Shakespeare's Wife (10 page)

If the impregnation of Ann Hathaway had been accidental rather than part of a deliberate strategy, Shakespeare could have evaded marriage with her, just as Lucio evaded marriage with Kate Keep-Down in
Measure for Measure
. Mistress Overdone tells us that Lucio seduced Kate under a promise of marriage, which is presumably how Kate ended up working as one of her whores at the Bunch of Grapes tavern, with Mistress Overdone paying for raising her child. Later in the play Lucio tells the disguised duke that he once appeared before
him for getting a wench with child. The duke asks, ‘Did you such a thing?' (IV. iii. 165). Lucio answers casually: ‘Yes, marry, did I; but I was fain to forswear it; they would else have married me to the rotten medlar' (166–7).

Even after promises of marriage, prolonged cohabitation and a pregnancy, it was easy for a man to evade marriage if he chose. Every year women brought fatherless children to be christened at Holy Trinity. On New Year's Day 1580 Joan Rodes brought her baby son to be christened John, and the curate wrote beside the entry in the register, as was the rule, ‘bastard', in Latin, ‘notha' or ‘nothus' the entry for the child's burial in November reads simply ‘Jone Rodes Bastard'. Two weeks later, Julian Wainwright brought to the font the second of her four illegitimate children, a daughter Sybil. How she managed to defy the authorities and continue living in Stratford with her children as an unmarried mother until her death and burial in Holy Trinity on 11 January 1593 must remain a mystery. The most likely explanation is that she was under the protection of a gentleman so powerful that the Corporation and the church had no option but to countenance her insolence. Nearly all the other unwed mothers appear in the record once and then disappear. In July 1581 Anne Breame brought her illegitimate daughter Elizabeth to be christened. In April 1582 Margery Foster christened her illegitimate son Richard, in September Alice Baker her illegitimate daughter Joan; in October Sybil Davis of Luddington buried a bastard son she had called Francis; in November Alice Smith had her son christened Humphrey. All of these mothers, except perhaps Julian Wainwright, should have been pressured by the women who assisted them in their labour to name the men responsible. If they had weakened, the father's name would have been written in the register instead of theirs. Perhaps the parish midwives were remiss that year and the women were spared the ordeal.

Pregnant women did not always have to be tortured or terrorised before they would name a father for their child. On 26 January 1581, the curate at Holy Trinity recorded the baptism of Margaret, ‘bastard daughter to Thomas Raynolds'. We are reminded of the shepherd who is Joan of Arc's father:

 

I did beget her, all the parish knows.

Her mother liveth yet, can testify

She was the first fruit of my bachelorship.
¹¹

 

The surviving records of the Stratford Vicar's Court tell us of Joan Dutton, a pregnant stranger detected in the house of William Russell; in court she alleged that she had been made pregnant by ‘a certain Gravenor, servant of Master Greville of Milcote'. She was ‘ordered to perform penance…clad in a sheet'.
¹²
In 1606 a heavily pregnant Anne Browne alias Watton named Hamnet Sadler's nephew John Sadler as the father of her child; though the citation had been pinned to his house door, he did not appear and was excommunicated.
¹³
Ann bore a daughter called Katherine; John went to London to seek his fortune.

Once a father had been named, he would be expected to support the child. In some cases the mother would be allowed to keep it until it was weaned or even longer, before it was transferred to the custody and the household of its father. In many cases the unwed mother who named the father stood to lose her child for ever. In 1606 in the Stratford Vicar's Court Margaret Price named Paul Bartlett as the father of her child. He was ordered to do penance but ‘proffered five shillings for the poor of the parish'. He was already maintaining the child. As for Margaret, the court book says simply, ‘She went away.'
¹⁴
Most of the women in her situation didn't wait to be formally ostracised but left of their own accord, many to try their luck in the brutal, anonymous world of the London stews. Bartholomew Parsons appeared in court a month before his son by the widow Alice Atwood was born and promised to maintain him. He offered ten shillings ‘for the use of the poor of the parish'.
¹⁵
What became of Widow Atwood is not known. In 1608 Thomas Burman admitted that he was the father of the baby Susanna Ainge was carrying; his penance too was remitted in return for a payment of ten shillings.
¹⁶

