Shakespeare's Wife

INTRODUCTION

considering the poor reputation of wives generally, in particular the wives of literary men, and the traditional disparagement of the wife of the Man of the Millennium

Anyone steeped in western literary culture must wonder why any woman of spirit would want to be a wife. At best a wife should be invisible, like the wives of nearly all the great authors schoolboys used to read at school. If Homer, Aesop, Plautus, Terence, Virgil, Horace and Juvenal had wives they have been obliterated from history. The wives who are remembered are those who are vilified, like Socrates’ Xanthippe and Aristotle’s Phyllis. Until our own time, history focussed on man the achiever; the higher the achiever the more likely it was that the woman who slept in his bed would be judged unworthy of his company. Her husband’s fans recoiled from the notion that she might have made a significant contribution towards his achievement of greatness. The possibility that a wife might have been closer to their idol than they could ever be, understood him better than they ever could, could not be entertained.

If Xanthippe had never existed, bachelor dons would have had to invent her. Among the scant references to her is the story told in the Phaedo of how, when she came with Socrates’ three sons to visit him when Socrates had been sentenced to death for corrupting the youth of Athens and ordered to commit suicide by drinking hemlock, she so annoyed the great man with her lamentations that he sent her home again, so that his last hours could be spent in rational discussion with his disciples. No historian has ever shown the slightest interest in what became of Xanthippe and her three small children after Socrates’ suicide. Such mundane matters are beneath the consideration of great men and their biographers. To protest that Socrates’ chosen martyrdom brought catastrophe on the four innocent people who depended on him would be merely womanish.

As Lisa Jardine pointed out in 1983: ‘Renaissance scholars from Richard Hooker to Francis Bacon are credited with scolding wives. Society seems to find it irresistible to characterise the unworldliness of the male intellectual and academic in terms of his failure to control the women in his life.’¹ Hooker and Bacon did rather well out of their wives, who were both wealthy. By 1588, when Richard Hooker married Jean Churchman, the protestant reformers had all but succeeded in eliminating the Pauline notion of wedded life as inferior to virginity. Even so, the woman who bore Richard Hooker six children, and brought him the financial security that made it possible for him to become the leading apologist of the Anglican Church, is known to us only as a scold.

Bacon was married in 1606, when he was forty-five, to a fourteen-year-old heiress called Alice Barnham, whom he had singled out for the purpose when she was only eleven years old. It was well known that Francis Bacon preferred boys to women, and kept a series of young male menials for his pleasure. In the circumstances, the young Viscountess St Albans could be thought to have had every right to behave badly. She seems to have endured her grotesque marriage without complaint until she became involved with John Underhill. A ‘Mr Underhill’ is listed in 1617 as a ‘Gentleman-in-Waiting’ at York House, where Viscount St Albans and his childless wife lived in state. In 1625, when Bacon was revising his will, in which he left the princely sum of £200 to a young Welsh servingman called Francis Edney, he added a codicil, revoking his legacies to Alice ‘for just and great causes’ and leaving her ‘to her right only’. In a pointed gesture, a mere fortnight after Bacon’s death, Alice Bacon married John Underhill in a public ceremony at St Martin’s in the Fields.² Of the miserable story of the marriage of a trusting child to a middle-aged pederast, all that has come down to us is Bacon’s view of marriage: ‘He that hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or of mischief.’³

Some such idea lies behind the almost unconscious certainty shared by all (male) observers that, if a man of genius is to realise his potential, he must put his wife away. Shakespeare could not have been great if he had not jettisoned his wife, but if he is to be great, she must be shown to have got her just deserts. Many English men of genius followed the example of the earliest-known Greek philosopher:

Thales Miletus was…held to be the first man that had the name of wise attributed unto him, being afterwards reckoned one of those seven who only were of the Grecians called wise men; he being importuned by his mother Cleobulina to take a wife whilst he was young, always answered her that it was yet time enough; and afterward, being grown in years and urged by her more earnestly, he told her, that it was (then) past time, and too too late, this grave man meaning hereby that it was not good to marry at all.⁴

This advice was reiterated in every generation. While the church ruled the academic establishment, all teachers were necessarily celibate but, even after the Reformation, when the reformers preached that it was a man’s duty to his maker to take a wife, many artists and intellectuals chose, or perhaps were constrained by their poverty, to remain unmarried, if not exactly celibate. Literature was a particularly laddish enterprise, the province of young bachelors who usually gave it up when–or if–they married. Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Nashe, Michael Drayton, all died unmarried. Any literary figure who bucked the trend and took a wife is usually commiserated, beginning with Geoffrey Chaucer who, we are told, ‘could not have been happy in his marriage’.⁵

Thomas Moore, writing in defence of his friend Byron’s appalling treatment of his clever wife, is one of the first to decide on little or no evidence that Shakespeare hated his wife.

