Shakespeare's Wife Read online

  Holden’s view is that, after the mythical ‘roll in the hay’, ‘the autumn of 1582 saw Anne Hathaway telling her late father’s friends that she was pregnant by young Will Shakespeare…’2 The implication is that Ann was informing on her lover to men who would grab the figurative shotgun and prod him down the aisle with it. All we know for sure is that Fulke Sandells, the overseer of Ann’s father’s will, and John Richardson, one of the witnesses, both men of substance, acted for the couple in securing a special licence and putting up the bond that would enable them to marry with a single calling of the banns. Both parties to a marriage were legally required to call the banns, that is, to announce the intended marriage in both parish churches on three successive Sundays, and to ask anyone who knew of grounds why the marriage should not proceed to come forward and state the case. The banns might not be called during Advent and Christmastide. In 1582 Advent Sunday fell on 2 December and Christmastide ended on the octave of the Epiphany, 13 January. Applications for special licences were relatively common; in 1582 the Consistory Court of Worcester granted ninety-eight of them. Puritan reformers inveighed against what they saw as the survival of a popish scheme to wring money from the faithful, and argued that solemnisation of marriage should be performed throughout the liturgical year, without penalties.

  That November the banns could have been called on any of four Sundays, 4, 11, 18 and 25 November, and on the Feast of St Andrew, 30 November. If the banns were not called before the special licence became necessary, we should probably conclude that it was because the match had not been agreed. Nobody would have committed the huge sum of £40 required for the bond if it could have been avoided or if there was the slightest chance of forfeiting it. Ann did not need to argue her case to anyone; she was a spinster and at her own disposal, but only misogyny would assume on the available evidence that she was pushing for the marriage and Will was resisting.

  With them to Worcester Sandells and Richardson had to take a slew of supporting documentation, all which would have had to be sworn and notarised, including an allegation giving correct names and addresses of both parties plus evidence of the consent of parents or guardians in the case of the minor, William. Being at her own disposal Ann would have signed the allegation for herself or, more likely, made her mark. She and William’s parents would also have been required to sign a statement that to the best of their knowledge there was no legal impediment to the marriage, no prior contract and no question of consanguinity. The £40 bond, ‘quadraginta libris bone et legalis monete Anglie’, was to indemnify the court in case of a challenge; the £40, the price of a middle-sized house, would become payable only in the event that the marriage was invalid. Neither the bride nor the groom was required to attend the court. The bond itself was written in Latin with an English explanation of the terms:

  The condition of this obligation is such that if hereafter there shall not appear any lawful let or impediment by reason of any precontract consanguinity affinity or by any other lawful means whatsoever but that William Shakespeare of the one party and Ann Hathaway of Stratford in the Diocese of Worcester maiden may lawfully solemnise matrimony together and in the same afterwards remain and continue like man and wife according unto the laws in that behalf provided and moreover if there be not at this present time any action suit quarrel or demand moved or depending before any judge ecclesiastical or temporal for and concerning any such lawful let or impediment. And moreover if the said William Shakespeare do not proceed to solemnisation of marriage with the said Ann Hathaway without the consent of her friends. And also if the said William do upon his own proper costs and expenses defend & save harmless the Right Reverend Father in God Lord John Bishop of Worcester and his officers for licensing them the said William and Ann to be married together with once asking of the banns of matrimony between them and for all other causes that may ensue by reason or occasion thereof that then the said obligation to be void and of none effect or else to stand & abide in full force and vertue3

  Once the special licence had been obtained and only one proclamation of the banns was required it could be made at the door of the church on the day of the marriage itself.

  The amount of money at risk seems higher than would be required simply to enable a marriage with only one asking of the banns. It has always been assumed that Ann had no other suitor than Shakespeare; if negotiations for a marriage with someone else had been begun before Ann’s father’s death, and had reached a stage of commitment, we would have another motive for speed and privacy in the circumstances. Ann’s brother Bartholomew married three weeks after his father’s death; in his case the commitment had reached its final stage and the marriage went ahead regardless. Bartholomew’s son and daughter were later to marry a sister and brother, and Ann may have been in line for a sensible marriage with one of her brother’s brothers-in-law before she fell in love with a boy genius.

