Shakespeare's Wife
Page 30
So I, in fear of trust, forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love’s rite,
And in mine own love’s strength seem to decay,
O’ercharged with burden of mine own love’s might.
O, let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love and look for recompense
More than that tongue that more hath more expressed.
O learn to read what silent love hath writ;
To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit. (23)
There was no ‘perfect ceremony’ to bind Shakespeare to his lovely boy, but he was so bound to Ann. It is not fashionable to suggest that he cared what she thought of what he did, but what writer—husband would be totally indifferent to his wife’s opinion? What husband challenged by his wife would not say that everything he did was for love of her, even is she was never mentioned in any of it?
Let those who are in favour with their stars
Of public honour and proud titles boast,
Whilst I, whom fortune of such triumph bars,
Unlooked for joy in that I honour most.
Great princes’ favourites their fair leaves spread
But as the marigold in the sun’s eye,
And in themselves their pride lies burièd,
For at a frown they in their glory die.
The painful warrior famousèd for fight,
After a thousand victories once foiled,
Is from the book of honour razèd quite,
And all the rest forgot for which he toiled.
Then happy I that love and am beloved
Where I may not remove or be removed. (25)
The only relationship from which Shakespeare could not ‘remove or be removed’ was the one he had with his wife. This may not have been what he meant, for he may have been crediting the ideal lover with ideal constancy, but it is the obvious significance of the words he chooses here. Perhaps what Ann read as she leafed through Thorpe’s little book were versions of sonnets that had once been written to her and had been reworked for another purpose. In 1609 Ann was fifty-three and unlikely to have given too much importance to rhymes written so long ago, but she was still without her husband’s company for most of the year. Stratford citizens visiting London probably brought back excited tales of the theatres and who knows that her daughters did not beg their mother to come with them to see their father’s plays?
Perhaps Ann was moved by the travelling Sonnets 27 and 28, remembering the early days when Will first rode off to London leaving her and his children behind.
Weary with toil I haste me to my bed,
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired,
But then begins a journey in my head
To work my mind when body’s work’s expired,
For then my thoughts from far where I abide,
Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,
And keep my drooping eyelids open wide,
Looking on darkness which the blind do see—
Save that my soul’s imaginary sight
Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,
Which like a jewel hung in ghastly night
Makes black night beauteous and her old face new.
Lo, thus by day my limbs, at night my mind,
For thee, and for myself, no quiet find. (27)
When Will rode off to seek his fortune he was on his own for the first time in his life. He may well have suffered the loneliness and anxiety, the frustration and disappointment that resound from this group of sonnets. A similar note is sounded in Sonnet 50:
How heavy do I journey on the way
When what I seek, my weary travel’s end,
Doth teach that ease and that repose to say
‘Thus far the miles are measured from thy friend’.
The beast that bears me, tired with my woe,
Plods dully on, to bear that weight in me,
As if by some instinct the wretch did know
His rider loved not speed being made from thee.
The bloody spur cannot provoke him on
That sometimes anger thrusts into his hide,
Which heavily he answers with a groan
More sharp to me than spurring to his side,
For that same groan doth put this in my mind:
My grief lies onward and my joy behind.
Scholars have preferred to think that these were the feelings that afflicted Shakespeare as he rode towards Ann and his family rather than away from them. There is no hard evidence either way. Even the term ‘friend’ in the third line does not exclude Ann. A friend for life was one of the promises made in ‘The Bride’s Goodmorrow’ the term hardly fits the master-mistress of the poet’s passion, because friends are meant to be similes inter pares, of equal standing, in perfect reciprocity. Sonnet 52 refers to the infrequency of his visits to his ‘friend’, like feasts ‘so solemn and so rare’, which reminds us that he would return to Stratford for those very feasts. The imagery of the chest and the wardrobe and even the ‘up-locked treasure’ might be taken to imply his home rather than the rather cheerless lodgings he could expect in London. All of which is not to say that Shakespeare’s sonnets are addressed to his wife, but that perhaps once, before they were prepared for publication, some of them had been meant for her. Praise of the beloved for constancy, as in Sonnet 53, seems ill directed towards the young man. If Shakespeare assumed different masks for different sequences and different imagined readers, it is no more than we should expect. It seems not unreasonable that one of his masks was the aspect that he showed to his wife.
Perhaps Ann had seen this sonnet long before it appeared in print:
When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least,
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate.