If Shakespeare had denied paternity, Ann could have been punished for being ‘unlawfully pregnant', possibly publicly whipped, certainly made to stand in front of the congregation on a Sunday, clad in nothing but a white sheet. When her time came the midwives would have refused to help deliver her until in extremity of fear and
pain she screamed out the name of her child's father, in which case Shakespeare too would have been disgraced, especially if she died, a deathbed statement having force in law. Faced with such evidence one wonders how Greenblatt could allow himself to say that ‘an unmarried mother in the 1580s did not, as she would in the 1880s, routinely face fierce, unrelenting social stigmatization'.
¹⁷
What the unmarried Elizabethan mother had to face was persecution so intense that it verged on savagery. Where the ecclesiastical courts were concerned,

What aroused most parochial concern and accounted for the great majority of prosecutions was ‘harbouring' pregnant women, that is receiving them, giving them shelter until they had given birth…the basic source of parochial concern was the fear that the bastard child, and perhaps the mother as well, would burden the poor rates.
¹⁸

In 1592, Thomas Kyrle was presented to the Stratford Vicar's Court for ‘encouraging in his house a certain pregnant woman'. He did not appear and was excommunicated.
¹⁹
In 1608 John Phelps alias Sutton was presented at the Vicar's Court for ‘receiving his pregnant daughter' who had given birth two months earlier, naming a John Burrowes as her child's father.
²⁰
Though premarital pregnancy was so common as to be normal, bastardy was not tolerated. The commonest motive for infanticide was illegitimacy.
²¹

If Shakespeare's parents had remained obdurate in refusing their consent to the marriage of Will and Ann, the match would not have been made and Ann would have been strumpeted, regardless of what Will thought about the matter. If he chose, he could have persuaded his parents that she had been free with her favours, that he was one of several sexual partners she had had that summer. In
Measure for Measure
Angelo justifies his failure to marry Marina not only because her dowry was lost at sea,

 

but in chief

For that her reputation was disvalued

In levity…(V. i. 218–20)

 

When Bertram in
All's Well that Ends Well
is confronted by Diana who claims that he has taken her virginity, he replies:

 

She's impudent, my lord,

And was a common gamester to the camp. (V. iii. 190–1)

 

Will could have produced henchmen to swear that they had enjoyed Ann, and she would have been consigned to a life of whoredom. He could have pleaded prior contract with some other woman. He could have run away, to London, or to sea, or to the wars. He would not have been the first or the last to escape a bastard being fathered on him by doing so. If John and Mary Shakespeare had thought their son was to be married to a whore, they could have stopped the marriage dead, and sent Ann away sorrowing.

With Shakespeare's biographers so eager to traduce his wife, it is surprising that no one has ever alleged that the child Ann bore in May 1583 was not his. The point could never be proved, as can none of the other allegations made about Ann Hathaway, one of which is that, when he was forced to marry her, Will was actually in love with another woman. The evidence for this is an entry in the Bishop of Worcester's register, under the date 27 November 1582, the day before the issue of the bond for Ann and Will's marriage recording the issue of a licence for a marriage ‘inter Wm Shaxpere et Annam Whateley de Temple Grafton', between a William Shakespeare and Ann Whateley of Temple Grafton.
²²
These days the entry is thought to be a scribal error. If it is it is an odd one. The bishop's register was copied by a professional scribe from the rougher lists made by the clerk officiating at the time. The substitution of one word for another, of Whateley for Hathaway, might be a simple misreading of a scribbled original, or the carriage of a word over from another entry, but the simultaneous introduction of Temple Grafton, instead of Shottery or Stratford, does strain credulity. It may simply be that the scribe copied the beginning of one entry, getting as far as the ‘Annam', say, and when he looked up again picked up an ‘Annam' in the following entry, so writing the beginning of one entry and the end of another.

