Shakespeare: A Life

by Park Honan

  No such tumult as that at the vintner's normally upset Shottery, and there was an air of placid well-being at Hewlands with its pasturage, meadow, and livestock. Richard Hathaway had left substantial legacies to seven children. It is likely that four of them -- Thomas, Margaret, John, and William -- were born to his wife Joan. Anne, Bartholomew, and Catherine, as his eldest children, must have been offspring of an earlier marriage; he left to his widow the option of refusing Bartholomew a bequest of land if she paid him £40, a normal provision if he was not her own son. 7

  Already an adult when three of Richard's children were born, Anne was about twenty-three years older than her father's smallest boy. Inevitably child-care had devolved upon her, as it did upon most women at a Tudor farm. Female work did not stop in daylight hours, and Anne's role would have included helping to wash, feed, and instruct the younger ones while seeing to other siblings. Her brother Bartholomew is asked in his father's will to be 'a Comforte unto his

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  Bretherne and Systers to his power', and there is sign of Anne's being kind or responsible if she was not so ideally tender-hearted as the person in William's 'hate-away' sonnet. Her father's shepherd Thomas Whittington, unless he was slow to collect his wages, later trusted her to hold in safekeeping for him his funds for the parish poor. 'I geve and bequeth', Whittington stated in 1601, 'unto the poore people of Stratford 40s. that is in the hand of Anne Shaxspere, wyf unto Mr Wyllyam Shaxspere, and is due debt unto me, beyng payd to myne Executor by the sayd Wyllyam Shaxspere or his assigns, accordyng to the true meanyng of this my wyll'. 8

  The shepherd in old age sojourned with John Pace, the brother-inlaw of Shottery's Jesuit martyr, 9 and one recalls that Anne's father named as an executor the brother of a defiant recusant. Still among several Shottery families of Hathaways in the 1580s or 1590s, no one appears to have been cited for avoiding church (though John Hathaway of Old Stratford was to be cited in a list of Catholic recusants for 1640-1). Anne's brother Bartholomew embraced the Anglican faith with evident readiness and ardour. He became a churchwarden (as did his three sons) and left a fervent statement of faith in his will. It would seem that a number of members of the Shakespeare -- Hathaway circle were typical of those in old Catholic families who conformed, even if some, now and then, abstained from Anglican communion. Anne and William's own child, Susanna, as a young woman, was to hear from the vicar's apparitor for missing an Easter communion and would then ignore the summons. Their friends Hamnet and Judith Sadler, along with a servant of Hamnet's, were also to be called before the church court for not receiving the Eucharist; Hamnet, or Hamlet, as we have seen from the 'bawdy court's' proceedings, pleaded for time to clear his conscience -- though it is hard to imagine this working man fretting over niceties of doctrine. As the heir of Roger Sadler the baker, he lived with Judith at the corner of High Street and Sheep Street next to the Corn Market, and normally, at least, brought himself to attend Anglican Easter service. On the other hand, Thomas and Margaret Reynolds were obstinate recusants, who appear once to have given refuge to a fugitive Jesuit priest; their son and heir William Reynolds was to be left 26s. 8d. in Shakespeare's will to buy a memorial ring.

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  One concludes that most of the poet's schoolmates and some of his friends were unexceptionally Protestant, but a nucleus of Catholics lay near the centre of his early acquaintanceship; he was surely not surprised by those of the old allegiance among Hathaway's friends -- or perhaps by Anne's regular church-going. Like others, she had, at some point, accepted an Anglican faith which had kept an old order of priests and bishops with a doctrine that admitted of belief in the Real Presence in consecrated bread and wine; her conformity may or may not have been painful for her, but it was to be matched by William's practice.

  Whether by calculation or instinct, he had been careful in one way. He had not courted above his social degree, or, in effect, matched the later presumption of his friend Richard Tyler, who was named in the first draft of the playwright's will. As a butcher's son, born in 1566, Tyler in the 1580s married Susanna Woodward of Shottery, after which Susanna was disinherited by an angry grandfather, who seems to have felt that a butcher's son was a poor choice for the eldest daughter of Mr Richard Woodward of Shottery Manor, who entertained the likes of Sir Fulke Greville.