By whatever austerity of temper or habits the poets Dante and Milton may have drawn upon themselves such a fate, it might be expected that, at least, the ‘gentle Shakespeare’ would have stood exempt from the common calamity of his brethren. But, among the very few facts of his life that have been transmitted to us, there is none more clearly proved than the unhappiness of his marriage.⁶

There is no evidence that Dante’s wife, Gemma Donati, who was better connected than he, made his life miserable; it is simply assumed that he would have been happier with his muse, Bice Portinari–as if it were the job of a muse to run a household and produce children. Gemma bore Dante at least four children; we should not be surprised to find that neither she nor they inspired a single line of poetry. When Dante was exiled in 1302, his wife of seventeen years chose to remain with her children in Florence.

Milton’s marital infelicity is legendary in every sense of the word; he was thirty-four when he married seventeen-year-old Mary Powell, a few weeks before the outbreak of the Civil War. His wife’s family were royalists, and she judged it best to return to them until the future should be less uncertain. This perfectly sensible response to a confused and dangerous situation is supposed have prompted Milton to write The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and therefore it is assumed that, when Mary returned to the marital household in 1645, he wished she hadn’t and that their life together thereafter was miserable. Whatever the case, conjugal relations were promptly resumed. Mary’s first child was born in July the next year; a few days after bearing her fourth in May 1652, she died. Milton’s first experience of marriage was not so disastrous that he did not contemplate a second; he was already losing his sight when he married Katherine Woodcock in November 1658 and fifteen months later she died in childbirth. So far marriage to Milton would seem far more punishing for his wives than for him. Milton married a third time at the advanced age of fifty-five because he was in need of a live-in carer. The woman chosen for him by his doctor was a poor relation of his own, twenty-four-year-old Elizabeth Minshul, who lived to spend the inheritance which was her only reward, and probably inadequate to support her for the fifty-three years that remained of her life after the poet’s death in 1674.

By doing the right thing, by remaining silent and invisible, Ann Shakespeare left a wife-shaped void in the biography of William Shakespeare, which later bardolaters filled up with their own speculations, most of which do neither them nor their hero any credit. Her given name and approximate birth date were known from her tomb in Holy Trinity Church Stratford; Shakespeare’s first biographer, Nicholas Rowe, supplied her maiden surname, and there matters rested until 1790.

Previous biographers had not worried much about the poet’s conjugal relations, nor (when they did evince curiosity) had they necessarily assumed his disaffection with Anne. In The Modern Universal British Traveller, which antedates Malone’s Supplement by one year, the ‘Biography of Warwickshire’ confidently informs us that Shakespeare ‘lived very happy’ with his wife, and, after he made some money minding horses, fetched her to London.⁷

It was in 1790 that Edmond Malone published an observation originally made by William Oldys in the margin of the entry on Shakespeare in his copy of Langbaine’s Account of the English Dramatic Poets (1691) that Sonnets 92 and 93 ‘seem to have been addressed by Shakespeare to his beautiful wife on some suspicion of her infidelity’.⁸ William Oldys, who was born in 1696, had no special knowledge; his impression was based on his reading of Sonnets 92–5 which in the edition of 1640 bore the sub-title ‘Lover’s Affection’.⁹ Oldys had as little reason to believe that Ann was beautiful as later commentators to believe that she was plain. At this early stage it looks as if Ann is being recruited into the ranks of the beautiful faithless wives; the allegation of infidelity would be made again and again, but for most scholars the mere fact of her being older than her husband made her unattractive.

Shakespeare’s will was published as early as 1752, in the third volume of Theobald’s Works of Shakespeare; as it became better known, it too was interpreted as evidence of Ann’s utter failure as a wife. James Boswell, struggling with the mass of material left by Malone, is probably the first to suggest that Shakespeare’s ‘affections were estranged from her either through jealousy or some other cause’.¹⁰ For others the disparity in age was enough in itself to discredit her. In Shakespeare: A Biography (1823), Thomas De Quincey, the first rhapsodist of bardolatry, remarked: ‘Neither do we like the spectacle of a mature young woman, five years past her majority, wearing the semblance of having been led astray by a boy who still had two years and a half to run of his minority.’¹¹

Ann made no ‘spectacle’ of herself and offered no ‘semblance’ whatsoever. With such semantics De Quincey turns her into a designing woman. He also decides that Shakespeare went to London to escape ‘the humiliation of domestic feuds’. When the marriage bond of Will Shakespeare and Ann Hathaway with its tell-tale date only six months before the christening of their first child was found and published in 1836, bardolaters were scandalised. To the early Victorians Ann stood revealed as a lustful, designing woman who entrapped an innocent young man.