  There is another possible impediment to the marriage of Will and Ann. If Richard Hathaway stood godfather to Richard Shakespeare, and/or Joan Hathaway to Joan Shakespeare, Will and Ann would have found themselves within the prohibited degrees of spiritual consanguinity. Godparents were treated within the canon law as parents; in the eyes of the church their children and their godchildren were spiritual brothers and sisters and could not marry without special dispensation from the bishop’s court. The doctrine of spiritual affinity had occasioned a very satisfactory flow of revenue to the ecclesiastical courts and was bitterly resented by the populace. It was hard enough finding suitable mates for one’s children without running into a web of affinity that effectively rendered all the neighbours ineligible.4 Spiritual consanguinity or ‘cognatio spiritualis’ as a ‘diriment impediment of marriage’, that is, grounds for dissolving a marriage already celebrated, had been attacked by Luther. In England the reform of the canon law was long in coming; neither the Henrician Canon nor Cranmer’s proposed reform of the canon law was ever put into effect. The Elizabethan settlement, which held that ‘no prohibition, God’s law except, shall trouble or impeach any marriage outside Levitical law’, did not address itself specifically to the question. Whether or not spiritual consanguinity was still in force seems to have been a matter of custom.

  What is actually a very ambiguous situation is seen by modern commentators as an open-and-shut case: ‘The distinct impression given by the bare documentation of these subsequent events is that these two worthies strong-armed young William over to the consistory court at Worcester, some twenty miles from Stratford, before he could flee his obligations.’5 There is no evidence that Shakespeare was ever at the Consistory Court at Worcester. He had no role to play in the negotiations and his presence was not required. There was nothing for him to sign, and as a minor he was not qualified to sign. There was no hearing. He was not to be questioned. Ann would not have been required to be there either. Holden elaborates his untenable case: ‘It has even been suggested that Sandells and Richardson obtained the licence on their own initiative, with or without the knowledge of Shakespeare’s father, to ensure that the father of Anne Hathaway’s future child duly became her husband.’6

  There is nothing, it seems, that ignorance and prejudice will not suggest when it comes to the marriage of Ann Hathaway. Holden’s nonsense is derived from the nonsense of the great Sir Sidney Lee, who did not scruple to invent what he did not know about the law governing marriage in the sixteenth century.

  The prominence of the Shottery husbandmen in the negotiations preceding Shakespeare’s marriage suggests the true position of affairs. Sandells and Richardson, representing the lady’s family, doubtless secured the deed on their own initiative, so that Shakespeare might have small opportunity of evading a step which his intimacy with their friend’s daughter had rendered essential to her reputation. The wedding probably took place without the consent of the bridegroom’s parents—it may be without their knowledge—soon after the signing of the deed.7

  Of this there was not the slightest possibility. For anyone under age to
marry without parental consent was considered a heinous sin, to which the Consistory Court could never have made itself a party. Will’s full consent was necessary too; if he was married according to the order in the Book of Common Prayer, he would have been asked once whether he would and again whether he did take Ann to be his lawful, wedded wife. Yet his great champions would rather believe that he perjured himself than that he honestly and truly took Ann Hathaway to have and to hold. Certainly there could have been opposition to the match, on either side or both sides, especially if a more suitable match had already been mooted. It may have been opposition to their marriage that persuaded the young people to preempt the ceremony, and force the issue by chancing a pregnancy, as others had done before them and were to do after them.

