Shakespeare's Wife

by Germaine Greer

  Agge’s unusual surname may represent a German name transmogrified; the drugs that Rogers supplied are more likely to be utilised in Paracelsian practice than, for example, in the far more conservative practice of John Hall. The administration of corrosive sublimate could mean that Agge was an unscrupulous quack. German candidates for a degree in medicine were at one stage required to take an oath that they would under no conditions prescribe mercury. Surgeons who made a speciality of treating venereal disease were not the most respected in their profession. They often set up lodging houses where their patients could hide out while they were undergoing treatment; poor householders could occasionally be prevailed upon to take patients into their houses and nurse them. In 1625 we find the receiver of the Earl of Middlesex, Thomas Catchmay, writing to tell his master that he had searched all over London for Sir Edward Greville only to find him ‘in the hands of some chirurgeon for some venereal scars’.35 We do not know whom Agge was treating besides Rogers.

  We have no record of the Bard’s ever being treated for the French disease, or exhibiting any of the symptoms of either syphilis or its treatment. If he was infected when he was first in London, at the age of twenty-two or so, he is likely to have had to undergo treatment at various times and ultimately to have been anointed or dosed with mercury or arsenic. What would have killed him, if this was the case, was not the spirochete or the gonococcus but the accumulation of toxins resulting from repeated treatment. Shakespeare’s strange detachment, from his neighbours in the enclosure struggle, even his astigmatic will, could be explained by the effect of mercury and/or arsenic on his brain. When Shakespeare appeared as the chief witness in the Belott v Mountjoy case in the late spring of 1612, he could not remember the details of a match in which he had acted as chief negotiator. Though Schoenbaum goes easy on him for having no recollection of what had happened eight years earlier, it was no small matter for a ‘friend’ who had been trusted to handle such a business to claim under oath to have no recollection of the salient details.36 It was Shakespeare’s duty to provide evidence of what had transpired; that was why the Mountjoys had asked him to act for them in the first place. He was to be called for a second interrogation under oath and his name appears in the margin of a set of interrogatories, but he seems to have been excused. He certainly did not appear. I cannot rid myself of an uneasy feeling that when Shakespeare gave evidence on 11 May he was so obviously ill and confused that it was decided that there was no point in his making a second appearance on 19 June. If he had been undergoing treatment, that is, being systematically poisoned with mercury chloride, he would have passed through periods of acute illness of which a common symptom was mental confusion. For all those who wonder why Shakespeare stopped writing, the cumulative effects of successive episodes of mercury poisoning could provide a tragic and terrible answer.

  Syphilis provides a possible answer to two more questions: why Shakespeare’s career ended so early and why he died so young. To the first could be replied that no one showing signs of any infection was allowed to frequent the court; courtiers with obvious signs of any contagious disease upon them, even measles or smallpox, had to find alternative lodgings until a complete cure had been achieved. As for Shakespeare’s dying so young, syphilis plus its treatment could kill at any age. And if the final phase had manifested in the form of an asthma or epilepsy Shakespeare would have known that he had at best only a few months to live.

  Syphilis would also provide an explanation of the quatrain inscribed on Shakespeare’s gravestone.

  Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear

  To dig the dust enclosed here.

  Blest be the man that spares these stones,

  And cursed be he that moves my bones.

  In his eagerness to prove that Shakespeare hated his wife, Greenblatt makes a nonsense of these undistinguished lines. What is stipulated is not that the grave not be opened, as Greenblatt has it, but that the bones not be disturbed. Hall and Dowdall both say that Shakespeare wrote the doggerel himself. I think it more likely that the stage management of Shakespeare’s monument in Holy Trinity was the work of John Hall, who would have known only too well that, if Shakespeare’s bones were ever to be exhumed for reburial in a more conspicuous place, posterity would see the lesions on them and know beyond the possibility of doubt that the man of the millennium died of terminal syphilis. As long as the bones are not disturbed, the question will remain moot.