[John] Britton entertains grave misgivings about Anne’s morals. He points to the burial on 6 March 1590, of ‘Thomas Green alias Shakspere’ and, supposing without good reason that this Green was a child, adds: ‘The inference of which this circumstance is susceptible must be obvious.’ To Britton, apparently, belongs the distinction of being the first to suggest that the woman who bore the dramatist three children also mothered a bastard.¹²

Everybody who meddles with Shakespeare biography readily accepts that the Bard was unfaithful to his wife and excuses him for it, but infidelity on the part of his wife is sufficient to justify estrangement.

When Shakespearean master-sleuth Halliwell-Phillipps published the entry of a marriage licence between a William Shakespeare and Ann Whateley of Temple Grafton in 1887 it was immediately assumed that (old, ugly) Ann Hathaway prevented William from marrying his (young, lovely) true love. The plays were trawled for evidence that Shakespeare bitterly regretted his marriage, and so little was found that scholars from De Quincey to Stephen Greenblatt were constrained to parrot Orsino in Twelfth Night:

Then let thy love be younger than thyself,

Or thy affection cannot hold the bent…(II. iv. 36–7)

–as if Shakespeare were no smarter than Orsino and the whole play was not about the wooing of a woman by a boy.

Moore interprets the scant details of Shakespeare’s domestic life as evidence that he disliked his wife:

The dates of the birth of his children, compared with that of his removal from Stratford,–the total omission of his wife’s name in the first draft of his will, and the bitter sarcasm of the bequest by which he remembers her afterwards–all prove beyond a doubt both his separation from the lady early in life, and his unfriendly feeling towards her at the close of it.¹³

Joseph Hunter credits the misery of living with Ann Shakespeare as the motive force of the Bard’s entire career: ‘It seems but too evident, that this was a marriage of evil auspices, and it may have been one principal cause of that unsettled state of mind in which the poet left Stratford, about four years afterwards.’¹⁴

No one has ever undertaken a systematic review of the evidence against Ann Shakespeare, while every opportunity to caricature and revile her has been exploited to risible lengths. In Joyce’s Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus dreams of an Ann Shakespeare disfigured by age and guilt: ‘And in New Place a slack dishonoured body that once was comely, once as sweet, as fresh as cinnamon, now her leaves falling, all, bare, frighted of the narrow grave and unforgiven.’¹⁵ Cinnamon is not used fresh and women don’t grow leaves. In Nothing Like the Sun Anthony Burgess has a sexually experienced Ann taking advantage of a drunken boy who is then forced to marry her: ‘Armed with a dildo this Anne lures her boy husband into strange sexual rites and later cuckolds him with his brother Richard on the second-best bed.’¹⁶ Journalist Anthony Holden, retelling the story in 1999, prefers his Ann ‘homely’.

It is hard to believe that this ambitious young dreamer [Shakespeare], already aware that there was a world elsewhere, way beyond rural Warwickshire, was so enamoured of a homely wench eight years his senior…as to want to marry her. Or did the local farmer’s 26-year-old daughter, only a month after her father’s death, set out to catch herself a much younger husband by seducing him?¹⁷

Stephen Greenblatt is not a novelist or a journalist but a renaissance scholar, yet even he follows the tradition of Guizot who believed that Shakespeare developed a positive aversion to his wife:¹⁸

When he thought of the afterlife, the last thing he wanted was to be mingled with the woman he married. Perhaps he simply feared that his bones would be dug up and thrown in the nearby charnel house–he seems to have regarded that fate with horror–but he may have feared still more that one day his grave would be opened to let in the body of Anne Shakespeare.¹⁹

Greenblatt labours the point, for which he has no better evidence than the doggerel quatrain on what purports to be Shakespeare’s gravestone. Ann fares no better at the hands of women: according to Diana Price,…‘one might speculate that the Hathaways got wind of the Shagspere–Whateley licence, and Anne Hathaway’s father escorted Mr. Shagspere by pitchfork to the altar’.²⁰

One might, but one probably should not. The film Shakespeare in Love presents Shakespeare as psychologically damaged by his early marriage:

Dr Moth: You have a wife and children?

Will: Ay…I was a lad of eighteen, Anne Hathaway was a woman half as old again…

Dr Moth: And…your marriage bed?

Will: Four years and a hundred miles away in Stratford. A cold bed too since the twins were born. Banishment was a blessing.

Dr Moth: So now you are free to love.

