He wondered that your lordship
Would suffer him to spend his youth at home,
While other men, of slender reputation,
Put forth their sons, to seek preferment out,
Some to the wars, to try their fortune there,
Some to discover islands far away,
Some to the studious universities…
And did request me to importune you
To let him spend his time no more at home,
Which would be great impeachment to his age,
In having known no travel in his youth. (I. iii. 4–10, 13–16)
Antonio pleads guilty:
I have considered well his loss of time,
And how he cannot be a perfect man,
Not being tried and tutored in the world. (19–21)
Schoenbaum asks, ‘Did the young husband tick off the weeks and days and months of the apprentice’s statutory seven-year sentence until the fateful day of his departure from Stratford?’8 In April of that year William had attained his majority and would have come into any bits and pieces of money or property left him by earlier bequests, supposing there were any. He would then have been free to seek his fortune away from Stratford without asking permission of his parents, but he would not have been free to abandon his pregnant wife.
Robert Greene’s abandonment of his wife was so scandalous that it inspired a literary sub-genre.
I married a gentleman’s daughter of good account, with whom I lived for a while, but forasmuch as she would persuade me from my wilful wickedness, after I had a child by her, I cast her off, having spent up the marriage money which I obtained by her. Then I left her at six or seven, who went into Lincolnshire, and I to London.
But O my dear wife, whose company and sight I have refrained these six years, I ask God and thee forgiveness for so greatly wronging thee, of whom I seldom or never thought till now. Pardon me, I pray thee, wheresoever thou art…9
On his deathbed Greene wrote to his wife, who had sent him word that she was in good health:
Sweet wife, as ever there was any good will or friendship between thee and me, see this bearer (my host) satisfied of his debt. I owe him ten pounds, and but for him I had perished in the streets. Forget and forgive my wrongs done unto thee…Farewell till we meet in Heaven for on earth thou shalt never see me more…
Bardolaters are made of sterner stuff than the repentant Robert Greene. Greenblatt is sorry only for the defaulting husband, asking his reader how Shakespeare could have written Orsino’s words ‘Let still the woman take an elder than her’ ‘without in some sense bringing his own life, his disappointment, frustration and loneliness, to bear upon them’.10 Usually when a husband abandons a wife with three small children, we are less concerned for his disappointment, frustration and loneliness than for hers. In this case, the absconding husband can do no wrong; it is the inconveniently fecund woman who has brought desertion upon herself.
Most scholars assume that once Shakespeare left Stratford, he didn’t come back until he retired in 1611 or so, when he settled in at New Place as if he had never been away. Greenblatt refers airily to ‘long years apart’.11 If literary scholars were not all so desperate to get Will so far away from Ann, they would see at once that the very idea is absurd. In the sixteenth century ‘living away from a wife’ was a crime, punishable in both the ecclesiastical and the civil courts. In 1584 Henry Field, the tanner of Bridge Street, close friend and colleague of John Shakespeare, was presented by the churchwardens for living apart from his wife. They were both charged with being ‘absent one from the other without the rule of law’.12 By this time they had been married for more than twenty-six years and had ten surviving children, one of whom would a few years later be the publisher of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. If Ann had alleged desertion, Will would have been a fugitive from the law. If she did not allege desertion, it was probably because she was not in fact deserted. If Will did desert her, and she did not denounce him, she must have been protecting him. If she was, she has been given no credit for it.
Laertes is one case in Shakespeare’s oeuvre of a son who insists on leaving his family and his birthplace to pursue his own ambition, having obtained his father’s ‘hard consent’ ‘by laboursome petition’. As he prepares to take ship from Denmark to France, he commands Ophelia,
sister as the winds give benefit
And convoy is assistant, do not sleep,
But let me hear from you. (I. iii. 2–4)
Ophelia, like virtually all Shakespeare’s female characters, can both read and write. Shakespeare’s wife is not allowed to have been capable of either. Polonius, the councillor and court functionary, probably has more in common with Alderman Shakespeare than any other Shakespearean character. We can only wonder if John Shakespeare set spies on his son in London as Polonius does on Laertes in Paris in the shocking first scene of the second act of Hamlet. We know that there were groups of Stratford citizens busied in London and we may guess that Shakespeare would have been given contacts for them, if indeed London is where he went. What seems oddly close to home is the last instruction Polonius gives his spy: ‘And let him ply his music’ (II. i. 73).
Most of Shakespeare’s biographers assume that when the Bard went missing he left his wife and children with his parents and brothers and sister at Henley Street. This scenario is worse than grim: son is seduced by ugly harlot, forced against his will to marry her, with no option but to bring her back to the parental home, where child is born, then twins, then he abandons everyone, his wife, his children and his parents. If this is what happened Ann’s life could hardly have been worth living, for she would have been held to blame for all of it, including the desertion of his parents by the son and heir. Such behaviour would have been considered so reprehensible by all the people Shakespeare had grown up with that Will could hardly have wanted to show his face in Stratford again. Fathers overwhelmed by their responsibilities did run away; some of the destitute men who wandered the country looking for work were fathers. In burial registers in times of dearth we find entries for children who starved because their fathers went away and didn’t come back and their mothers couldn’t cope. Ann Shakespeare did cope.