  On the other hand, William can hardly have acquired a maturity of outlook that years would have given Anne. She had not acquiesced at a casual moment, but when her circumstances were changed radically by loss. Less than three months after their father's death Bartholomew had wed Isabel Hancocks of Tredington and gone to live at Tysoe -twenty miles south of Hereford. He was the brother closest to her in age, and it is likely that Anne became a godmother to his child. (Bartholomew's daughter 'Annys' -- or 'Anne' in her marriage register -- was baptized on 14 January 1584 after he had decided to return to Stratford. 10 ) It may not follow that, after her brother had left Hewlands, her loneliness, age, or a quarrel with her father's widow had led Anne to take a lover. But William was rewarded partly because of displacements in her life; she would have been of use to her father and brother, and after losing them she had found this rather elegant young man of Henley Street, a son of her father's friend, ardent in his need for her. Now, however, she had to face the consequences of becoming pregnant-her social humiliation and the ruin of her life. Just how

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  much William valued her maturity, or the kindness Whittington appears to credit her with, we do not know. But he was evidently in love, and his problem in November was to arrange for his future as quickly as he could.

  A licence for lovers

  The urgency of his situation must have touched his parents sharply. Under the elms of Henley Street with its dogs, carts, dust, and clamour a few craftsmen knew a consoling normalcy, but in the troubled Midlands the glovers' trade had its endemic difficulties, as it fell into deeper decline. The Shakespeares' family included five living children-William, Gilbert, Joan, Richard, and the 2-year-old Edmund -and John Shakespeare with his large responsibilities had more cause for anxiety. In the last Trinity term ( 15 June-4 July 1582) he had been compelled, at any rate, to seek legal sureties of the peace against Ralph Cawdrey, William Russell, Thomas Logginge, and Robert Young'for fear of death and mutilation of his limbs'. 11 The formulaic phrase might seem to apply literally to Ralph Cawdrey the butcher, who once assaulted John Shakespeare's brother-in-law, Alexander Webbe. But Cawdrey had become a respected figure at 'halls'. William's father had sat with him at council in September, and had sought sureties not because (in the legal formula) he feared 'death or mutilation', but because he needed a respite from suits by creditors.

  A family scandal could further damage his trade. If the vicar's court noticed a sexual offence, the lovers might be asked to apologize publicly on a Sunday. That could bring a mild ignominy down upon a family. In fact, rash lovers did not always avoid semi-public disgrace even if they married: Fulke Sandells's son later heard from a vicar's apparitor simply because his wife gave birth too soon after their wedding.

  Gossip and rumour, in themselves, could cause an alert court to summon a pregnant woman and her lover, and as Anne's condition became obvious it could have attracted attention, so she may have left Hewlands by November. But the evidence is unclear, in any case: her November locale is given as "Temple grafton', in a Worcester entry

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  that errs with her surname (' Whateley'). Temple Grafton was a settlement outside the parish but only three and a half miles west of Shottery and south of the Alcester road. (The hamlet was about five miles from Henley Street.) If she huddled there William perhaps felt obliged to ask for his father's consent to marry, and his mother's willingness to share a home with his bride.

  Yet he was not quite so dependent on them as is often implied. Ecclesiastical laws had loopholes, and Richard Cosin (the bishop's chancellor at Worcester) had power to override a refusal of consent and issue a licence. 12 Nevertheless whatever their surprise, the young ma
n's parents had reason to favour a wedding once they knew of Anne's condition, quite apart from a craftsman's fear of scandal and the real disgrace of bastardy. Anne, of course, was no stranger to them, but the child of an honourable yeoman William's father had aided; they were likely to find her age and practicality of benefit to their son, a young man lively, eloquent, with a 'mint of phrases in his brain' perhaps, but of small practical experience. In one light, William was both more and less than a mere individual; he was a guarantor of his family's futurity, his father's investment and hope, since he would inherit; and those with property to bequeath seldom objected to an heir's early marriage. 13 A son who wed early might count on having a grown heir in his lifetime, so that heritable land would not devolve (with wardship complications) on a mere child.