Will: Yet cannot love nor write it.²¹

In his discussion of the film in Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (2001) Philip Armstrong continues the cod psychoanalysis:

…half a mother and half a wife, no longer a wife since a mother two times over, Anne Hathaway (never seen in the film) provides the figure whose union with and simultaneous distance from her husband/son embodies a version of that Oedipal drama diagnosed in Shakespeare, and identified as the source and theme of all his work, by Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank and Ernest Jones.²²

The bewildered reader of the endless traducing of the invisible woman of Stratford might ask as Master Lusam does in How to choose a good wife from a bad:

But on what root grows this high branch of hate?

Is not she loyal, constant, loving, chaste,

Obedient, apt to please, loth to displease,

Careful to live, chary of her good name,

And jealous of your reputation?

Is not she virtuous, wise, religious?²³

All biographies of Shakespeare are houses built of straw, but there is good straw and rotten straw, and some houses are better built than others. The evidence that is always construed to Ann Hathaway’s disadvantage is capable of other, more fruitful interpretations, especially within the context of recent historiography.

There is one resounding exception to the rule that the wives of great men must all have been unworthy. It does not apply to the wives of protestant reformers. The housewife superstars of reformed religion were women like Anna Zwingli, Katherine Melancthon, Idelette Calvin, Anna Bullinger and the amazing Wibrandis Rosenblatt. Käthe Luther is as silent as Ann Shakespeare; though she wrote many letters, only one survives. The marriage of the dowerless ex-nun Katherine von Bora and the ex-monk Martin Luther was arranged; they were handfasted privately and publicly blessed and feasted two weeks later, a pattern that can be discerned in the Warwickshire marriages of Ann Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Käthe then took over the vast ex-monastery the Elektor Friedrich had given her husband, filled it with orphans, teachers, students, refugees and guests, brewed the ale they drank, grew the vegetables and fruit they ate, raised and slaughtered her own animals and made their butter and cheese–and bore six children, and nursed her demanding husband through his many ailments physical and mental.

Ann Hathaway had no gossip magazines to keep her posted on the day-to-day lives of such role models. She found her role model where Käthe Luther found it, in her Bible.

She girdeth her loins with strength and strengtheneth her arms.

She seeth that her merchandise is good; her candle is not put out by night.

She putteth her hands to the wheel, and her hands handle the spindle.

(Proverbs, xxxi: 17–19)

CHAPTER ONE

introducing the extensive and reputable family of Hathaway alias Gardner of Shottery together with the curious fact that one of their kinsmen was a successful playwright for the Admiral’s Men

Shakespeare’s wife was identified as long ago as 1709, when Nicholas Rowe informed the readers of his edition of the plays: ‘His wife was the daughter of one Hathaway, said to have been a substantial yeoman in the neighbourhood of Stratford.’¹ There were many Hathaways within a day’s ride of Stratford. Hathaways farmed in Bishopton and Shottery in Warwickshire, and in Horton, Bledington, Kingscote and surrounding districts in neighbouring Gloucestershire. There were also tradesmen called Hathaway in London, Banbury and Oxford, and one or two claimed the rank of gentleman. The Hathaway horde was so numerous in fact that the Shottery family into which Ann was born used a distinguishing alias. They were known mostly as Hathaway alias Gardner, and sometimes as just plain Hathaway or just plain Gardner.

In the medieval period such aliases served to distinguish between people with the same surname by specifying the region or town they came from or the trade they followed. Perhaps an earlier Hathaway had indeed been a gardener. Sometimes, when there was no male heir, a female descendant’s husband might inherit on condition that he assumed her family name as an alias. The point of aliases is still being disputed by genealogists; although during Ann Shakespeare’s lifetime the use of aliases became less consistent, it was a generation or two before it faded out altogether. We know that Ann’s grandfather John Hathaway was already using the alias, so it is not something we are likely ever to unravel. For years nobody realised that the ‘Jone Gardner of Shottery’ who was buried in Holy Trinity churchyard in 1599 was the same person they had already identified as Ann Shakespeare’s stepmother.² In 1590 a ‘Thomas Greene alias Shakespeare’ was buried in Holy Trinity Church Stratford, sending historians off on a wild-goose chase for a woman called Greene giving birth to an illegitimate Shakespeare, or vice versa, for the alias was occasionally used for de facto wives and to denote descent on the wrong side of the blanket.

