Shakespeare's Wife Read online

  David Cressy found a sharp rise in the number of schoolmasters listed by visitations in rural Essex and Hertfordshire from 1580 to 1592.28 One fifth of the villages in Cambridgeshire had a schoolmaster licensed continuously from 1570 to 1620 but the provision of teaching varied enormously from county to county and even parish to parish. In some places farmers clubbed together and pooled their resources to endow a local school.

  Between 1580 and 1700, 11 per cent of women, 15 per cent of labourers and 21 per cent of husbandmen, could sign their names, against 56 per cent of tradesmen and craftsmen, and 65 per cent of yeomen…There was…‘general and substantial progress in reducing illiteracy’ among all social groups except labourers in the late sixteenth century…29

  In the dame schools girls were taught to read and sew, knit and spin, boys to read, write and cast accounts. We have no idea how many dame schools there were in England in the early modern period but there must have been many more than there were schools where boys were taught by graduates. When Christ’s Hospital was founded in 1552, girls as well as boys were admitted; the girls would be taught to read and sew but not to write. Reading was essential if women were to follow their daily devotions, reading the approved verses of the Bible and the psalms allotted for the day; sewing provided for the woman and her family.

  Claire Cross, working on the spread of Lollardism in the early sixteenth century, was vividly aware of the importance of women in the process.

  It may be that considerably more women than the churchmen suspected acquired the ability to read in order to peruse Lollard books. Certainly a reverence for books characterizes women in a majority of communities, and in several, Lollard women took a major part in organizing book distribution. As mothers and grandmothers they had unique authority over impressionable children, and far more women than have been recorded may have been responsible for helping educate succeeding generations in heresy.30

  John Rhodes published in 1588 The Countryman’s Comfort for ‘the poor Countryman and his family who will ask these vain questions, sometimes saying: “What shall we do in the long winter nights? How shall we pass away the time on Sundays? What would you have us do in the Christmas holidays?” ’31

  Though there was a Bible in every husbandman’s home, there was also literature of more light-hearted kind. Spufford found that there was a mass of literature produced for the delectation and information of the masses, mostly little books or chap books that cost two pence:

  The reappearance of a great number of popular songs of satisfying content and artistry…in the half-century or so after 1550, is a form of phenomenon a little like the phenomenon of the Great Rebuilding and is very likely related to it. The same upsurge of spending power in the countryside that enabled the yeomanry to rebuild their houses, also permitted them to send their sons to school and to free them from the labour force. Children of less prosperous men could perhaps only be spared from school until six or seven, when they were able to become useful wage-earners and so only learned to read.32

  The sabbatarian Nicholas Bownde lamented in 1595:

  In the shops of Artificers, and cottages of poor husbandmen…you shall sooner see one of these new ballads, which are made only to keep them occupied…than any of the psalms, and may perceive them to be cunninger in singing the one than the other. And indeed, the singing of ballads is very lately renewed…so that in every fair and market almost you shall have one or two singing and selling of ballads.33

  The ballad sellers were often women. As early as 1520 Oxford bookseller John Dorne noted in his day-book that he was selling up to 190 ballads a day at a half-penny each.34 Ann probably sang ballads as she worked, much to the annoyance of those who thought like Miles Coverdale that ‘women at the rocks and spinning at the wheels should be better occupied than with “hey nonny-nonny—hey trolly lolly” and such-like fantasies’.35

  Autolycus, the pedlar in The Winter’s Tale, sells literature to both sexes.

  He hath songs for man or woman. No milliner can so fit his customers with gloves. He has the prettiest lovesongs for maids, so without bawdry, which is strange, with such delicate burdens of dildoes and fadings, ‘jump her and thump her’, and where some stretch-mouthed rascal would, as it were, mean mischief and break a foul gap into the matter, he makes the maid to answer, ‘Whoop! Do me no harm good man’. (IV. iv. 192–200)

  In The Merry Wives of Windsor Slender recalls that he has lent his book of riddles to Alice Shortcake (I. i. 185).

  Writing depends upon materials, pen, ink and paper. Goosequills were easy enough to come by, but ink and paper were expensive. As Greenblatt points out, ‘A pack of paper that, neatly folded and cut, yielded about fifty small sheets, would have cost at last fourpence, or the equivalent of eight pints of ale, more than a pound of raisins, a pound of mutton and a pound of beef, two dozen eggs or two loaves of bread.’36 However, the number of women who could write may have been greater than we think. We don’t know how many women, lacking a writing master, copied the characters they saw in the books they read. Women’s handwriting in the period is very different from men’s. Where men had two hands, a formal hand and a rapid scrawl, both cursive, most women put their thoughts down in a single not quite joined-up script. Their spelling was often phonetic, often wildly inconsistent. As women were the members of the family who moved away when they married, they were the ones who were duty-bound to write regularly to their parents, guardians and siblings, no matter how challenging a task they found it. Letters received had to be answered by return of post, that is by the same time the following week. To leave a letter unanswered was a serious discourtesy. Most of this prodigious activity has left no trace because families did not keep women’s letters, deeming them merely personal and domestic whereas men’s letters, which dealt with political, legal and financial matters and might be produced in the all too common event of litigation, were carefully filed.

