. As for the suggestion that Ann was ‘to some extent…independent’, she could have been a girl of independent means, if property had been entailed on her by her mother’s family, but such an arrangement would have left a paper trail that has yet to be discovered.

  Even if Ann did have some property of her own, as a husbandman’s daughter she would not have been expected to pass her life in idleness. As small children she and her brother would have been sent into the fields to scare away birds from the crops, and perhaps even to pick stones out of the soil. At an early age she would have learnt how to milk her father’s ewes—

  Each shepherd’s daughter with her cleanly pail

  Has come afield to milk the morning meal.2

  What the family did not drink for breakfast, together with what she milked in the evening every day from April to October, would have been fermented until it separated to curds and whey. The whey was the family’s usual drink; the curds were made into cheeses, soft for im
mediate consumption and hard for keeping.

  Before 1534 the making of hard cheeses was done in the cool vaults of the monasteries; after the dissolution farmers took over the cheese-making themselves with rather variable results. In the 1580s cows were still a relative rarity in Warwickshire compared to sheep, but Ann may well have had a cow or two to take care of. Though the herding of the animals was mostly men’s work, women could do it at a pinch. Milking and the preparation of milk products on the other hand was exclusively women’s work. Ewes the milkmaid could handle by herself; if she was dealing with a cow, she needed a cowherd to hold the halter to control the beast. Women also looked after the smaller creatures, the chickens, ducks and geese.

  My love can milk a cow