Shakespeare's Wife

by Germaine Greer

  It seems that Quiney never recovered full consciousness, for he made no will, either written nor oral, and appointed no executor or guardian for his children. We can only imagine the anguish of Bess Quiney and her children as he agonised for three terrible weeks before death released him. On 31 May he was buried. Bess found herself a lone parent of nine children who must have been deeply traumatised by their father’s terrible death, and more and more demoralised as it became clear no one would be brought to book for his murder, even though there were witnesses to the event and everyone in Stratford knew who was responsible. The Corporation had never looked so irrelevant or so feeble, as its mad landlord rode roughshod over the criminal and civil law.

  Another person who must have been almost as affected by Quiney’s murder was Thomas Greene of the Middle Temple, who as solicitor for the Corporation had helped him prepare his suits to the Exchequer and the lord chancellor. After Quiney’s return to Stratford, Greene had continued to give the case his full attention. In September 1598 he had succeeded in gaining access to Coke, who confirmed the right of the Corporation in the matter of the toll corn, and advised that the consent of Sir Edward Greville was not necessary for the installation of the bailiff. In October he had a third consultation with Coke and advised Quiney to hasten to London with the charter so that work could begin on drawing up a new one. It may have been Quiney’s murder that prompted Greene to interest himself particularly in Stratford’s struggle. He was to make his home in Stratford for nearly twenty years.

  According to Fripp, Greene was ‘an intimate friend of William Shakespeare, resident with him for some years at New Place, and proud to call the Poet “Cousin”’.27 Unfortunately, it is as difficult to find evidence of real friendship between Shakespeare and Greene as it is between Shakespeare and Quiney. Greene certainly lived at New Place but he was more likely to meet Shakespeare in term-time in London than out of term in Stratford. Though Greene called Shakespeare ‘cousin’ we have no evidence that Shakespeare ever acknowledged the relationship. Coney-catchers (or conmen) gained the confidence of their victims by claiming cousinhood, which is why the activity is called cozening. Greene was beyond doubt an honest man but it has been impossible to establish any blood relationship between him and Shakespeare. We should probably infer that he was a kinsman of Ann’s rather than Shakespeare’s. Greene’s father was Thomas Greene, a mercer, of Warwick, who died in 1590, five years before his son entered the Middle Temple from Staple Inn, where his membership fees were guaranteed by John Marston of Coventry and his son John, who would later turn dramatist.

  In 1602, after Greene was called to the bar, he accepted a retainer from the Corporation of Stratford; his patent to serve as the steward of the Stratford Court of Record was sealed on 31 August 1603. At about the same time he married Lettice Chandler, the young widow of a Leicestershire mercer, and brought her to live at New Place. Not long afterwards, on 8 November 1603, Bess Quiney’s daughter Elizabeth married Lettice Chandler’s twenty-six-year-old widower stepson, the mercer William Chandler, who went into partnership with Bess in the mercery business, using one of her houses known as the Cage as his headquarters. Greene’s father, Thomas Greene of Warwick, had served as master of the Warwick company of mercers, grocers and haberdashers, so it seems likely that this interlocking pair of marriages was engineered through the network of trading partners in mercery. Bess Quiney was certainly involved, but Ann Shakespeare too may have played her part, for without the offer of decent accommodation for the newly-weds at New Place the marriage could hardly have gone forward. Though the marriage was apparently arranged, it seems that Thomas and Lettice were very happy together. When Greene died in 1640, he left most of his estate to his ‘most dear and loving wife, being sorry that [he had] no more to leave to so good a woman’.

  If there was anyone in Stratford who realised just how conspicuous a figure Shakespeare cut in London it was Thomas Greene. The young gentlemen of the Inns of Court were passionate playgoers. Even after he became Town Clerk of Stratford, Greene lived during the terms in his chambers in the Middle Temple. It seems impossible that he did not keep Ann informed of her husband’s triumphs, if no one else did. Greene may have had literary pretensions of his own. He is probably the Thomas Greene who penned a poem on the accession of James I called A Poet’s Vision and a Prince’s Glory, and he is probably the same Thomas Greene who contributed a commendatory poem for the 1603 edition of Drayton’s The Barons’ Wars. The conceit is daring, if not entirely felicitous.

