Shakespeare's Wife

by Germaine Greer

  Amid the uproar, on 5 June 1607, Susanna Shakespeare married John Hall at Holy Trinity. Midsummer marriages were rare; theirs was the only wedding in Stratford that June. Ann had a long summer day in which to regale the wedding guests with the best of her ale and wine, and the spiced cakes and comfits that were traditional, as well as more substantial fare. Flushed with her exertions all that long hot day, she must have been the original for the shepherd’s wife in The Winter’s Tale.

  This day she was both pantler, butler, cook,

  Both dame and servant, welcomed all, served all,

  Would sing her song and dance her turn, now here

  At th’upper end o’the table, now i’the middle,

  On his shoulder and his, her face afire

  With labour and the thing she took to quench it

  She would to each one sip. (IV. iv. 56–62)

  The feast was for everyone in Stratford, including those too poor to own a wedding garment. Even the almsfolk and the paupers had the right to drink the bride’s health. Everyone must have been there, the burgeoning Hathaway clan led by Susanna’s uncle, the churchwarden, Mary Shakespeare and her bachelor sons, the Harts, the Quineys, the Sadlers, perhaps even the bride’s father with the King’s Men, whose musicians might have played for the dancing under the mulberry trees.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  of Ann’s reading of the sonnets

  In the summer of 1609 a visitation of the plague closed the theatres and we may assume perhaps that Shakespeare was at home in Stratford. Meanwhile Thomas Thorpe, who specialised in notorious texts by celebrities, published Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Never before Imprinted. The year before he had published Chapman’s scandalous Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Biron, which had been suppressed by order of the king, and Jonson’s Masque of Blackness and Masque of Beauty which had been sensations when they were performed at court. We should probably conclude therefore that in 1609 Shakespeare was a celebrity of the same magnitude. Ever since Francis Meres had referred to the ‘sugared sonnets’ that circulated among Shakespeare’s ‘private friends’ in his Palladis Tamia: Wit’s Treasury of 1598, there had been a good deal of interest and gossip about them. Someone into whose hands copies of the sonnets fell sold them to Thomas Thorpe; what Thorpe acquired is thought by most scholars to have been a complete transcript, probably copied out by more than one scribe, if inconsistencies of spelling and diction are any guide. The possibility that additional sonnets were obtained from other sources cannot be ruled out. Thorpe registered his copyright at the Stationers’ Company in May 1609 and hired George Eld to print the copy. As was normal in those days, the author, unless he actually sold the copy to the printer himself, received nothing. What Thorpe and his printer eventually produced was a collection of 154 sonnets and a narrative poem in forty-seven stanzas of rime royal called ‘A Lover’s Complaint’. Only two of the sonnets had appeared in print before. In 1599 rather different versions of Sonnets 138 and 144 had been the only poems by Shakespeare that appeared in William Jaggard’s compilation The Passionate Pilgrim by William Shakespeare.

  It may be that with everybody keeping clear of plague-ridden London the Shakespeares didn’t notice the liberty that Thorpe had taken. In August 1608 Richard Burbage acquired for the King’s Men the lease of the Blackfriars Theatre. This was the same building that James Burbage had refurbished in 1597, only to be prevented from using it by a petition from local residents; his sons had then leased it to Henry Evans, the entrepreneur who managed the boy actors. Their performance of The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Biron so scandalised the French ambassador that the theatre was closed down, and Evans was obliged to surrender his lease. When the theatres reopened that autumn Shakespeare was writing for two theatres, plus the command performances at court and wherever else their royal patron required. Busier than he had ever been before in his life, he probably had no time to deal with Thorpe’s edition. He could have insisted on corrections, supposing the book was still in press, but he didn’t.

  Thorpe, the son of a London innkeeper, kept no shop of his own. Of the thirteen copies of the little quarto that now survive two lack title-pages. Of the other eleven, seven are advertised as to be sold by William Aspley and and four by John Wright at his dwelling at Christ Church Gate. What this means about the sales of the volume is uncertain; given the dog days and the plague they may well have sold slowly. There would be no second edition. Shakespeare might have used his influence as a leading member of the King’s Men to have the book covertly withdrawn from sale. Certainly, compared to the splash made by Venus and Adonis, which was still being regularly reprinted, the sonnets made no impact whatsoever.

  How long it took for the first copy to turn up in Stratford we cannot tell, but anyone who knows small-town mores will be certain that it was not long before some ‘well-wisher’ made sure that the book was placed in Ann’s hands. Perhaps it contained no surprises. If Will had accepted a commission in 1590 or so from a noble lady who wanted him to write a sonnet sequence persuading her playboy son to marriage, Ann would have been unsurprised to find it at last in unauthorised print and amused perhaps by the riddling dedication with which Thorpe tried to disguise his ignorance of the provenance of his copytext.

  To the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets Mr. W. H. all happiness and that eternity promised by our ever-living poet wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth.