  Long-standing venereal disease was not the only condition that permitted the identification of a terminal stage. Certain tumours of the internal organs were pretty well understood to be impossible to treat, especially because the diagnosis could only be made very late in the disease process. Ambrose Paré, principal physician to Henri III, distinguishes four kinds of tumour or imposthume; as he is primarily concerned with curing such things he has little to say about the management of terminal disease, but there are some clues, as in his description of the management of the patient with a ‘phlegmon’:

  If he be of that age or have so led his life that he cannot want the use of wine, let him use it, but altogether moderately. Rest must be commanded, for all bodies wax hot by motion, but let him chiefly have a care that he do not exercise the part possessed by the phlegmon for fear of a new defluxion. Let his sleep be moderate, neither, if he have a full body, let him sleep by day, particularly after meat. Let him have his belly soluble, if not by nature then by art, as by the frequent use of glisters or suppositories. Let him avoid all vehement perturbations of mind, as hate, anger, brawling; let him wholly abstain from venery.37

  Some such consideration might explain why Shakespeare seems so inert once we have him at New Place. He may not even have been told of Judith’s sudden wedding in February or of the death of his brother-in-law at the beginning of April. As his condition deteriorated its management may have involved clumsy palliatives that would have intensified his inertia and even resulted in stupor. ‘If the pain remain, and yield not to these remedies, we must fly to stronger, making use of narcotics or stupifactives, but with care lest we benumb or dead the part…’38

  Paré’s treatments for pain are all local, cataplasms and poultices of henbane, poppy and nightshade. In the case of the tumours called cancers, most physicians were well aware, as Paré was, that there was nothing to be done.

  When it is increased and covers the noble parts it admits no cure but by the hand, but in decayed bodies, whose strength fail, especially if the cancer be inveterate, we must not attempt the cure, neither with instrument, nor with fire, neither by too acrid medicines as potential cauteries, but we must only seek to keep them from growing more violent or spreading further, by gentle medicines and a palliative cure. For thus many troubled with a cancer have attained even to old age. Therefore Hippocrates admonishes us that it is better not to cure occult or hidden cancers, for the patients cured (saith he) do quickly die but such as are not cured live longer.

  If her husband’s illness had been diagnosed as a cancer, Ann would have been advised to purge his melancholy humour.

  Therefore thick and muddy wines, vinegar, brown bread, cold herbs, old cheese, old and salted flesh, beef, venison, goat, hare, garlic, onions and mustard, and lastly all acrid, acid and other salt things which may by any means incrassate the blood and inflame the humours must be eschewed. A cooling and humecting diet must be prescribed, fasting eschewed, as also watching, immoderate labours, sorrow, cares and mournings. Let him use tisanes, and in his broths boil mallows, spinach, lettuce, sorrel, purslane, succory, hops, violets, borage and the four cold seeds. But let him feed on mutton, veal, kid, capon, pullet, young hares, partridges, fishes of stony rivers, rear [soft-boiled] eggs, and use white wine, but moderately, for his drink.39

  As the patient wasted, she would have been advised to procure asses’ milk for him, for both internal and external application.

  It is assumed that John Hall treated the poet in his last illness; if the diagnosis had already been made and the disease known to be te
rminal, there was small call for the services of a physician. In any case, Hall’s use of botanicals was very close to the kind of medical treatment supplied by gentlewomen and well within the competence of Ann Shakespeare. She might have been able to reduce local inflammation by dressing the sores with leaves of mercury but, basically, beyond keeping her husband as clean and comfortable as possible, there was little to be done. If what was needed was palliative care and pain relief, the apothecary was of more use than the diagnostician. Most effective was opium. If Ann was game to dose Shakespeare with opium, he was lucky. Mostly it was considered too dangerous to use. Mary, Lady Hoby was shocked to hear of the death of her physician Dr Brewer, ‘procured by a medicine he ministered to himself to cause him to sleep’.40

  Once their patient was despaired of, all three, physician, surgeon and apothecary, probably took their costly selves off and left the poet to his nurse. Terminal nursing since the beginning of time has been women’s work. As Adriana says in The Comedy of Errors:

  I will attend my husband, be his nurse,

  Diet his sickness, for it is my office.41

  Mandragora was known to procure sleep; soaking mandrake root in sweet wine resulted in a reasonably effective anaesthetic.42 In Joshua Cooke’s How to choose a good wife from a bad Young Arthur attempts to murder his impossibly good wife by drugging her wine with what he takes to be a poison, which is actually a ‘compound powder of poppy…and mandrakes’, originally intended for use in anaesthetising a man whose leg was to be cut off.43 Ann would not have intended to cast her dying husband into a ‘dead sleep’ so she is more likely to have used another analgesic, henbane perhaps, or syrup of poppies. Of all the simples in the New Place garth, henbane was the one most extensively used by old wives. The henbane of choice was the white henbane:

  The juice…drawn out of the dry seed bruised by itself and laid in warm water is better and releaseth the pain sooner than…the milky humour that cometh out of the herb by scotching or nicking…the first juice and that which is drawn out of the dry seed are conveniently put in the medicines that assuage pain.44

  Preparations of henbane and poppy seeds ‘drunken with mead’ were also used:45

  the heads and leaves of poppies be boiled in water will make a man sleep if his head be bathed there with…the juice of black poppy called opium cooleth more, thicketh more and drieth more…it assuageth ache and bringeth sleep…But if a man take too much of it it is hurtful, for it taketh a man’s memory away and killeth him. If it be put into the fundament after the manner of a suppository it bringeth sleep…46

  White poppy brings a pleasant sleep, black poppy ‘dull or sluggish’ sleep.

  Ann was less likely than a professional man to have dosed her dying husband with harsh purgatives and emetics to add to his miseries, and more likely to have concentrated her efforts on easing his pain as they both waited in patience for the end. She might even have told Hall to keep his ludicrous and astonishingly expensive prescriptions for more distinguished patients, because four months’ care from physicians like him had been known to reduce the richest clients to penury. Perhaps it was Ann’s expert care that kept Shakespeare hanging on for a whole month after he updated his will on 25 March. In those quiet hours in the sickroom, husband and wife may have drawn closer together, reliving the old days of their courtship and marriage, remembering the time of their children’s innocence. Ann would certainly have read to her husband from her Bible. She would not have read to him from his own poetry, I fancy, for fear of agitating and distressing him, unless it was his fable of marital union between the phoenix and the turtledove.

  So they loved as love in twain

  Had the essence but in one:

  Two distincts, division none.

  Number there in love was slain.

  Hearts remote yet not asunder,

  Distance, and no space was seen

  ’Twixt this turtle and his queen,

  But in them it were a wonder.

  When Hamlet had groaned, in his misery, ‘Husband and wife is one flesh,’ he was speaking, necessarily, anagogically. The union of marriage is not a union of bodies, but a union of souls, of which the intercourse of bodies is merely an emblem. If Shakespeare had gone here and there, defiling his body and compromising his compact with his wife, her constancy now redeemed him.

  Property was thus appalled

  That the self was not the same.

  Single nature’s double name

  Neither two nor one was called.

  Reason, in itself compounded,

  Saw division grow together,

  To themselves yet either neither

  Simple were so well compounded.

  Once Ann would have had so many questions, but now that it was too late to ask them she realised that she no longer needed the answers. Her daughters may have remonstrated that she was doing too much for the husband who had done so little for them, that the men-and maidservants should undertake the heavier, dirtier tasks, but Ann was a wife of the old school.

  I have no better reason to believe that Ann slept in her husband’s chamber so that she would wake if he was restless at night than the example of Mistress Quickly watching by the deathbed of Sir John Falstaff:

  He parted even just between twelve and one, even at the turning of the tide, for after I saw him fumble with the sheets, and play with flowers, and smile upon his fingers’ end, I knew there was but one way. For his nose was sharp as a pen and he babbled of green fields…he bade me lay more clothes to his feet. I put my hand into the bed and felt them and they were cold as any stone. Then I felt to his knees and so upward and upward, and all was cold as any stone.47

  In peasant families it was usual for a family member to sleep alongside the dying person, checking regularly that they were still warm, chafing their limbs if they grew chill, ready to call the others if the end appeared to be approaching. If Ann did as much for Shakespeare it would not have been thought worthy of remark.