The Christian name of the woman who married William Shakespeare in 1582 is as unstable as her surname. The only evidence that Richard Hathaway alias Gardner of Shottery had a daughter called Ann is a reference in his will to a daughter called Agnes. Scholars have demonstrated convincingly that in this period Agnes and Ann were simply treated as versions of the same name, pointing out dozens of examples where Agnes, pronounced ‘Annis’, gradually becomes ‘Ann’. Richard Hathaway left a sheep to a great-niece he calls Agnes, though according to the parish record she was actually christened Annys; in 1600 she was buried as Ann. Theatre manager Philip Henslowe called his wife Agnes in his will but she was buried as Ann. Ann’s brother Bartholomew called a daughter Annys, but she was buried as Ann. The curate William Gilbert alias Higgs who wrote Hathaway’s will married Agnes Lyncian, but she was buried as Ann Gilbert.³ This is not simply serendipitous. Agnes was the name of a fourth-century virgin martyr of the kind whose lurid and preposterous adventures are the stuff of The Golden Legend, justly ridiculed by protestant reformers.⁴ Ann (or Hannah) was the solid biblical name of the Redeemer’s grandmother. It is only to be expected that as protestantism gained hearts and minds Agnes would be silently driven out by Ann. We may accept that the child born Agnes Hathaway grew up to be Ann Shakespeare.

The brass plate set in the stone over her grave next to William’s in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church Stratford tells us that Ann Shakespeare ‘departed this life on the sixth day of August 1623 being of the age of 67 years’. We have no evidence to corroborate this information. If the funeral plate is correct she was born in 1556, eight years before her husband. Engravers do make mistakes; the figures 1 and 7 are easily confounded in the calligraphy of 1623, but as all Ann’s family was baptised at Holy Trinity, where the registers began to be kept in obedience to the royal edict of 1558, we must conclude that she was born before the register began to be kept, and not afterwards. So 1556 it is.

Our best evidence that Agnes Hathaway alias Gardner of Shottery is the woman who married Will Shakespeare in 1582 is the will made in 1601 by her father’s shepherd Thomas Whittington. Whittington is identified in Richard Hathaway’s will: ‘I owe unto Thomas Whittington my shepherd four pounds six shillings eight pence.’ Twenty years on, when he made his will in 1601, Whittington identified Ann as Shakespeare’s wife:

Item I give and bequeath unto the poor people of Stratford forty shillings that is in the hand of Ann Shakespeare wife unto Mr William Shakespeare and is due debt unto me being paid to mine executor by the said William Shakespeare or his assigns according to the true meaning of this my will.⁵

The Hathaway family house is supposed to be the one that is now known as Ann Hathaway’s Cottage, though indeed it was never hers. This twelve-roomed farmhouse, known to the Hathaway family, if not to the bardolatrous public, as Hewlands Farm, is built on stone foundations, of timber-framed wattle-and-daub. The oldest part of the dwelling, thought to date from the late fourteenth century, consists of a hall of two twelve-foot bays reaching to the timbered roof, constructed around two oaken crucks that are pinned together to form the peak of the roof. Before the Great Rebuilding of the 1560s, all the members of the household would have slept in the hall, around an open fireplace from which the smoke escaped through an opening in the thatch.⁶

Ann’s paternal grandfather, John Hathaway alias Gardner, acquired the copyhold of Hewlands Farm in 1543 and it was probably he who modernised the house by installing stone fireplaces in each of the two bays of the hall, one eight feet across and the other eleven. The stone hearths were also the supports for stout oak bressemers supporting an upper floor which was divided into separate connecting rooms. On the ground floor, next to the hall, there was a kitchen with a huge domed bread-oven. A dairy or buttery has also survived. An east wing was added to the main building later, probably by Ann’s brother, Bartholomew Hathaway.

Shottery, to the west of Stratford, was then a cluster of farms worked by tenants of the manor; in 1595, we find the more substantial of them growing wheat, barley and peas on arable holdings of as much as 200 acres, but in 1581 the average holding would have been rather smaller and the farming more mixed. Hewlands Farm, which then stood right on the edge of the Forest of Arden, was typical in that it consisted of pasturage for sheep as well as cultivated yardland. Yardland or virgate was the name given to bundles of strips of land suitable for cultivation; the area of a yardland could be anything from twenty to forty-six acres. In 1595 Joan Hathaway’s half-yardland amounted to no more than fifteen acres, so we should probably assume that Richard Hathaway farmed thirty acres or so. He may have held other lands which he had devised to his son and heir before his death, but, even if he didn’t, his holding can be described as substantial, though he was a rung below a yeoman or freeholder.