  Nothing about this makes sense. Ann could have made sense of it, probably, if she chose. If, as some scholars think, Mr W. H. is the begetter in the sense that he made possible the printing by supplying Thorpe with the copy, some have suggested that W. H. may stand for William Hathaway, Ann’s half-brother. If this were the case, then William might well have had the copy from Ann or her husband. Hathaway was certainly struggling; perhaps rather than giving him money the Shakespeares had given him the copy to sell for what he could get. It is even possible that Ann had done it on her own initiative, a possibility—and a ground for Shakespeare’s disliking her and cutting all the Hathaways out of his will—that no scholar has ever considered. There is a school of thought that holds that Shakespeare engineered the publication himself. If he did he could have used William Hathaway; however, before getting too carried away with this idea, we must take account of the fact that William Hathaway was not entitled to be addressed as ‘Master’.

  Whatever the truth of the matter, even if Ann had never seen the poems before, there would have been no question of a sudden and painful discovery that her husband was homosexual. In 1609 the word ‘homosexual’ did not exist. All non-reproductive sexual activity was sodomy, whether carried out alone or with others of either or both sexes. Though all kinds of sexual proclivities were known about in the early seventeenth century and roundly discussed as examples of human depravity, none was assumed to be pathological or congenital. Unprincipled thrill-seekers would, it was assumed, draw the line at nothing. Whatever form their lechery took it would damn their souls to hell. No contemporary gossip associates Shakespeare with buggery, although boy players were thought by puritans to act the part of women off as well as on the stage. It would have been literally unthinkable that William Shakespeare, commoner, would commit to poetry his attempts to seduce a youth of higher rank than himself. If the sonnets had been interpreted as any such thing they would have been suppressed, and all known copies burnt. Thorpe would never have dared openly to publish them. Sodomy, if proven, was a hanging matter.

  The most popular candidate for the role of beloved youth has for more than a century been Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. If Thorpe had meant to give a clue to the other party in a sodomitical relationship by his reference to Mr W. H., he must have been very sure that no one would understand it as referring to a real-life magnate of the rank of Southampton. Anyone who could be shown to have defamed a peer of the realm, whether the allegations were true or false, could be hauled before the Court of Star Chamber on a writ of scandalum magnatum and punished severely;
the peer referred to also had the right of recovery of damages, whether he was materially affected by the allegations or not. The last thing that Thorpe intended by referring to Mr W. H. was to suggest that a peer of the realm with the initials H. W. was the catamite of a popular playwright. He is probably not referring to any such person. The only other evidence we have for an intimate relationship between the glover’s son and the peer consists in the fulsome dedications of Shakespeare’s epyllia which are nowadays barbarously interpreted as indicating genuine, real-life intimacy. The dedication of The Rape of Lucrece in particular seems to go beyond mere courtly compliment:

  To the Right Honourable Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, and Baron of Tichfield,

  The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without end, whereof this pamphlet without beginning is but a superfluous moiety. The warrant I have of your Honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance. What I have done is yours, what I have to do is yours, being part in all I have devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater. Meantime, as it is, it is bound to your Lordship, to whom I wish long life lengthened with all happiness.

  Your Lordship’s in all duty,

  William Shakespeare.

  The self-conscious eloquence of this has nothing to do with intimacy and everything to do with publicity. One is reminded of Sir Walter Ralegh,

  Our passions are most like to floods and streams:

  The shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb.1

  Like Southampton, Ralegh fell in love with one of Elizabeth’s maids of honour, twenty-seven-year-old Elizabeth Throckmorton; when the queen discovered the relationship in the summer of 1592, both were imprisoned in the Tower.2 The love for which Ralegh brought to a catastrophic halt his meteoric career as a royal favourite inspired not a single line of poetry. In disgrace he penned ‘The Ocean’s Love to Cynthia’, in twenty-two books, the longest and most extravagant love poem in the English language, dedicated not to the woman for whom he had sacrificed everything, but to his tormentor, Elizabeth I.

  But that the eyes of my mind held her beams

  In every part transferred by love’s swift thought,

  Far off or near, in waking or in dreams,

  Imagination strong their lustre brought.3

  The language of real love as distinct from the courtly affectation of love reads like this, Ralegh’s letter to his wife on what he thought was the eve of his execution:

  You shall now receive, (my dear wife) my last words in these my last lines. My love I send you, that you may keep it when I am dead, and my counsel, that you may remember it when I am no more. I would not, by my will, present you with sorrows (dear Bess). Let them go into the grave with me and be buried in the dust. And seeing it is not the will of God that ever I shall see you any more in this life, bear my destruction gently and with a heart like thyself.4

  Ralegh had in fact fifteen more years of married life. The letter was famous among his contemporaries and much copied.5 In a similar case, thinking he was to pay the ultimate price for his role in Essex’s Rebellion, Southampton wrote to his countess from the Tower, addressing her as ‘sweetheart’, ‘doubt not but I shall do well [that is, meet death bravely] and bless yourself with the assurance that I shall ever remain your affectionate Husband’. The letter was endorsed, ‘To my Bess’.6