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings. (29)
Such a sonnet is barely fit for the eyes of a patron, or for that matter for a paramour of the moment. It speaks of solitude and distance self-imposed, of ambition thwarted, of disadvantage in the sphere of his endeavour, all to be expected of a half-educated young man taking on the London theatre industry at its own game. If it referred to a woman keeping a home for him, remaining true to her bond with him regardless of his uselessness as a provider, it would make sense. If instead of plaudits and profits he could send home only a sonnet such as this, Ann would have been more than satisfied. The same could be said of the sonnet that follows it in Thorpe’s edition. After a catalogue of repinings it ends:
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end. (30)
The most direct of the sonnets is also the least applicable to a crush on a first, second or third young man, however seductive and brilliant. Sonnet 110 reads like an apology to his oldest and truest love:
Alas, ’tis true, I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motley to the view,
Gored my own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
Made old offences of affections new.
Most true it is that I have looked on truth
Askance and strangely, but, by all the above,
These blenches gave my heart another youth,
And worse essays proved thee my best of love.
Now all is done, have what shal
l have no end.
Mine appetite I never more will grind
On newer proof to try an older friend,
A god in love, to whom I am confined.
Then give me welcome, next my heaven the best,
Even to thy pure and most most loving breast.
Shakespeare had chosen the life of a mountebank, a dealer in shadows and illusions. If Ann was anywhere near as puritan as her brother Bartholomew she must have detested the idea from the beginning and even Shakespeare’s eventual success would hardly have mollified her. The devil being the father of lies, dissimulation is the beginning of all sin and it was this, less than the lasciviousness of the displays, that excited the ire of the puritan reformers. The sonnet sounds as if it is a mild defence against a passionate condemnation, beginning by freely admitting guilt, ‘Alas, ’tis true,’ ‘Most true it is…’ The poet proceeds to argue like a sophist, excusing his infidelities in terms that strangely presage the devilishly brilliant boy who has ruined the country maid in ‘A Lover’s Complaint’.
To make the weeper laugh, the laugher weep,
He had the dialect and different skill,
Catching all passions in his craft of will.
That he did in the general bosom reign
Of young, of old, and sexes both enchanted,
To dwell with him in thoughts, or to remain
In personal duty, following where he haunted.
Consents bewitched, ere he desire, have granted,
And dialogued for him what he would say,
Asked their own wills and made their wills obey.
The boy’s sophistical argument, that experiencing inferior loves serves to convince a man of the superiority of his first love, is a tougher doctrine than that might seem, for it has little to do with a rebirth of passion or conjugal intimacy. The sonnets that follow 110 spell out the theme of repentance and reformation:
O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds. (111)
Though the sonnets claim to be plain-speaking all through, this is the plainest speech so far. We don’t know when these lines were written, but it seems that they belong to a much later stage in the poet’s life than the trickier sonnets of the 1590s. The ultimate statement of the doctrine of marriage as spiritual discipline is probably Sonnet 116.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come.
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never lived, nor no man ever loved.
The final couplet contains the equivocation, for if God is love, mere man is not capable of it. Such heroic love is unattainable for fallible humans, but strive for it the poet must and will. The love he now finds true may not have been his original passion for Ann, and Ann may not here be meant. Then again she may: again the poem appears to answer an angry accusation, and once again it finds a sophistical excuse. Shakespeare could have written ‘no one ever loved’ he wrote ‘no man ever loved’. In his plays women are shown time and time again to be constant in love through months and years of separation. Ann may have been the model, and her steadfastness itself a reproach that grew more poignant with the passing of the years.
Accuse me thus: that I have scanted all
Wherein I should your great deserts repay,
Forgot upon your dearest love to call,
Whereto all bonds do tie me day by day,
That I have frequent been with unknown minds,
And given to time your own dear-purchased right,
That I have hoisted sail to all the winds
Which should transport me farthest from your sight.
Book both my wilfulness and errors down,
And on just proof surmise accumulate.
Bring me within the level of your frown,
But shoot not at me in your wakened hate.
Since my appeal says I did strive to prove
The constancy and virtue of your love. (117)
There can be no proof that this is a husband speaking to a wife, but there are strong hints. The person to whom ‘all bonds’ tie a man can only be the woman to whom he has been bound in marriage. Shakespeare had certainly spent his precious time with all kinds of riff-raff, leaving Ann to grow old without him. The cheek of the final couplet has its literary precedent in famous stories like that of Patient Grissill, who endured all kinds of torments without ever being heard to condemn the man who inflicted them upon her. The penitent mood continues until Sonnet 126, which lacks its final couplet, and seems otherwise oddly out of sequence. Kerrigan interprets it as an envoi, a deliberate ending of the sequence. The next sequence concerns the dark lady. In reading these sonnets Ann would have realised, perhaps for the first time, that her husband had been besotted with a courtesan who seduced one of his adored young men.9 The matter was fairly recent; the poet describes his ‘days as past the best’.