  In 1595 Shakespeare’s patron, the Earl of Southampton (the same who is thought to have had a fully acted-out homosexual relationship with the Bard), fell seriously in love with one of the queen’s maids of honour, the Earl of Essex’s beautiful cousin Elizabeth Vernon. Over the next three years he wooed and won her, of necessity surreptitiously, for the queen was notoriously unwilling to countenance the wedding of her maids of honour, especially with any courtier she wanted to keep as one of her own devotees. In 1598 when the affair became known, the infuriated queen banished Southampton from Whitehall and ordered him to accompany Secretary Cecil on an official trip to France. On 1 February Rowland White wrote to Sir Robert Sidney:

  My Lord of Southampton is much troubled at her Majesty’s strange use of him…Master Secretary hath procured him licence to travel. His fair mistress doth wash her face with too many tears. I pray God his going away bring her to no such infirmity as is, as it were, hereditary to her name.8

  At this juncture, the twenty-five-year-old Southampton, abetted by the Earl of Essex and clearly determined to have Elizabeth as his wife at any cost, took the desperate step of consummating the relationship. By 12 February when White wrote to Sidney again, Elizabeth Vernon was pregnant: ‘My lord of Southampton is gone and hath left behind him a very desolate gentlewoman that hath almost wept out her fairest eyes.’9 The fairness of Elizabeth’s eyes is evinced by a series of portraits, which show her to have been a classic Elizabethan beauty with blooming cheeks and lips, dark-grey eyes and masses of auburn hair. It was not until August, when royal attention was distracted by the obsequies for Lord Treasurer Burghley, that Southampton was able secretly to cross the Channel and solemnise his marriage.

  Mistress Vernon is from the court and lies in Essex House. Some say she hath taken a venue under the girdle and swells upon it, yet she complains not of foul play but says the Earl will justify it. And it is bruited underhand that he was lately here four days in great secret of purpose to marry her and effected it accordingly.10

  Southampton then returned to Paris, hoping that his pregnant countess would escape the queen’s wrath at least until after her delivery. By 3 September the queen had been informed of the clandestine wedding and commanded Southampton’s immediate return from Paris, but he failed to comply. He was probably with his wife when she was brought to bed of a daughter, Penelope, at the beginning of November, and on 11 November he was imprisoned in the Fleet, where he remained until he was needed to support Essex in quelling the Irish Rebellion. Despite the vicissitudes of Southampton’s career, which included another four-year period of imprisonment, the couple would go on to have four more surviving children.

  If the impregnation of Ann Hathaway had been accidental rather than part of a deliberate strategy, Shakespeare could have evaded marriage with her, just as Lucio evaded marriage with Kate Keep-Down in Measure for Measure. Mistress Overdone tells us that Lucio seduced Kate under a promise of marriage, which is presumably how Kate ended up working as one of her whores at the Bunch of Grapes tavern, with Mistress Overdone paying for raising her child. Later in the play Lucio tells the disguised duke that he once appeared before him for getting a wench with child. The duke asks, ‘Did you such a thing?’ (IV. iii. 165). Lucio answers casually: ‘Yes, marry, did I; but I was fain to forswear it; they would else have married me to the rotten medlar’ (166–7).

  Even after promises of marriage, prolonged cohabitation and a pregnancy, it was easy for a man to evade marriage if he chose. Every year women brought fatherless children to be christened at Holy Trinity. On New Year’s Day 1580 Joan Rodes brought her baby son to be christened John, and the curate wrote beside the entry in the register, as was the rule, ‘bastard’, in Latin, ‘notha’ or ‘nothus’ the entry for the child’s burial in November reads simply ‘Jone Rodes Bastard’. Two weeks later, Julian Wainwright brought to the font the second of her four illegitimate children, a daughter Sybil. How she managed to defy the authorities and continue living in Stratford with her children as an unmarried mother until her death and burial in Holy Trinity on 11 January 1593 must remain a mystery. The most likely explanation is that she was under the protection of a gentleman so powerful that the Corporation and the church had no option but to countenance her insolence. Nearly all the other unwed mothers appear in the record once and then disappear. In July 1581 Anne Breame brought her illegitimate daughter Elizabeth to be christened. In April 1582 Margery Foster christened her illegitimate son Richard, in September Alice Baker her illegitimate daughter Joan; in October Sybil Davis of Luddington buried a bastard son she had called Francis; in November Alice Smith had her son christened Humphrey. All of these mothers, except perhaps Julian Wainwright, should have been pressured by the women who assisted them in their labour to name the men responsible. If they had weakened, the father’s name would have been written in the register instead of theirs. Perhaps the parish midwives were remiss that year and the women were spared the ordeal.