The family had been well established in the district for generations. A John Hathaway appears as an archer on the muster rolls (lists of citizens eligible for military service) in 1536. He also served at different times as beadle, constable and affeeror (assessor of sums owed) to the parish. He was one of the fifteen citizens from whom were selected the Twelve Men of Old Stratford (one of several manors that comprised the borough of Stratford) who presided twice a year at the Great Leet, when tenancies were arranged and transferred, debts paid and rents adjusted. In the subsidy of 1549 John Hathaway’s annual income in goods was valued at £10, one of the highest valuations. In 1556, as well as Hewlands, he held another house and yardland described as ‘late in the tenure of Thomas Perkyns’, and another toft and yardland known as Hewlyns. John Hathaway probably died before his son Richard took possession of Hewlands Farm. Richard is first named in the records as assessed on an annual income of £4 in goods in 1566–7. Following what seems to have been a Hathaway family custom of partible inheritance, with the greater share going to the younger son, John Hathaway’s estate had probably been split between Richard and his elder brother George Hathaway alias Gardner who was also farming in Shottery.

At the time of his death in 1581, Ann’s father had eight living children. The eldest son was Bartholomew, who, like Ann, was born before the parish registers began to be kept. A boy was christened Richard on 4 January 1562; by the time his father made his will this child had apparently perished. Next came Catherine, who was christened at Holy Trinity on 22 October 1563. It is usually assumed that the mother of these children then died, but no wife of a Richard Hathaway or Gardner appears in the Stratford burial register and no second marriage has turned up in the Stratford registers or anywhere else. The sole evidence for the supposition that Hathaway married twice is that the woman Hathaway was married to at the time of his death was called Joan, and the ‘filia Richardi Hathaway alias Gardner de Shotery’ who was christened ‘Joan’ on 9 May 1566 is assumed to be her first child. We don’t know for certain how many wives Richard Hathaway had. If Ann, born in 1556, was his first child, and William, born in 1578, his last, we are presented with a child-bearing career of twenty-two years, which would not be unusual, let alone impossible, for one woman. Ann’s friend Judith Sadler bore her first child in 1580 and her last in 1603.

For no very good reason then, Ann, her brother Bartholomew and Catherine are taken to be the children of the first wife, and Joan, Thomas, Margaret, John and William the children of the second. Thomas ‘the son of Richard Hathaway’ was christened on 12 April 1569, Margaret ‘daughter to—Gardner of Shotrey’ on 17 August 1572, John ‘son to Richard Hathaway’ on 3 February 1575, and William ‘sonne to Richard Hathaway of Shottrey’ on 30 November 1578. All the births in the Hathaway family are separated by three years, more or less, except for the births of Richard and Catherine, which are separated by only twenty-two months. The circumstances of Richard Hathaway’s birth and putative death are a puzzle. There is no Richard Hathaway buried at Holy Trinity between January 1562 and September 1581; instead we have two Richard Hathaways each called ‘filius Richardi Hathaway alias Gardner’, one buried on 29 March 1561 and the other three days later. These are usually taken to be twins, one of whom inherited the name from the other, but the repetition might as easily be a scribal error. If Hathaway’s wife had borne and buried premature twins in March 1561, she could have produced another child by January 1562, but neither it nor she is likely to have been strong or healthy. The likeliest time for both to have died is January 1562, which still gives Hathaway time to find a new wife and get her pregnant by the beginning of 1563. This reproductive scenario is grim, to be sure, but it is not at all unusual. In 1662 Ann and Bartholomew would have been too small to be taken to the fields or left alone in the house; with no one to do the woman’s share of farm work, Hathaway had to find a new wife without delay. The riddle may one day be resolved, but at this stage we have no idea who Ann Shakespeare’s mother was or when she died.

In the summer of 1581, Ann’s father fell ill. On 1 September he called the curate William Gilbert and dictated his will. The preamble is conventional and protestant: ‘first I bequeath my soul unto almighty God, trusting to be saved by the merits of Christ’s passion, And my body to be buried in the church or church yard of Stratford aforesaid…’⁷ To each of his sons Thomas and John, Richard left a portion of £6 13s 4d to be paid to them at the age of twenty years. Thomas was twelve and a half, John six and a half. The youngest boy was to get more: ‘Item I give and bequeath unto William my son ten pounds to be paid unto him at the age of twenty years’.

Again we encounter what seems to be a local or familial variant of the custom of gavelkind, the ancient system by which all male children inherited some part of the estate and the youngest son more than the others. It is usually associated with Kent, but also with nearby Wales. As it happened, Thomas may not have lived to collect his portion, for the will is the last we hear of him.