  In trumpeting his devotion in the dedication of The Rape of Lucrece the poet is actually reminding Southampton of his obligations towards him, because he has devoted his literary activity to him, not because he is devoted to him. Southampton was the most active literary patron of the 1590s; Shakespeare reminds his lordship, with a tinge of tartness, that, while he may have other protégés, under the terms of their past relationship Shakespeare is bound to a single patron, himself. The language may be the language of idolatry, but Southampton is quite capable of registering the nuance and appreciating the irony. Similarly, extravagant though their language of love may be, no one who read the sonnets before the nineteenth century imagined their context to be a consummated sexual relationship between men. Idealistic friendship did not involve buggery, regardless of what classical scholars have always known about same-sex relationships in antiquity. In 1609 Southampton, who had been released from his second spell of prison by James I on his accession, was thirty-six years old, a highly visible and successful courtier and merchant adventurer, the attentive husband of a court beauty and father of five children. He was also notoriously quick to take affront. If there had been any suggestion that one of his erstwhile protégés was exposing him to potentially harmful gossip, Southampton would have had him silenced, probably for ever, and the offending books destroyed. If we are to understand the sonnets we cannot treat them as documentation of a real-life relationship and we may hope that Ann did not.

  The sonnets as published by Thomas Thorpe begin straightforwardly enough. The poet urges a young man to abandon self-love, marry and procreate. For the first twelve sonnets the young man is addressed as ‘thou’, and suddenly in the thirteenth there is a change. The person addressed is ‘you’ rather than ‘thou’, and the poet dares to address him, or her, as ‘my love’. In the following sonnet we revert to the ‘thou’ form of address, and back to ‘you’ for the next three. It is conceivable if not obvious that the ‘thou’ and the ‘you’ are not the same person and the relationship not the same relationship. In Sonnet 145 Ann would have encountered herself as Will’s relenting mistress.7 John Kerrigan sums up the problems that this fact—if it is a fact—poses for the whole collection:

  Was [Sonnet 145] included for sentimental reasons? Did it find its way into Shakespeare’s manuscript by mistake? Was it inserted by a scribe, by Thorpe, or by someone at Eld’s printing shop? More than any other sonnet 145 casts doubt on the authority and order of [Thorpe’s text].8

  Indeed. If one of the 154 sonnets is written by Shakespeare for his wife, why should not others too be addressed to her? Some of the sonnets appear to date from the early 1590s; others seem later, some much later. If, as we have supposed, the boy Will courted the woman Ann with poetry—and the existence of Sonnet 145 is part of the case—then his may not have been the only poetry that Ann read. She may have been aware of the sonnet craze of the 1590s and had a much better understanding of the context and the rules of the sonnet game that is vouchsafed to us today. A man does not write sonnets to his wife; ‘deep-brained sonnets’ are part of a seduction game—unless we are to understand a context of estrangement and an attempt to repair a damaged relationship. All English love poetry—probably all love poetry—is about distance and disappointment. Gratified desire does not feel the need to versify.

  The persuasion of the young man to marry gradually gives way to a boast by the poet that the young man will be known to posterity not through the issue of his loins but because he, Shakespeare, has made him immortal in his verse. What is absurd about this claim is that though everybody knows the verse, nobody knows the identity of the young man, who may be several interchangeable young men. As far as description goes he is generic, young, lovely, with bright eyes and hair like marjoram buds; there is no identikit portrait, no blazon of his physical charms, not even a pun on his name. There are some sonnets that don’t seem to be about any ‘him’ at all.

  So is it not with me as with that Muse,

  Stirred by a painted beauty to his verse,

  Who heaven itself for ornament doth use,

  And every fair with his fair doth rehearse,

  Making a couplement of proud compare

  With sun and moon, with earth and sea’s rich gems,

  With April’s first-born flowers and all things rare

  That heaven’s air in this huge rondure hems.

  O, let me true in love, but truly write,

  And then believe me, my love is as fair

  As any mother’s child, though not so bright

  As those gold candles fixed in heaven’s air.

  Let them say more that like of
hearsay well;

  I will not praise that purpose not to sell. (21)

  So may a man celebrate the worth of his wife, whom he does not wish to share with the rest of the world. We know from his extreme reticence that, however hyperbolically he might write of a distant patron, Shakespeare did not ‘like of hearsay well’. If his brother chaffed him about never praising the beauty of his wife, he might have answered in this vein, slightly testily, recalling his commitment to her and her children, and her equal status with him in the ‘one flesh’ of wedlock. Some of the sonnets ask forgiveness for neglect, again in terms that seem ill sorted for a relationship between a young and lovely nobleman and a poeticising commoner. We can hardly imagine the young Earl of Southampton complaining like a neglected wife that the man Shakespeare never told him that he loved him.

  As an unperfect actor on the stage,

  Who with his fear is put besides his part,

  Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,

  Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart,