Shakespeare: A Life (14 page)

later printed in
Shake -- speares Sonnets
as no. 145 has autobiographical references and he plays on her name '
Hathaway' as 'hate away'. The pun, of course, is not very exact. In
the sonnet, a lady's acquiescence is merciful. Her poet, it seems, has
been so suave that she has hardly had a chance to be cutting,
petulant, or severe with him:

Those lips that Loves owne hand did make,
Breath'd forth the sound that said I hate,
To me that languisht for her sake:
But when she saw my wofull state,
Straight in her heart did mercie come,
Chiding that tongue that ever sweet,
Was used in giving gentle dome:
And taught it thus a new to greete:
I hate she alterd with an end,
That follow'd it as gentle day,
Doth follow night who like a fiend
From heaven to hell is flowne away.
I hate, from hate away she threw,
And sav'd my life saying not you.

The poem's naïve diction and simple feeling suggest early work, and it may well date from about 1582.

However that may be, she would have a legacy. Her father Richard
Hathaway, alias Gardner or Gardiner, a few days before he died in
September 1581, had anticipated the wedding of his daughter 'Agnes'
(pronounced 'Annes' and interchangeable with the name Anne). She was
to have io marks, or £6.13
s.
4-
d.,
'at the daye of her maryage'.
³
His will was proved on 9 July 1582, and the lovers, in the summer,
could have plighted their troth with the hope of a legacy to come. A
trothplight was binding, and if spoken before witnesses it legitimized a
child born out of wedlock -- but it was not recommended by clergymen
of any persuasion. It would not necessarily save two young people from
a summons by the vicar's court, and William may have been reluctant
to force his people to accept his union with Anne as a
fait accompli
in this way before November.

At no time, in his school years or later, had he been a stranger at
Anne's door. His father had twice helped her own father as a surety in

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1566, and had paid Hathaway's debts of £8 to John Page, the ironmonger, and £11 to Joan Biddle.
⁴
The sums suggest that Shakespeares had not been unwelcome at the
Hathaways' farm. A mile to the west of town, but within the parish,
Shottery was then a scattered hamlet with about 1,600 acres of common
fields under tillage, an area as large as Stratford's three other main
fields put together. Richard Hathaway's house, with extensions added
after his time, survives as Anne Hathaway's Cottage. The Forest of
Arden was then nearby, and visitors now are reminded of Oliver's
'sheepcote' and of the pretty woodland setting Celia describes in
As You Like It
:

West of this place, down in the neighbour bottom.
The rank of osiers by the murmuring stream
Left on your right hand brings you to the place. (IV. iii. 79-81)

Roses, herbs, and posy-peas still grow in the garden, though an
orchard with fragrant apple trees and wild flowers must now be imagined.
A brook flows below the house, which is built on a slope and has
stone foundations with timber-frame walls filled in by wattle and
daub, under a steep roof of thatch. The dwelling was ample for a family
of eight or ten, with its 'hall' or downstairs sitting-room, a kitchen
with a heavy bake-oven, and several upper rooms. Crucks, or curved
oak timbers, rose from the ground to roof-ridge in the oldest part
(dating from the fifteenth century), and lately builders had added two
fireplaces with chamfered oak bressumers or sustaining beams, eight
and eleven feet wide, and an upper floor for rooms over the hall. In his
will Hathaway mentions two bedsteads, which would have been valuable
if elaborately carved, and 'the Seelinges in my haule house' or his
wainscots, which must have kept out winter drafts. Chairs, stools,
cushions, brass pots, eight pieces of pewter -- all later owned by his
son Bartholomew -- may originally have been in his own hall, where a
high-backed bench or 'settle' is fixed near the hearth today.

For two generations, at least, Hathaways had been locally prominent,
and their word had carried weight in Shottery and other parts of
Stratford parish. Richard's father, John, had been one of the Twelve
Men of Old Stratford's court, and had served as a beadle, a constable,

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and an affeeror while turning a profit in farming; his goods, in the
subsidy of 1549-50, are valued at £10 (not, then, a low assessment). In
turn Richard had carried on the farming, and, it seems, had married
twice. Seven of his children were alive in 1579, when Shakespeare was
near the end of his schooldays.

At
that time, Shottery was fairly tranquil. Families here with recusants or
with a Jesuit priest as a son, such as the Burmans or the Debdales,
lived on good terms with church-goers. Though he apparently went to
Anglican service, Richard Hathaway named in his will John Pace, a
Catholic neighbour, and asked that his will's two supervisors be Fulke
Sandells, a young farmer, and another of his 'Trustie ffryndes and
neighboures' Stephen Burman, whose wife Margaret was a defiant
Catholic twice cited by commissioners for avoiding church.
⁵
But by 1580 or 1581, Shottery had become the focus of an angry
dispute over land at its western edge, Baldon Hill, claimed alike by
the Protestant Earl of Warwick and the Catholic M
^r
Francis Smyth of Wootton Wawen. The dispute threatened to incite religious partisans.