  What ornament might I devise to fit

  Th’aspiring height of thy admirèd spirit,

  Or what fair garland worthy is to sit

  On thy blest brows that compass-in all merit?

  Thou shalt not crownèd be with common bays,

  Because for thee it is a crown too low.

  Apollo’s tree can yield [but] simple praise;

  It is too dull a vesture for thy brow,

  But with a wreath of stars shalt thou be crowned

  Which, when thy working temples do sustain,

  Will, like the spheres be ever moving round

  After the royal music of thy brain.

  Thy skill doth equal Phoebus, not thy birth.

  He to Heaven gives music, thou to earth.

  The Greenes’ first child was born at New Place, baptised in Holy Trinity on 18 March 1604 and given the name Ann. The son who was christened on 17 January 1608 was given the name William. If he was therefore Shakespeare’s godson, he was passed over in his will, as were all the Greenes (and for that matter all the Hathaways). Though New Place is repeatedly given as Greene’s residence, and he may have lived there for more than ten years, Greene did not become the official householder; we know from entries in the record that, all through the period of Greene’s residence at New Place, the mostly absent Master Shakespeare was identified as the householder. We should probably conclude that Greene and his wife and children occupied the equivalent of a serviced apartment in the big house, while they tried to find a home of their own which, given the shortage of housing after the fires, was no easy matter. Ann and her maids must have provided the Greenes with accommodation befitting a gentleman and his family; even after Greene had secured the title to St Mary’s House, he was happy to continue at New Place, while the outgoing tenant found excuses to delay his departure. In September 1609 Greene wrote to Sir Henry Rainsford that he had agreed to let the sitting tenant George Browne sow his garden: ‘I was content to permit it without contradiction and the rather because I perceived I might stay another year at New Place.’28

  In 1617 when Greene came to sell St Mary’s House he implied that he had lived there for only six years. The deciding factor may have been Shakespeare’s retirement to Stratford, which most scholars think happened in about 1611. If Greene moved out of New Place at that point, and it seems he did, we have to conclude that he never lived with Shakespeare and was no great friend of his. We should probably see Greene as Ann’s kinsman and Ann’s friend, if a wife may be allowed to have such a thing.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  of Susanna and her match with a gentleman of London and a midsummer wedding at last

  In September 1601 John Shakespeare died and was buried in Holy Trinity churchyard. If he left a will we can find no record of it, no inventory, nothing in the probate records. His son and heir, William Shakespeare, apparently disposed of his effects. One thing he saw fit to do was to issue a new lease of the Henley Street premises to Lewis Hiccox. As we have seen, when Hiccox died in 1627, this lease had still sixty-three years to run and was valued at £65.1 The reference in his inventory to ‘houses’ should make clear that the Maiden Head Inn occupied both the east and west houses; what the sixty-three years represent is not so clear. The property was already leased in 1583; it seems that when he inherited the property the Bard granted a new lease of ninety-one years, probably because he needed to raise money.2

  On 1 May 1602 Shakespeare parted with £320 in cash to William Combe of
Warwick and his nephew John Combe for four yardlands amounting to 107 acres with rights of common in Old Stratford; as he was not himself present at the sealing of the deed, his brother Gilbert acted for him. The witnesses included Anthony and John Nash. The tenant-farmers were Lewis Hiccox and his brother Thomas.3 This transaction bears the stamp of William rather than Ann, for he would go on to cultivate friendships with the Combes and Nashes, with whom Ann and her family had scant sympathy. As Whitgift’s ecclesiastical commissioner, a post which he held from 1601 till his death in 1610, William Combe was involved albeit distantly in the rooting out of Calvinism from the established church. His nephew John Combe had grown rich by lending money at 10 per cent. In 1605 when Shakespeare bought for £440 from Ralph Hubaud of Ipsley a half-share in the tithes of Stratford and Old Stratford, he appointed Anthony Nash as his manager.