  Pregnant women did not always have to be tortured or terrorised before they would name a father for their child. On 26 January 1581, the curate at Holy Trinity recorded the baptism of Margaret, ‘bastard daughter to Thomas Raynolds’. We are reminded of the shepherd who is Joan of Arc’s father:

  I did beget her, all the parish knows.

  Her mother liveth yet, can testify

  She was the first fruit of my bachelorship.11

  The surviving records of the Stratford Vicar’s Court tell us of Joan Dutton, a pregnant stranger detected in the house of William Russell; in court she alleged that she had been made pregnant by ‘a certain Gravenor, servant of Master Greville of Milcote’. She was ‘ordered to perform penance…clad in a sheet’.12 In 1606 a heavily pregnant Anne Browne alias Watton named Hamnet Sadler’s nephew John Sadler as the father of her child; though the citation had been pinned to his house door, he did not appear and was excommunicated.13 Ann bore a daughter called Katherine; John went to London to seek his fortune.

  Once a father had been named, he would be expected to support the child. In some cases the mother would be allowed to keep it until it was weaned or even longer, before it was transferred to the custody and the household of its father. In many cases the unwed mother who named the father stood to lose her child for ever. In 1606 in the Stratford Vicar’s Court Margaret Price named Paul Bartlett as the father of her child. He was ordered to do penance but ‘proffered five shillings for the poor of the parish’. He was already maintaining the child. As for Margaret, the court book says simply, ‘She went away.’14 Most of the women in her situation didn’t wait to be formally ostracised but left of their own accord, many to try their luck in the brutal, anonymous world of the London stews. Bartholomew Parsons appeared in court a month before his son by the widow Alice Atwood was born and promised to maintain him. He offered ten shillings ‘for the use of the poor of the parish’.15 What became of Widow Atwood is not known. In 1608 Thomas Burman admitted that he was the father of the baby Susanna Ainge was carrying; his penance too was remitted in return for a payment of ten shillings.16

  If Shakespeare had denied paternity, Ann could have been punished for being ‘unlawfully pregnant’, possibly publicly whipped, certainly made to stand in front of the congregation on a
Sunday, clad in nothing but a white sheet. When her time came the midwives would have refused to help deliver her until in extremity of fear and pain she screamed out the name of her child’s father, in which case Shakespeare too would have been disgraced, especially if she died, a deathbed statement having force in law. Faced with such evidence one wonders how Greenblatt could allow himself to say that ‘an unmarried mother in the 1580s did not, as she would in the 1880s, routinely face fierce, unrelenting social stigmatization’.17 What the unmarried Elizabethan mother had to face was persecution so intense that it verged on savagery. Where the ecclesiastical courts were concerned,

  What aroused most parochial concern and accounted for the great majority of prosecutions was ‘harbouring’ pregnant women, that is receiving them, giving them shelter until they had given birth…the basic source of parochial concern was the fear that the bastard child, and perhaps the mother as well, would burden the poor rates.18

  In 1592, Thomas Kyrle was presented to the Stratford Vicar’s Court for ‘encouraging in his house a certain pregnant woman’. He did not appear and was excommunicated.19 In 1608 John Phelps alias Sutton was presented at the Vicar’s Court for ‘receiving his pregnant daughter’ who had given birth two months earlier, naming a John Burrowes as her child’s father.20 Though premarital pregnancy was so common as to be normal, bastardy was not tolerated. The commonest motive for infanticide was illegitimacy.21

  If Shakespeare’s parents had remained obdurate in refusing their consent to the marriage of Will and Ann, the match would not have been made and Ann would have been strumpeted, regardless of what Will thought about the matter. If he chose, he could have persuaded his parents that she had been free with her favours, that he was one of several sexual partners she had had that summer. In Measure for Measure Angelo justifies his failure to marry Marina not only because her dowry was lost at sea,