If Ann loved Will, and we shall decide in default of evidence to the contrary that she did, she must have missed him terribly, especially in the long dark winter evenings, when she sat working by the dying fire as her children slept. No commentator on Shakespeare has ever suggested that during his absences from Stratford he missed his wife and children. Yet it is Shakespeare who gives voice to the yearning of the women who wait out the weeks and months for the return of the man they love. If he didn’t miss Ann, he was vividly aware that she missed him.
In Cymbeline, when Imogen hears that Posthumus believes that she has betrayed him, Shakespeare puts these words into her mouth:
False to his bed? What is it to be false?
To lie in watch here, and to think on him?
To weep twixt clock and clock? If sleep charge Nature,
To break it with a fearful dream of him,
And cry myself awake? That’s false to’s bed, is it? (III. iv. 40–4)
We might be reminded of a theme that surfaces from time to time in the sonnets.
Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Not services to do, till you require.
Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour
Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,
Nor think the bitterness of absence sour
When you have bid your servant once adieu.
Nor dare I question in my jealous thought
Where you may be, or your affairs suppose,
But like a sad slave, stay and think of naught,
Save, where you are, how happy you make those.
So true a fool is love that, in your will
Though
you do anything, he thinks no ill. (57)
That God forbid that made me first your slave,
I should in thought control your times of pleasure,
Or at your hand th’account of hours to crave,
Being your vassal, bound to stay your leisure.
O, let me suffer, being at your beck,
Th’imprisoned absence of your liberty,
And patient-tame to sufferance, bide each check
Without accusing you of injury.
Be where you list, your charter is so strong
That you yourself may privilege your time
To what you will. To you it doth belong
Yourself to pardon of self-doing crime.
I am to wait, though waiting so be hell,
Not blame your pleasure, be it ill or well. (58)
Try as one might, these two sonnets are hard to fit into the relationship either with the young man or with the dark lady. The thought process is very like that of a wife left alone at home, watching the clock, trying to keep her love unpoisoned by jealousy or bitterness.
In 1613 or thereabouts, Lady Mary Wroth, niece of Sir Philip Sidney and friend of Ben Jonson, wrote a sonnet sequence in the person of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, her lover, William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, the father of her two illegitimate children, and joint dedicatee of the Shakespeare First Folio.
Dear, famish not what you yourself gave food,
Destroy not what your glory is to save,
Kill not that soul to which you spirit gave,
In pity, not disdain, your triumph stood.
An easy thing it is to shed the blood
Of one who, at your will, yields to the grave,
But more you may true worth by mercy crave
When you preserve, not spoil but nourish good.
Your sight is all the food I do desire.
Then sacrifice me not in hidden fire,
Or stop the breath which did your praises move.
Think but how easy ’tis a sight to give—
Nay, even desert, since by it I do live.
I but chameleon-like would live and love.13
As his mistress (or more probably one of his mistresses), Lady Mary had no right to the company of her lover, but a lawfully wedded wife had no better claim to her husband’s time. Almost all the opportunities open to ambitious men required them to spend long periods away from their families. Soon after Grace Sharington married Anthony Mildmay in 1567, he left her at his family estate in Northamptonshire while he went off to Paris. She was to live in Northamptonshire for twenty years while he travelled in Europe and sojourned in London. It was not his wife but his father, Elizabeth’s chancellor of the Exchequer, who had the power to have him recalled from France in March 1569 in the hope that he would find preferment at court.14 When he didn’t, Mildmay chose to join the attempt to suppress the revolt of the northern earls rather than stay at home.15 In 1576 Elizabeth, entirely unmindful of Mildmay’s responsibilities as a husband, granted him permission to travel overseas for two years ‘for his better increase in knowledge and experience of foreign language to be thereby the more able to serve [her] thereafter’.16 He accompanied Walsingham to the Low Countries and was sent as envoy to Duke Casimir of the Palatinate.17 When he came back in 1579 to England, instead of joining his wife he entered Gray’s Inn. By March 1582 he was back in Holland,18 and his wife was pregnant. When Mildmay was elected MP for Wiltshire in the 1584 parliament he was obliged to spend all three terms in London. In 1586 he escorted Mary Queen of Scots to Fotheringay.19 Grace wrote in her own account of her life:
My husband was much from me in all that time and I spent the best part of my youth in solitariness, shunning all opportunities to run into company lest I might be enticed and drawn away by some evil suggestions to stain my unspotted garment and so be robbed of mine innocency…20
In 1595 Elizabeth consented to Mildmay’s taking five servants, three horses, £100 and some jewels to Germany, where he was to stay for a year to be treated at a medicinal spa.21 In 1596, after he was knighted, he accompanied the Earl on his embassy to France, only to incur the disfavour of Henri IV who requested his recall, whereupon his diplomatic career collapsed, and he had no option but to retire to his estates and endure the company of his wife.22
Ann must have known by repute what London was like, known that the streets were full of whores, from the sleaziest to the most glamorous. As the long months passed, she must have worried that Will would be led astray, by a young man’s urges or by ill company. Once again we may be reminded of Polonius questioning whether his son Laertes may not commit:
such wanton, wild and usual slips
As are companions noted and most known
To youth and liberty. (II. i. 22–4)
Ann may have had to struggle not to think about her young husband being drawn into ‘drinking, fencing, swearing, quarrelling, drabbing’, ‘the flash and outbreak of a fiery mind’. She might have heard the gossip from people returning from London—
‘I saw him enter such a house of sale’—
Videlicet a brothel…(Hamlet, II. i. 60–1)
It is painful to think of Ann bailed up by a Stratford busybody as Mistress Arthur is by Master Anselm in How to choose a good wife from a bad, and having to keep her countenance as she is harangued:
I say your husband haunts bad company
Swaggerers, cheaters, wanton courtesans.