  His mother, no doubt, wished him to acquit himself well, and as arrangements were made near the month's end, some wind may have gone out of William's sails. His real troubles, so far as one intuits them, began with marriage, as in a sense his possibilities did. He had no choice but to take on abrupt responsibility -- to be a husband, a father. So his initiative was undercut; his situation in November was hardly that of August. In yielding to exigencies late in the year his summer romance must have begun to seem humdrum, undramatic, dull, without risk, boring to an active mind. Also there were besetting aspects of such a dilemma, for a complex young man sensitive to local opinion; he was likely to regard any excitement, dread, regret, or embarrassment he felt in November in many different lights, as his mind circled round all sides of a topic. He probably began, though,

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  soon enough to see his predicament in ironic perspective, and so assumed a path that would help him to take a robust, amused, varyingly ironic view of marital affairs later. At the moment he had to think of banns, fees, sureties, a visit to the consistory court, a licence, and the inexorable approach of a hasty wedding.

  He appears to have journeyed to the bishop's court at Worcester, late in November, with the farmers Fulke Sandells and John Richardson. Since the first was a supervisor and the second a witness of Hathaway's will, the two yeomen, in effect, represented Anne's father. Sandells, at 31, seems to have been as taciturn as his dry, laconic Baldon Hill deposition suggests; he had no reason to be convivial with a youth who had compromised Hathaway's daughter. But both Shottery farmers agreed to post as surety for the marriage licence the large sum of £40, to be forfeited if the validity of the union were impeached.

  In the consistory court's licence entry, he was now matched with a ghost; the wording of the entry (dated 27 November) applies absurdly to a union 'inter willelmum Shaxpere et Annam whateley de Temple grafton'. But clerks were lax with names of brides; one Stratford marriage bond later seems to permit a wedding of a bridegroom with his own curate, and another, in 1625, allows that ' John Francis and Edmund Canninge' may wed (but 'Joan' could be spelled 'John'). 14 Some confusion about Anne's locale, perhaps, was bound to occur if she was living outside the parish. The chance that she was staying with Whateleys is remote, though Whateleys were in the diocese and the name had been prominent at Stratford since the town's incorporation. The best explanation of 'Annam. whateley' may be that the court's clerk was beset by a tithe dispute, involving William Whateley, the vicar of Crowle, on the same day Shakespeare appeared. That suggestion with relevant evidence was offered by Joseph Gray in Shakespeare's Marriage, a main source for moderate commentators ever since (though Gray does not quite explain 'Temple grafton'). Anyway, a clerk's error has made ' Anne Whateley'into an enduring spook.

  Substantially, on 28 November, the bond of sureties shows that William did not merit a 'special' licence of a kind issued to clerical bridegrooms and those of more exalted rank than his own. He

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  qualified for a 'common' licence, reserved for husbandmen, craftsmen, and the like. This document was addressed, as a rule, to the minister of the named church where the wedding was supposed to occur, but we do not know where his own licence was sent.

  Four conditions imposed on the young man all take the form of unlikely negatives: he must not marry if a legal impediment exists, or if a suit alleging an impediment is in process, or if he cannot guarantee the bishop and the bishop's officers immunity from harm arising from the issuing of a licence, or -- more interestingly -- if the bride's friends do not approve the match. Two muddy-booted farmers, it seems, represented Anne's friends, and the word 'impediment' (which is in the marriage service too) would be recalled by a poet who wrote, 'Let me not to the marriage of true minds | Admit impediments'. By the end of the day, he was free to marry. The bond itself allows

  that william Shagspere on the one partie, and Anne hathwey of Stratford in the Dioces of worcester maiden may lawfully solennize matrimony together and in the same afterwardes remaine and continew like man and wiffe. 15

  With the flick of a quill pen Anne has returned, in this document, back to Stratford parish-if she ever left it.

  Richard Cosin or his registrar, Robert Warmstry, did remove one 'impediment'. The wedding, by licence, would need to be preceded by only one reading of banns in church, not three as was more usual, and that saved an unhelpful delay. The reading of banns was prohibited in the diocese between Advent Sunday ( 2 December 1582) and the octave of Epiphany (13 January), during which time weddings, too, were not customary and in principle not allowed.