Hathaway then turns to his daughters: ‘Item I give and bequeath unto Agnes my daughter six pounds thirteen shillings four pence to be paid unto her at the day of her marriage’, with the like to Catherine. Edgar Fripp interprets these bequests as evidence that both girls were already betrothed.⁸ Much as I would like to be able to prove that Will and Ann were already recognised as future spouses on 1 September 1581, more than a year before their marriage was solemnised, I’m afraid that Fripp gets it wrong. The leaving of marriage portions in wills is a promise of cash to be raised from the estate in the event of a marriage. With £6 13s 4d or ten marks, Ann had exactly the same cash portion as Will’s mother when she married John Shakespeare. Though Mary Arden’s father too described himself as a mere husbandman, Mary inherited a landed estate as well as the cash. Ann too may have had lands settled on her by deed during her father’s lifetime, and may have been a better catch than we know. If lands farmed by Richard had been left by Ann’s mother’s family to the heirs of her body they would have passed directly to her children at the time of her death and would not have been Richard’s to dispose of.

If Catherine ever married it was not in Stratford.⁹ As far as we can tell she was not buried in Stratford either, so we should probably conclude that she found work, and hopefully a life, elsewhere. As Joan is not mentioned in the will, we should infer that she is dead, but no record of her burial has ever been found, unless she is the ‘child of Goodman Hathaway’s’ who was buried on 5 September 1572. The youngest daughter Margaret was to receive her portion when she reached the age of seventeen rather than on her wedding day, which suggests that she was not likely to marry, perhaps because she suffered from some infirmity or deformity. Her father’s will is the last we hear of her. Thus three of Richard Hathaway’s daughters disappear from history, leaving us with only Ann. The combined legacies, amounting to more than £40, are a lot to raise from a husbandman’s estate, especially as the crop from half the yardland was to be reserved for Hathaway’s first-born son Bartholomew, who was already farming somewhere on his own account, possibly near Tysoe where he was living in 1583.

Item my will is (with the consent of my wife) that my eldest son Bartholomew shall have the use commodity and profit of one halfyard land with all pastures and meadowing thereto belonging with the appurtenances to be tilled, mucked and sowed at the charge of Joan my wife, he only finding seed during the natural life or widowhood of the same Joan my wife to be bestowed, severed from the other of my land for his commodity and profit. And my will is that he, the same Bartholomew shall be a guide to my said wife in her husbandry, And also a comfort unto his brethren and sisters to his power. Provided always that if the said Joan my wife shall at any time or times after my decease go about to disannul or take away from my said son Bartholomew the foresaid half yard land with the appurtenances, so that he do not enjoy the commodity and profit of the same according to the true meaning of this my last will and testament, then my will is that the said Joan my wife shall give deliver and pay unto my said son Bartholomew within one year after any such denial, or discharge the sum of forty pounds of lawful English money

This rather cumbersome arrangement suggests that, unusually, Joan and her children would remain in Richard Hathaway’s house, rather than giving way to the son and heir; Joan would be responsible for the management of the rest of the Hathaway farmlands with Bartholomew’s help. In most parts of England in exchange for a third portion of the estate, a widow would have been expected to vacate the house but, perhaps because Thomas, Margaret, John and William were still so small, Joan was allowed to remain there. A match for Bartholomew had already been concluded; on 25 November, only three weeks after his father’s death, he married Isabel Hancocks of Tredington. Wherever he took his bride home to, it was not to Hewlands Farm, where Joan remained farming on her own account until her death in 1599. The will goes on: ‘Item: I give and bequeath unto every of my godchildren four pence apiece of them’. We don’t know who Richard’s godchildren may have been, or how many of them there were. It is possible that children of John Shakespeare may have been among them. In September 1566 John Shakespeare stood surety for Richard Hathaway in two actions, and was called on to pay debts for him to a Joan Biddle and a John Page. Later, in 1579, Hathaway and John Shakespeare would both be mentioned in the will of Roger Sadler as debtors to his estate. On 15 April 1569 the Shakespeares’ second daughter was christened Joan, perhaps after Richard Hathaway’s wife, though it seems as likely that she was named for her aunt Joan, Mary Shakespeare’s sister. In 1574 a son received the name Richard. Perhaps Richard Shakespeare too became one of the unspecified number of godchildren to whom Richard Hathaway left four pence apiece in his will. If this was indeed the case, William Shakespeare and Ann Hathaway were related to each other within the prohibited degrees of spiritual consanguinity.

‘Item: I give and bequeath unto Agnes Hathaway and Elizabeth Hathaway daughters unto Thomas Hathaway a sheep apiece of them’. Agnes Hathaway, not quite four years old, and Elizabeth, not quite two, were daughters of Hathaway’s nephew Thomas, the youngest of the seven children of his elder brother George, who had died eight years before, being buried in Holy Trinity on 25 September 1573. Why Richard should have singled out Thomas’s very small children for special remembrance is not known. Perhaps Thomas had been part of the workforce at Hewlands before his marriage. He must still have been sheep-farming otherwise there would have been small point in giving his little girls their own sheep. He may have become alienated from the rest of his family in the matter of religion and have found sympathy and support from his uncle. Thomas’s children and grandchildren were to remain close to Ann and her daughters all their lives, unlike Ann’s half-brothers John and William Hathaway.