  In the fourth song from Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, published in 1591, the amorous shepherd tries to coax his nymph to lower her guard:

  Your fair mother is abed,

  Candles out and curtains spread.

  She thinks you do letters write.

  Write, but first let me indite.37

  Sometimes grown women learnt to write. In Westward Ho (1604), the city wives Mistress Honeysuckle and Mistress Wafer are also being taught the use of the pen: ‘we come to acquaint thee with an excellent secret: we two learn to write…Yes, believe it, and we have the finest schoolmaster, a kind of Precisian, and yet an honest knave too…’38 Mistress Tenterhook is amazed. Master Honeysuckle interrogates the ‘mechanical pedant’, actually a bankrupt merchant in disguise, who claims to have been teaching married women to write for thirteen years: the exchange is possibly indebted to Malvolio’s unwittingly obscene description of Olivia’s hand in Twelfth Night.

  I trust ere few days be at end to have her fall to her joining, for she has her letters ad unguem: her A, her great B and her very C, very right, D and E delicate, her double F of a good length but that it straddles a little too wide, at the G very cunning.

  Her H is full like mine, a goodly big H.

  But her double L is well, her O of a reasonable size, at her P and Q neither merchant’s daughter, alderman’s wife, young country gentlewoman or courtier’s mistress can match her.

  And how her V?

  U, sir, she fetches up U best of all. Her single U she can fashion two or thee ways, but her double U is as I would wish it.39

  Obviously, teaching a woman to write is sexy. Did a penniless teenage boy, with nothing to his name but a grammar school education, unfold the mystery of writing as one stratagem for winning a quiet, sensible country girl? What else did he have to offer? Not a lot, as we shall see.

  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

  One thing young Will Shakespeare had to offer was poetry.
Even some of Ann’s most determined traducers think this truncated sonnet was penned by Will Shakespeare for her:1

  Those lips that Love’s own hand did make

  Breathed forth the sound that said, ‘I hate’

  To me that languished for her sake,

  But, when she saw my woeful state,

  Straight in her heart did mercy come,

  Chiding that tongue that ever sweet

  Was used in giving gentle doom,

  And taught it thus anew to greet:

  ‘I hate,’ she altered with an end

  That followed it as gentle day

  Doth follow night, who like a fiend

  From Heaven to Hell is flown away.

  ‘I hate’ from hate away she threw

  And saved my life, saying ‘not you’.

  If Will wooed Ann in one poem, he almost certainly wooed her in others. The syntax of this sonnet, No. 145 in Thorpe’s collation, is so baggy that the sense becomes almost dropsical; fourteen lines are needed to convey a single fatuous idea that the beloved said ‘I hate’ (boo!) and then ‘not you’ (hurrah!). The complex rhyme scheme closes each four-stressed end-stopped line with a definite clunk. Amid this elephantine tiptoeing we arrive at ‘hate away’ which has been interpreted by the Shakespearean cryptologists as ‘Hathaway’, which goes as near to prove as anything does in these cloudy regions that the poem is about Ann Hathaway, if not addressed to her. If it is, then according to her husband, Ann Shakespeare’s heart was merciful, her tongue ever sweet, and her judgment gentle. What is more, it was not the woman who seduced the boy, but he who ‘languished for her sake’, to the point of death, it would seem, and only then did she succumb to his importunity, and so save his life.

  Ann had good reason to resist Will’s advances: he was too young; he had been trained to no trade that we know of, and his family, having nursed pretensions beyond their means, had run into serious financial trouble. For all we know, Richard Hathaway might have forbidden Ann to countenance Will’s suit and she may have been constrained, like Portia, to respect her father’s wishes. Perhaps there was another contender for her hand, the son of one of her Shottery neighbours, a Sylvius to her Phoebe, a Will to her Audrey. If Ann Hathaway had suitors, they would have been farmers’ sons of more or less her own age, whom she had known since they were children. The life of a husbandman was unlivable without a wife, and Ann probably had what it took to be a good one, which was not great beauty but good health and capability. A well-known song from Campion’s second Book of Airs celebrates the country girl.

  Joan can call by name her cows

  And deck her windows with green boughs

  She can wreaths and tutties make

  And deck with plums a bridal cake

  Is not Joan a housewife then?

  Judge true-hearted honest men…

  Joan is of a lovely brown

  Neat as any in the town,

  Hair as black as any crow

  And does nimbly trip and go…

  Happy is their hour and time

  Who can give sweet Joan the wine.2

  Country people believed that their way of managing the rampant sexuality of young people was the right way. The key to the sequence of events was continuity.

  When did Perseda pastime in the streets,

  But her Erastus over-eyed her sport?

  When didst thou with thy sampler in the sun

  Sit sewing with thy feres but I was by?

  When didst thou go to church on holidays

  But I have waited on thee to and fro?3

  Boys and girls were guided by their parents into propinquity as they grew up together and then by degrees into intimacy.

  Between the acres of the rye,

  With a hey and a ho and a hey nonny no,

  These pretty country folks would lie,

  In spring-time, the only pretty ring-time.

  When birds do sing, hey-ding-a-ding ding,

  Sweet lovers love the spring.4

  Once the relationship was recognised by friends and neighbours it could not easily be broken off. A girl who was abandoned by a recognised swain was damaged goods. A girl who dumped a faithful lover was a jilt. The pattern of Ann’s life should have been as much as ten years courting with one or other of her country swains, then marrying when the opportunity for housekeeping arose, once there was land for him to work, beasts for him to keep and a sheep or two for her. Instead she cast herself away upon a brilliant boy with nothing. ‘When parents have a long time beaten the bush, another oft, as we say, catcheth the bird…’5

  We know from contemporary legislation that educated boys were considered a risk to simple country girls.6 In As You Like It Touchstone is a city wit who makes a speciality of wooing silly country girls like Audrey, the goatherdess, and has done since he was a boy. He reminisces about an earlier love: ‘I remember the kissing of her batler, and the cow’s dugs that her pretty chapped hands had milked, and I remember the wooing of a peascod instead of her, from whom I took two cods and giving her them again, said with weeping tears, “Wear these for my sake” ’ (II. iv. 45–50). ‘Batler’ was the name given to the wooden paddle that was used to thump the washing. Touchstone fancies himself a poet: ‘I am here with thee and thy goats, as the most capricious poet, honest Ovid, was among the Goths…’ (III. iii. 6–7). The schoolboy reference to the Tristia means less than nothing to Audrey. Touchstone laments: ‘When a man’s verses cannot be understood, nor a man’s good wit seconded with the forward child understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room. Truly, I would the gods had made thee poetical’ (III. iii. 9–13).

  Audrey is not poetical, as it turns out, but other country girls were. In the twenty-first century we tend to imagine seducers as older men, but the typical Elizabethan seducer was a boy. In 1609 Shakespeare’s sonnets found their way into print, and with them a narrative poem about the wooing of a country girl by a devilishly clever boy who, as soon as he has won her, abandons her. Those who find it hard to imagine a teenage seducer might be surprised at the description of the villain of ‘A Lover’s Complaint’:

  ‘His browny locks did hang in crooked curls,

  And every light occasion of the wind

  Upon his lips their silken parcels hurls…

  ‘Small show of man was yet upon his chin.

  His phoenix down began but to appear,

  Like unshorn velvet on that termless skin…

  ‘His qualities were as beauteous as his form,

  For maiden-tongued he was, and thereof free…’

  This young male is still an adolescent and yet a sexual predator. The woman he has seduced and abandoned seems older, and not simply because her grief has aged her:

  Upon her head a plaited hive of straw,

  Which fortified her visage from the sun,

  Whereon the thought might think sometime it saw

  The carcase of a beauty spent and done.

  Time had not scythed all that youth begun,

  Nor youth all quit, but in spite of heaven’s fell rage

  Some beauty peeped through lattice of seared age.

  So odd is this poem that scholars have been reluctant to attribute it with certainty to Shakespeare, some preferring George Chapman. The sole authority for the attribution to Shakespeare is the printing of the sonnets published by Thomas Thorpe, which has been thought to have been both unauthorised and inaccurate. In fact Thorpe was an editor careful enough to satisfy the demands of Ben Jonson. Duncan-Jones is just one scholar who has questioned whether the printing of the sonnets really was unauthorised.7 If we deny the poem’s authenticity as a work of Shakespeare we lay ourselves open to questioning the authenticity of some or even all of the sonnets, several of the themes of which are revisited in this highly sophisticated poem. It would be unwise in the extreme to interpret the poem as in any way autobiographical, but it should be sufficient to convince those nineteenth-century schoolmasters who could not entertain the tho
ught of a precocious boy seducing an innocent countrywoman that the sixteenth century found the idea completely plausible.

  Young as he is, the young man in ‘The Lover’s Complaint’ has been wooed by many; the country maid has heard of his conquests and his ‘foul adulterate heart’ and has held herself aloof. His suit relies upon a lying argument: he maintains that he has behaved so badly with other women because he has never truly loved anyone but her. She has no sooner fallen for it than he is gone, but so bewitched is she by him that if he were to return to her she would forgive him all his perfidy.

  We may assume perhaps that the teenage Shakespeare was attractive; in later life he was described as a well-shaped man of charming manners. The boy seducer of ‘The Lover’s Complaint’ has something in common with young Master Fenton in The Merry Wives of Windsor. As the landlord of the Garter Inn has it: ‘He capers, he dances, he has eyes of youth; he writes verses, he speaks holiday, he smells April and May’ (III. iii. 46). He is of the same breed as Falstaff’s younger rivals, the ‘lisping hawthorn buds that come like women in men’s apparel and smell like Bucklersbury in simple time’ (III. iii. 66–8). Fenton (whose Christian name we never learn) writes verses. And the maid he writes them to is called Ann.