  As her husband’s health deteriorated, Ann may have been too preoccupied to notice what her younger daughter was up to. On 10 February Judith Shakespeare suddenly married Thomas Quiney, with no prior announcing of the banns. The match may have been mooted as long before as 1611, when Judith witnessed a deed of sale of a house belonging to Thomas’s mother Elizabeth Quiney. With the proceeds Thomas Quiney had taken a lease on a tavern in the High Street, which might have been thought of as a prelude to setting up as a married man, but no wedding ensued. Now, suddenly, five years later, 31-year-old Judith and 27-year-old Quiney were in such a hurry to be married that they applied for a licence to permit their marrying in Lent, not from the Bishop of Worcester, as Judith’s parents had, but from the Vicar of Holy Trinity Church, who claimed the right to issue licences as part of the privilege of the town charter or ‘Stratford peculiar’.

  In this case the spur may have been a pregnancy but not the bride’s. When an unmarried woman called Margaret Wheeler was brought to bed in Stratford in mid-March and the midwives did their duty by refusing to assist her until she ‘confessed the man’, she named Thomas Quiney. The midwives may have delayed too long, for they lost both mother and baby. On 15 March ‘Margaret Wheeler and her child’ were buried in Holy Trinity. Duncan-Jones assumes that Margaret Wheeler is a connection of Alderman John Wheeler who was bailiff in 1565 and 1576, before resigning his office in 1586.48 This Wheeler died in 1592, and his wife in 1596. Of their four sons none can be identified as the father or the grandfather of a Margaret. No fewer than five Wheeler families, as well as scattered Wheelers who appear unrelated, can be found in the Stratford registers of the time. The only possibility seems to be the daughter of Randall Wheeler, who was baptised Margaret at Holy Trinity Church in September 1586, which would make her three years older than Thomas Quiney. An Elinor Wheeler was the servant of Richard Pink, maltster and husbandman, who in his will in 1615 assured her of bed and board in his house for as long as she stayed in service or a legacy of £3 if she preferred to leave. Two more
Wheelers bore illegitimate children, Joan Wheeler a son Robert in March 1617, and Elizabeth Wheeler a son John in January 1625. Perhaps there was a low-life clan of Wheelers living somewhere on the wrong side of the tracks, though Humphrey Wheeler, the shoe-maker, had a daughter Elizabeth born in 1601 who may have been the same Elizabeth who bore a base-born child in 1625.

  By 15 March the newly-weds were in trouble. An apparitor called Walter Nixon informed against them to the Consistory Court of Worcester for marrying without the correct licence. Quiney did not attend the hearing, and was excommunicated. On 26 March, Quiney was called before the Vicar’s Court in Stratford to answer the matter of Margaret Wheeler’s pregnancy; in open court he confessed to having had carnal knowledge of her and was condemned for fornication. His penance was to stand at the church door arrayed in a white sheet for three Sundays in succession. For some reason, perhaps for fear of public disorder, the penalty was quickly reduced. Quiney was asked instead to make a gift of one crown to the poor of the parish, and to confess his fault to the incumbent of the chapelry at Bishopton. In the court record the clerk has entered against this mitigated requirement, ‘dismissus’, so perhaps even this mild punishment was eventually waived.49 We need to infer, I think, that the truth behind this matter was more complex than appears. Somehow or other Quiney was able to convince the moral authorities that he was not the unprincipled lecher that he seems. He did after all attend the court, thereby acknowledging its authority; he did confess his fault, either because he couldn’t do otherwise, if indeed Wheeler had named him, or because he was shocked and contrite at the price she and her child paid for their dalliance.