Francis Smyth, with four peacocks in his coat of arms, was a son of
the heiress of Wootton Wawen north of the parish; he openly professed to
be a Catholic, but just avoided the usual penalties for his belief,
and in his property claims if not in his religion he infuriated the
earl. When the earl in court challenged his claim to Baldon Hill, the
two main contenders at least were influenced by religious-party
allegiance. Shakespeares and Hathaways were well apprised of the affair
since one juror was Anne's father, another was Fulke Sandells (who
also acted as a surety at Shakespeare's marriage), and a third was
Anne's near neighbour Richard Burman.

Not long before he died, Anne's father had supported the earl's
claim, but Smyth defied the jurors' findings around October 1582, when
Anne was carrying William's child. By the time a new commission looked
into the case, Baldon Hill was provoking sharp civic tension, and when
the future playwright was 19 the Warwickshire equivalent of Capulets
and Montagues, stirring for a fight, gathered one day at a vintner's
at the corner of Bull Lane and Old Town where Sir Thomas Lucy was
trying -- upstairs -- to examine witnesses. A real scene that
Shakespeare and the parish would have heard about is

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apparent in court records. Stepping into the vintner's parlour, the
Catholic Smyth was rudely met by the earl's man, John Goodman, then
wearing a dagger:

GOODMAN. M
^r
Smyth, you do not like a gentleman.

SMYTH. Why?

GOODMAN. For you do my lord great injury.

SMYTH. Why, wherein?

GOODMAN. Marry, you go about to allure my lord's witnesses, and talk with them in corners.

SMYTH. I do not.

GOODMAN. You do.

SMYTH. I tell you truly I do not.

GOODMAN. But thou dost (
advancing upon him
). Thou shalt not.

SMYTH. I tell thee thou dost say untruly (
thrusting him away with his hand
).

GOODMAN. What, dost thou lay thy hands upon me? If thou clost lay thy hands on me I will lay my dagger on thy pate (
putting his hand to his dagger and offering to draw it
).

Smyth extricated himself, but his servant, Richard Dale, was set upon by two of the earl's men together -- Goodman and M
^r
Fenton:

FENTON (
grasping Dale by the doublet
). Ah sirrah! What dost thou here? Thou art a knave of all knaves! Away, knave! Out of this place!

GOODMAN. What, villain, wilt thou not go? Go, or I will lay my dagger on thy pate. (
putting a hand to his dagger
)

(
Fenton gives Dale a blow on the side of the head, thrusts him partly
through the door, and claps the door upon one of his legs.
)

DALE. I pray you, let me take my other leg with me! (
struggles with Fenton to open the door, and goes upstairs in fear and trembling
)
⁶

Sir Thomas Lucy's commission made small headway with regard to that
turmoil on 12 January 1584, and the case slowly dragged on until a
final settlement for the Catholic landowner Smyth. Shakespeare -with the
rest of the gossipy town -- must have heard what had passed between
Smyth, Goodman, Dale, and Fenton and possibly remembered ' Fenton' when
he wrote
The Merry Wives
, though the young gentleman who steals
away Anne Page (as the host describes him) is less like the earl's
rough man than like a nonchalant, sprightly lover of

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18 -- 'he capers, he dances, he has eyes of youth, he writes verses, he
speaks holiday, he smells April and May' (III. ii. 61-2).

Most Shottery jurors in the Baldon Hill affair, it appears, had not
spoken or decided upon religious party lines; people were wary of a
case with a strong doctrinal factor. Events dictated caution. In the
year of William's marriage Cottam, the brother of Stratford's
schoolmaster, was hanged, and Robert Debdale of Shottery was to suffer
the same fate as a missionary priest. William may already have learned
to be discreet, but the mood of his parish would have affected him at
least to the extent of making him a more seeking, fascinated
observer. Even Baldon Hill exposed old religious fractures in a
society, and local wits must have have enlivened the issues involved.
William's own wit and imagination developed with enormous, buoyant
force and humour as his head cleared itself of cobwebs left by the
'grammar gods', and civic contention appealed to him as he looked
beyond the outward spectacle to the inward, private lives of
individuals. If he was a neutral observer, he came closer to being a
dramatic poet who would not 'take sides'. Perhaps the paradox of his
courtship was that his imagination out ran it, as he took in tangled,
intriguing, or comic events such as those involving the pride and
pretensions of Smyth or the earl.

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 40
^s
. that is in the hand of Anne Shaxspere, wyf unto M
^r
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 26
s.
8
d.
in Shakespeare's will to buy a memorial ring.

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