  To try to make too much of these transactions is risky, but speculation is excusable…Was it at this time that Shakespeare ceased to act, on a regular basis at least? And if so, was it because he was hoping to spend more time in Stratford now that his elder daughter was well into her marriageable years? He was fast turning her into a bourgeois heiress and could hardly be blamed for wanting to be on the spot to vet her suitors. He cannot have earned less than £250 per annum from his income as a sharer in the Globe, a playwright and a property owner. It must, at the very least, have been a temptation to divide his year more equitably between London and Stratford.4

  Shakespeare seems to have resisted the temptation for ten years. In May 1602 Susanna turned nineteen, which was by no means ‘well into her marriageable years’. Thought had been given to providing her with some sort of education; she could certainly read and she wrote a neat hand.5 And as for ‘wanting to be on the spot’ we don’t know if Susanna was in Stratford between 1602 and the time of her marriage there in 1607. She may have been sent into service years before. Thomson may find nothing far-fetched in the idea that young gentlemen were beseiging New Place begging the Bard for his daughter’s hand; some such wishful thinking probably inspires Schoenbaum’s impression that John Hall, the man Susanna eventually married, was living in Stratford before the wedding. Though Schoenbaum states confidently that ‘Around 1600 he [Hall] settled in Stratford where he soon had a thriving medical practice’, there is no evidence of Hall’s having been in Stratford at all let alone ‘settled’ there at any time before his marriage to Susanna.6

  If Shakespeare acquired the Old Stratford yardland because he was thinking of a marriage, it didn’t happen. We hear nothing of any marriage until five years later, which is not to say that negotiations might not have been afoot in 1602. Susanna’s marriage was certainly no rushed affair. It has all the hallmarks of a carefully arranged match. The prime mover could have been her father or her mother or herself, or her bridegroom’s father, or a more distant kinsman or well-wisher. In The Merry Wives of Windsor Page chooses one bridegroom for his daughter Ann, his wife another, and the girl herself yet another. As for whether Susanna and John Hall knew each other before a match between them was proposed, we know nothing of the matter. We know that Susanna was in Stratford in 1606, the year before her marriage, because at Easter her name appeared on the list drawn up by the churchwardens and sidesmen of Holy Trinity as one of those who had not received the sacrament. One of the churchwardens was her uncle Bartholomew Hathaway. The offence was not considered trivial; if she had no excuse Susanna would have been fined a swingeing £20. Because seven of the twenty-one names on the list were suspected of being Catholics, Susanna’s presence on the list becomes another card in the house of cards that is the Shakespeare-was-a-Catholic hypothesis. Susanna was summoned to attend the Vicar’s Court but when she appeared her case was dismissed. By appearing, she had acknowledged the vicar’s authority over her; often appearance and a promise of reformation were enough to fend off punishment. Catholic recusants usually preferred to stay away and pay the yearly fine. Hamnet and Judith Sadler were also summoned, but did not appear. Hamnet was often in trouble for providing bread and cakes on a Sunday; as Sunday trading may have produced the bulk of his weekly takings, he may have preferred to be excommunicated rather than confess himself at fault, but he was also being pursued by angry creditors. From 1597 or so Sadler was being sued on all sides for failure to pay for goods supplied and for defaulting on bonds of obligation.7 On 13 January 1603 he appeared at the quarter sessions on a charge of baking contrary to the statute.8

  In his submission to the Privy Council in 1577, the Bishop of Gloucester had identified three kinds of recusants: ‘the third sort, commonly called Puritans wilfully refuse to come to church, as not liking the surplice, ceremonies and other service now used in the church…’9 Given the fact that Susanna was to marry a strict puritan a year later it seems more likely that hers was puritan recusancy than that she was a Catholic. If she was a puritan Susanna would simply have been following the tendency of her mother’s family, but if the ritual as practised by John Rogers did not alienate her Calvinist uncle, it’s hard to see how it could have alienated her. If Susanna didn’t stay away from church for doctrinal reasons, it could have been because she was away from Stratford. She may have been housekeeping for her uncle Gilbert in London or even for her father. If, as I shall argue, her younger sister went into the service of Bess Quiney, it seems only logical to consider the possibility that Susanna too found work outside her mother’s household, and perhaps outside Stratford. However, given the Hathaway family’s closeness to the church, it seems unlikely that the church officials would not have known that she was not then living in Stratford.