  Shakespeare's banns were probably read in church on St Andrew's Day, 30 November, and the couple could have wed the next day, before the prohibited season of Advent (otherwise they would have had to wait until mid-January). Haste was welcome in light of Anne's situation, and the ceremony took place in one of several possible locales. John Haines, the curate, could have married them at St Peter's Bishopton -- north of Shottery -- or, possibly, Thomas Hunt did at All Saints' Luddington to the south. These were Stratford's two chapelries. But likelihood, after all, favours Temple Grafton, though

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  its mention in the entry is not proof the wedding occurred there; it would have been an unobtrusive place. Four years later, a Puritan survey of Warwickshire described the vicar of Grafton, John Frith, as 'an old priest & Unsound in religion'. As a papist Frith was not up to much and was not very dangerous: 'he can neither prech nor read well, his chicfest trade is to cure hawkes yt are hurt or diseased, for which purpose manie doe usuallie repaire to him'. 16 It is pleasant to think Frith's hawks watched the young couple. Yet whether they were married at Grafton or not, William and Anne began wedded life before winter came to Stratford parish.

  After Davy Jones's show

  By December the poet had almost certainly brought Anne to Henley Street, if she was not there before the wedding. It was normal for a groom's father to offer the bride room and board for a few years, and couples gratefully accepted shared lodgings. Anne had her bequest of 10 marks, and William may have had an annuity of £2, plus an extra year's pay, if he worked for Hoghton, or savings if he had worked elsewhere. Yet he would have found it hard to set up a new home with his wherewithal.

  Even before any interlude 'in the Countrey', it seems, he had worked for his father. He kept on for 'some time' in that employment after thinking it 'fit to marry', says Nicholas Rowe, who explains the nature of the work only as 'that way of Living which his Father propos'd to him'. 17 At any rate, William could have found a pen in his hand rather than a glover's knife; he became very familiar with legal and business terms, though he could have picked these up later (he would write plays partly to suit Inns of Court men); he learned no more of the law than someone outside the field could have acquired, and he absorbed what he needed from other professions too. (Juliet's use of 'deed', 'counsel', or 'commission' -- Romeo and Juliet, IV. i. 57-64 -- for example, need not suggest that he had trained as an attorney.) Probably he served as a clerk, scrivener, and part-time helper of his father.

  Did a back wing at the Birthplace afford the newlyweds some privacy? The wing has been said to have been 'an independent little

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  dwelling, with separate kitchen, staircase, and "solar", extending into the garden', but it is hard to imagine much independence for anyone in a glover's domestic arrangements. 18 The couple probably dined with William's parents, and Anne would have been obliged to cooperate in the common family work.

  We cannot peer into the ménage, but it would have had drawbacks as well as a few advantages. That Anne seems to have stayed with William's parents until the purchase of New Place in 1597 -- some fourteen or fifteen years after she began to live with them -- argues that she was welcome to Mary Shakespeare. Both countrywomen were pious daughters of affluent, conservative farmers. John Shakespeare had more in common with the two women than did William -- a grammarschool scholar and poet too old for an apprenticeship and surely aching for better challenges than Stratford could offer. In this ménage he was in the position of a child twice over, first to his mother and then to his wife. He was in effect doubly fixed in his former home; he was his mother's flesh and blood, and of one flesh and blood with his wife: 'Farewell, dear mother', Hamlet mocks King Claudius, 'Father and mother is man and wife, man and wife is one flesh' (IV. iii. 51, 53-4.). To an extent he was locked into a little, ever-present situation of halfunderstandings, or of much less than full communication, in which his elders could not have responded to much in his being. So it is often, with one generation and the next, but the gap between young and old in provincial towns in the 1580s was particularly great. William's Latin training had abetted his concern with books when more were being published than ever before and the nation's culture was becoming more complex, refined, challenging to the mind; the pace of sophistication was swifter than at any time in the past. There are signs of Mary's unusual capability, but we do not know that she read for pleasure; his father and wife were, at best, semi-literate.