There could have been two William Shakespeares in the diocese of Worcester marrying two Anns at much the same time and both in
need of a special licence. This possibility did not seem incredible to Sir Sidney Lee, but it hasn't found favour with anybody else much. There were lots of Shakespeares in Warwickshire c.1580 and lots of them were Williams. Half a dozen William Shakespeares of marriageable age can be found in Rowington in the 1580s. William was a preferred name among the Shakespeares of Oldiche too; one of the brothers of John Shakespeare the corviser (shoe-maker) who lived in Stratford for a time, and baptised three children there, was a William. William Shakespeares were common also at Wroxall. Thomas Shakespeare of Alcester left a young son William when he died in 1539; Christopher Shakespeare of Packwood names a son William as one of the overseers of his will in 1557; a William Shakespeare was named as an overseer in the will of John Pardie of Snitterfield in 1579. Other William Shakespeares there were, aplenty.

There were also Whateleys in Warwickshire, though fewer than Shakespeares or Hathaways. A William Whateley baptised a son and a daughter at Holy Trinity in the 1560s. Alderman George Whately (or Wheatley) who acted as bridge warden for many years and was elected Bailiff of Stratford in 1583, had no connections with Temple Grafton. He was born in Henley-in-Arden, where in 1586 he endowed an elementary school for thirty children. He was buried in Holy Trinity Stratford in the pestilential summer of 1593. Whateley was a successful wool draper, whose house ‘with glass windows in the hall, parlour and upper chamber, and beehives in the garden' stood opposite the Shakespeares' in Henley Street.
²³
(He had two brothers who were Catholic priests on the run.) None of his children by his wife Joan who died in Stratford in February 1579 was christened in Stratford. On 19 May 1582 another George Whateley, almost certainly the alderman's son, took Mary Nasson to wife at Holy Trinity. He could have had a sister or cousin Ann living in Temple Grafton. Three of George Whateley's children were subsequently baptised in Stratford, none of them an Ann. The only other child of Alderman Whateley's who can be traced in the Stratford records is an unmarried daughter Catherine, to whom the Corporation leased a house on the High Street in 1598.

Ann Hathaway could have been living in Temple Grafton, three
and a half miles to the west of Shottery, and a good five miles from Stratford, but not for the reasons adduced by Park Honan:

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 that errs with her surname…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.
²⁴

Honan begins by assuming that the William Shakespeare of the entry in the Bishop of Worcester's register is identical with our William Shakespeare; the possibility of two William Shakespeares seeking special licences at the same time is not to be considered. Then, he assumes that in copying the original register the scribe made a single mistake, getting the name wrong but the place right. It is actually harder to do this than to join half of one line to half of another. For the eye to return to the right line and not note the mistaken surname is almost impossible. For Honan Ann Whateley is a mistake for Ann Hathaway but Temple Grafton is not a mistake. Temple Grafton is the hamlet where she is to be found ‘huddled'. A small hamlet in Elizabethan Warwickshire was not an easy place to hide in; as a stranger newly arrived in the district Ann would have been conspicuous. Any suspicion that she might be pregnant would have brought her to the attention of the authorities. A woman in search of anonymity and invisibility in 1582 would have had to travel a lot further than three or four miles.

If Ann Hathaway was living in Temple Grafton, it places her courtship by William Shakespeare in a very different light. It is usually assumed, and, given the fact that the men who acted for her in the securing of the licence were the same men of Shottery who witnessed her father's will, it is most likely, that she was until her marriage a member of the Hathaway household in Shottery. If she was not, it would not have been because she was in the early stages of pregnancy, but because she was working to support herself. It was quite usual in
Tudor England for children to be sent away from home, to live and work in the households of relatives or even of complete strangers. About half the children apprenticed to learn crafts and trades in London in this period were girls. Instead of working as an unpaid farm servant for her own family in Shottery, Ann could have been apprenticed to a skilled craftswoman or artisan somewhere else, but it is more likely to have been in a busy market town like Stratford than in sleepy Temple Grafton. At twenty-six Ann would have been long out of her indentures.