Michael Wood finds in Sonnet 145 a key to the mystery of Shakespeare’s marriage:
one can never judge a relationship from the outside…Reading between the lines [of Sonnet 145] she would be the rock on which he relied through his life, supporting his career in London. Perhaps he really did mean that she had ‘saved my life’. Years later those words stood when he published the poem. And later still Ann would desire to be buried with him.10
Though some caution is in order—it was not Shakespeare who published the poem and we have only late-seventeenth-century gossip about where Ann desired to be buried—Wood’s almost unconscious absorption of an impression of Ann as rock-like strikes me as justified. There are some who want to believe that she reproached her husband for blazoning abroad his infidelities, others that she nagged and railed and drove him further out of her life.11 She is as likely to have refused to read the sonnets or to have them read to her. She was after all part of his reality, not his fantasy. My own feeling is that she was indeed given a copy of the sonnets and not by her husband, that at first she scorned to read them behind his back, and when she did begin to read them she was shaken, moved and impressed. Some she would have seen before, but not all. Then she would have tucked the little book deep inside the coffer where she kept her own possessions, opened her Bible and prayed for them both. If her husband had never raised the question of the sonnets with her, I doubt she would have raised it with him. She may have permitted herself the odd grim little smile.
They that are rich in words must needs discover
That they are poor in what makes a lover.12
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
of the poet’s younger daughter Judith and the Quiney family, of Ann as maltster and money-lender, and the deaths of Mary and Edmund Shakespeare
Though Shakespearean scholars have not been much interested in Judith Shakespeare, the novelist William Black found her so interesting that he spun his romance of Judith Shakespeare into three volumes, though it is actually quite short. Black’s Judith is the prettiest damsel in Warwickshire, who trips about the leafy lanes gathering flowers and occasionally slips up to Shottery to visit ‘Grandmother Hathaway’, naying and forsoothing as she goes. She is tricked by Leofric Hope into selling him the script of one of her father’s plays and almost pines to death under her father’s displeasure. End of story.1
Scholars too, bereft of anything like fact, occasionally p
ermit themselves a little idle speculation. One thinks Judith was Shakespeare’s favourite. Another decides that she was afflicted by guilt for the death of her twin. Yet another that her father punished her for it: ‘Judith, it seems, was not a favourite daughter. She may have suffered in her father’s eyes, from having had the insensitivity to stay alive so many years after the death of her much-loved twin brother at the age of eleven.’2 No one would have loved Hamnet better than his twin, or been more traumatised by his death, unless it was the mother of both of them. If Shakespeare was so unjust as to shun his daughter because of her bereavement, he cannot have been the man we think he was.
What is undeniable is that Judith Shakespeare reached the ripe age of thirty-one unmarried. As we have seen, in Shakespeare’s time fewer women married than do today. Many women were in service, and unable to marry or even to entertain offers of marriage without the permission of their employers. Others had no dowries or portions to put towards the establishment of a household. Still others, at their own disposal and earning an independent living, saw no reason why they should jettison their freedom and their property by submitting to the rule of a man.
One way of assessing Judith Shakespeare’s life career is to look at what became of the cohort of girls born in Stratford in 1585. Holy Trinity register shows thirty-nine girls (besides Judith) born that year; three (including girl twins) were baptised and buried on the same day; three more lived two weeks, another five weeks, another nine months; twin girls died young, one aged one year and the other in the plague year of 1588, along with another of Judith’s age peers; two more died at the age of twelve. One-third of the girls born that year did not reach marriageable age, which leaves twenty-six who might have. Of these only three were married in Holy Trinity Church: Katherine Rose married John Tipping in 1604, Margaret Moore married John Molnes in 1605 and Isabel Loxley alias Cockes married Thomas Mayhew on 31 May 1606. Joan Yate was buried unmarried in 1606. Which leaves twenty-two girls—slightly more than half of the cohort—who were christened but neither married nor buried in Stratford. Women of the same names can be found marrying elsewhere, in London, for example, but, failing further evidence, it would be foolhardy to identify them with the Stratford-born girls.