There he defiles his body, stains his soul,
Consumes his wealth, undoes himself and you,
In danger of diseases whose vile names
Are not for any honest mouths to speak
Nor any chaste ears to receive and hear.23
If Shakespeare went to London specifically to try his fortune in the theatre, he would have had to wade through the stews to get to it. In January 1587 Philip Henslowe joined forces with a London grocer to run a new ‘playhouse now framing and shortly to be erected and set up’ on a site at the corner of the Rose Alley and Maiden Lane, bang in the middle of the red-light district.
‘Rose’ was a street euphemism for a prostitute…(One of the most fashionable of Southwark’s brothels, the Cardinal’s Hat, owes its name to the colour of the tip of the penis.) Henslowe and Alleyn had a financial interest in brothels other than the Rose, and Alleyn’s wife (Henslowe’s step-daughter) may have been a partner.24
In Pierce Penniless his Supplication to the Devil, Nashe has Pierce instruct his Satanic Majesty to:
Call a leet at Bishopsgate and examine how every second house in Shoreditch is maintained. Make a privy search in Southwark and tell me how many she-inmates you find…Lais, Cleopatra, Helen, if our clime hath any such I commend them with the rest of our unclean sisters in Shoreditch, Southwark, Westminster and Turnbull Street to the protection of your Portership, hoping you will speedily carry them down to Hell, there to keep open house for all young devils that come…25
In late-sixteenth-century London, though prostitution was ubiquitous it was hardly big business. Every alehouse had female servants who could be had for a few pence or a dish of coals. Prostitution supplemented the earnings of working girls but the extra earnings were mere pocketmoney, ‘sixpenny damnation’ as Nashe calls it. London was not Venice. It boasted no grand courtesans, unless we may count Emilia Lanier such. The illegitimate daughter of a Jewish court musician from the Veneto, in 1587 she was or was about to become the mistress of the lord chamberlain, Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon.26 Shakespeare would eventually become a member of his company of players. It is assumed that because Emilia was half Jewish she was swarthy; the great Venetian courtesans, some of whom were Jewish, were usually Titian-haired, that is to say, dyed blonde. As a courtesan Emilia was a rare bird; most of London’s prostitutes were of a different class altogether.
Ann knew, none better, how strong her husband’s desires were, and she probably also knew that any penalty he incurred for casual sex would be brought home to her. Shakespeare too would have read the
injunction in their Bible:
Let thy fountain be blessed and rejoice with the wife of thy youth. Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant roe; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times and be thou ravisht always with her love. And why wilt thou, my son, be ravisht with a strange woman, and embrace the bosom of a stranger? (Proverbs, v: 15–20)
The first prostitute in the Shakespeare oeuvre is Doll Tearsheet in Henry IV, Part 2. (Her name doesn’t mean that she tore up sheets, but that her sheets are hempen.) This whore with a heart of gold plies her trade at the Boar’s Head tavern in Eastcheap. Falstaff reminds us at her first entrance that, despite her merry nature and quick wit, she carries disease. Though Prince Hal who, like the young Shakespeare, is on the loose in London and well outside his father’s ambit, gets up to all kinds of villainy, he exhibits no familiarity with Doll or her ilk. When Hal becomes Henry V, Doll is dragged off to prison, despite her vociferations that she is pregnant. She is unusual among Shakespearean whores in that, while she is shameless and vulgar, she is essentially a sympathetic character.
In Measure for Measure when Pompey learns that the prostitution industry is to be extirpated, he warns the disguised duke of the economic consequences for the city: ‘if this law hold in Vienna for ten year, I’ll rent the fairest house in it after three pence a bay’ (II. i. 230–1). Prostitution provides the contrast both for Isabella’s idealistic purity and for the misdemeanour of her brother who has cohabited with his wife before solemnisation, and is to be punished with death. The disguised duke is shocked and disgusted to learn that Lucio esteems him as a whoremaster. If Shakespeare played any part in Measure for Measure it was probably that of the duke, and he may have responded with particular plangency: ‘I have never heard the absent duke much detected for women. He was not inclined that way’ (III. i. 185–6).
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