It is typical of the provident Hathaway family that spouses had been found for four of George’s children before he died. Philippa married Laurence Walker at Holy Trinity in 1567; John married Margery Round of Snitterfield in 1568; their son christened at Holy Trinity on 14 December 1573 was called Richard. George married Ann Heaton of Loxley in 1570 and Alice married Henry Smith of Banbury in 1572. The other three were also able to marry after their father’s death, which suggests that they too had been left adequate portions. Thomas married Margaret Smith (probably the sister of Henry) in 1575; in 1579 Ann married William Wilson who was to become a Stratford alderman in 1592, and a few months later Frances married David Jones, the man who produced the Whitsun pastoral that was played in Stratford in 1583; the accounts of the Corporation for that year list ‘thirteen shillings and fourpence paid to David Jones and his company for his pastime at Whitsuntide’.¹⁰ By these marriages Ann was connected to a significant proportion of the settled population of Stratford and the surrounding district.

The fact that Richard Hathaway made his wife rather than his eldest son his executor and residuary legatee reinforces the notion that she was a second wife and rather younger than he. Joan would remain in Shottery where she is recorded as holding a half-yardland in 1590, and running a household of six in 1595. It was not until well after her death in 1599 that Bartholomew took possession of Hewlands Farm. Historians who imagine that Ann and Bartholomew were running Hewlands Farm together after Richard Hathaway’s death are simply wrong.¹¹

The overseers of the will, who received twelve pence each for their pains, were Hathaway’s neighbours, forty-three-year-old Stephen Burman and thirty-year-old Fulke Sandells. The Warwickshire Corn Enquiry of 1595 lists four Burman households in Shottery of which Stephen Burman’s with a hundred acres under barley and sixty acres under peas and a household of fifteen people was the largest.¹² Fulke Sandells seems to have been primarily a sheep-farmer, with only twenty acres of barley and eleven acres of peas in 1595. The will was witnessed by the curate William Gilbert, Richard Burman, John Richardson and John ‘Hemynge’. Gilbert served as under-schoolmaster at the grammar school at various times from 1561–2, and was appointed curate on £10 a year in 1576, a position that he held until his death in 1612. He was also paid £1 a year to maintain the town clocks. John Richardson was a substantial member of the Shottery community; when he died in 1594 his goods, including wheat, barley, peas, oats and hay in the barns, five cows, three heifers and a bullock, four horses and mares, and 130 sheep were appraised at £87 3s 8d. Of most interest to us is John Hemynge or Hemmings. A John Hemmings, hayward of Shottery, baptised seven children in Holy Trinity between December 1563 and September 1582, including another John. What nobody knows is in what way if at all these John Hemmingses are related to the John Hemmings who together with Henry Condell edited the Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays. Fripp believes that John Hemmings to be the son and heir of George Hemmings of Droitwich, but the evidence is rather less than conclusive.

No servants, except the shepherd Thomas Whittington, are mentioned in Hathaway’s will. As Catherine was neither married nor buried in Stratford, it seems likely that she had gone into service. If Ann was still living in Shottery, she may have been making herself too useful for her own good. Joan Hathaway, with the running of the farm to consider, may have been only too happy to leave the cooking and washing, brewing and baking to Agnes–Ann. Indeed, we might think of Ann as in much the same situation as Cinderella, except that she is older rather than younger than the other children.

The match between William Shakespeare and Ann Hathaway was an alliance of two substantial families in a close-knit community where everybody knew everybody else’s business. Husband and wife would remain in contact with both their extended families, who continued to live in houses that were within walking distance of each other, worshipping at the same church, christening and burying their children in the company of their own kith and kin.

The connection of the Hathaway clan with the theatre may extend to more than the marriage of Frances Hathaway with a local impresario and the coincidence of the name Hemmings. A playwright with the same name as Ann’s father, Richard Hathaway, spelt as it is spelt in the will, ‘Hathway’, was one of the stable of playwrights retained by Philip Henslowe, owner–manager of the Rose Theatre, to furnish plays for the resident company, the Admiral’s Men. Because so few of these plays found their way into print, Henslowe’s diary is virtually our sole source of information about him. The Dictionary of National Biography tells us that Richard Hathway was almost certainly connected to the Warwickshire Hathaways