  Susanna could have just been a bad girl, like Joan Tante: ‘she useth not to stay in the church in service time and sermon time…going out of the church with beckoning of her finger and laughing…’10 Joan seems to have been going through a bad patch; a few years later she was considered sufficiently deserving to be received into the almshouse. Elizabeth Wheeler wouldn’t go to church and was continually brawling and abusing her neighbours. In the Vicar’s Court, when questioned about her behaviour, she shouted, ‘God’s wounds! A plague upon you all! A fart of one’s arse for you!’11 Susanna simply appeared, and was forgiven. If Susanna’s reason for non-attendance was that she was a Catholic, she betrayed her faith utterly when she married a puritan as uncompromising as John Hall, but her epitaph of 1649 could be interpreted to mean that she had been converted to right religion by her husband.

  Witty above her sex, but that’s not all,

  Wise to salvation was good Mistress Hall.

  Something of Shakespeare was in that, but this

  Wholly of him with whom she’s now in bliss.12

  Susanna’s bridegroom John Hall was born in Carlton in Bedfordshire in about 1576, and with his elder brother Dive studied at Queens’ College Cambridge, graduating BA in 1594 and MA in 1597. What he did after that is not known, but it has been suggested that he studied medicine somewhere on the continent. He was never licensed by the Royal College of Physicians, nor did he secure a licence to practise medicine from the Bishop of Worcester. As a man of pronounced puritan sympathies, Hall may have been unwilling to submit to the authority of either institution. He was the second son of the physician William Hall, who had ten children besides. Four of his sisters had already made good matches, and at the time of John’s marriage his father was living in Acton, a village north-west of London. Abraham Sturley may be the link between Stratford and the Halls; when he went down from Cambridge in about 1580 he took the position of legal agent for Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlcote, who held an estate at Pavenham in Bedfordshire, only a few miles from where John Hall was born. If William Hall had sent out the word to old friends that he was looking for a bride for his son, Sturley in Stratford may have bethought himself of Susanna, and may even have handled negotiations for the match and helped draw up the settlement.

  No record of such a settlement has been found or indeed speculated about; but given Hall’s status as a rising physician and Shakespeare’s as a
gentleman of means, it would in fact have been more unusual if the parties had not made the customary provisions for the settlement of lands on themselves and their heirs and provision for a jointure in the event of widowhood.13

  Though it was customary for heiresses to share their father’s estate, as the Arden women had done, Susanna seems to have been made sole heiress for the purposes of the match, with Hall’s father correspondingly making John his chief legatee, disinheriting his elder brother Dive. In Deloney’s novel, wealthy Jack of Newbury married, as his second wife, his housekeeper. To make the match, her poor parents scraped together twenty nobles and a yearling calf to give with her, along with the assurance that her new husband would be her father’s sole legatee.

  ‘O my good son,’ quoth the old woman, ‘God’s benison be with thee forever more, for to tell thee true, we had sold all our kine to make money for my daughter’s marriage, and this seven year we would not have been able to buy more. Notwithstanding we should have sold all that ever we had before my poor wench would have lost her marriage.’

  ‘I,’ quoth the old man, ‘should have sold the coat from my back, and my bed from under me, before my girl should have gone without you.’14

  If the documentation of Susanna’s marriage should ever be found it would probably make sense of Shakespeare’s will. By securing such an advantageous match for Susanna, Shakespeare severely limited the marriage prospects of his other daughter. Twenty-first-century observers might find this behaviour distasteful, but it was by no means unusual. Once the match was made, Shakespeare was legally bound to respect the terms of the contract. If he left the matter to Ann, he may have been surprised and displeased at how little room had been left him when it came to disposing of his property. Without a settlement Shakespeare could have left his property to Susanna and the heirs of her body, bypassing John Hall, but this is not what happened. John Hall became the outright owner of Shakespeare’s estate after his death, with the right to dispose of it as he wished. Scholars have assumed that this reflected a particular trust placed in Hall by Shakespeare, and because Shakespeare could do no wrong they have assumed that the trust was justified. Ensuing events suggest otherwise.