Shakespeare's Wife (15 page)

The play opens with an aged father on trial for his life; Egeon, a Syracusan merchant, has fallen foul of the Ephesian authorities who have placed an embargo on trade with Syracuse. Any merchants who, cannot raise sufficient ‘guilders to redeem their lives' will be executed:

 

if any Syracusan born

Come to the bay of Ephesus he dies,

His goods confiscate to the duke's dispose

Unless a thousand marks be levied

To quit the penalty and to ransom him.

Thy substance, valued at the highest rate,

Cannot amount to a hundred marks,

Therefore by law thou art condemned to die. (I. i. 18–25)

 

There is nothing very amusing about any of this, especially to anyone who knew what persecution John Shakespeare was enduring at the hands of capricious authority back in Stratford. Egeon answers:

 

Yet this is my comfort: when your words are done

My woes end likewise with the evening sun. (26–7)

 

The duke is moved to a minimum degree of mercy.

 

Yet will I favour thee in what I can.

Therefore merchant I'll limit thee this day

To seek thy health by beneficial help.

Try all the friends thou hast in Ephesus.

Beg thou, or borrow, to make up the sum,

And live. If no, then thou art doomed to die. (49–54)

 

We don't see Egeon again until the final scene of the play. He is brought on ‘barehead with the headsman and other officers', bound, as if on his way to execution. He stands silent as Adriana pleads with the duke to order the abbess of the nearby convent, where her errant husband has found sanctuary, to open the gates. Egeon does not speak until he has seen his son's long-lost twin, whom of course he takes for the son he knows. He pleads with him to pay his ransom, and is denied. His prospects of survival having withered away, the gate of the convent suddenly opens to reveal the abbess with the other Antipholus. She is the
deus ex machina
. She is also Egeon's wife. As she originally presented him with twins, she presents them now on stage together for the first time. The words of redemption are spoken by her.

 

Whoever bound him, I will loose his bonds,

And gain a husband by his liberty. (V. i. 341–2)

 

The wife who redeems her husband does so by remaining faithful to her bond, even in the absence of fellowship, comfort and intimacy. The compact between spouses is a spiritual one; remaining faithful to it is what constitutes salvation. This is a hard doctrine; only the abbess knows how hard.

 

Thirty-three years have I but gone in travail

Of you, my sons, and till this present hour

My heavy burden ne'er deliverèd.

The duke, my husband, and my children both,

And you the calendars of their nativity,

Go to a gossips' feast and joy with me

After so long grief, such felicity. (403–9)

 

Greenblatt might object that this is nothing but a conventional schema, typical of an older kind of didactic play, that he is entitled to ignore it and concentrate on interchanges that might strike him as belonging to the stuff of theatre rather than ritual. Perhaps, perhaps. What should be obvious is that Shakespeare did not think in twentieth-century clichés. We are not dealing here with representations of folk as ‘happily married', but as truly married. For Shakespeare marriage was a demanding and difficult way of life—if anything, more demanding and more difficult for wives than for husbands. Even before the abbess appears to redeem her husband, the wronged wife Adriana steps in to do something similar for the man she thinks is her husband, bound as a madman and pursued for debt. When the arresting officer protests:

 

He is my prisoner. If I let him go,

The debt he owes will be required of me (IV. iv. 118–19)

 

she answers:

 

I will discharge thee ere I go from thee.

Bear me forthwith unto his creditor,

And, knowing how the debt grows, I will pay it. (120–2)

 

When we first meet Adriana she is distraught because her husband does as he pleases, ignoring her needs and demands; her younger sister, who has yet to assume the yoke of marriage, presumes to tell her her duty. The audience can see very clearly that Adriana rails because her husband doesn't turn up for dinner and that her husband turns up less and less because when he does he gets an earful. In
The Comedy of Errors
Shakespeare dramatises the growing misunderstanding and alienation of spouses who begin their married lives with unrealistic expectations by poising the ‘before' against the ‘after'. The courting of Luciana by the unmarried Antipholus is the before; the after is the painful conflict that has arisen between the married Antipholus and Adriana, who laments:

 

What ruins are in me that can be found

By him not ruined? Then is he the ground

Of my defeatures. My decayèd fair

A sunny look of his would soon repair…(II. i. 95–8)

Thou art an elm, my husband, I a vine,

Whose weakness married to thy proper state

Makes me with thy strength to communicate…(II. ii. 177–9)

 

Though Luciana is critical of Adriana's destructive state of mind, she is also ready to exhort her sister's husband to behave better. Strangely, when she confronts the man she thinks is Adriana's husband she proceeds on the assumption that he is unfaithful to her sister and tells him to conceal it:

 

Alas, poor women! Make us but believe

(Being compact of credit) that you love us.

Though others have the arm, show us the sleeve.

We in your motion turn, and you may move us.

Then, gentle brother, get you in again.

Comfort my sister, cheer her, call her wife…(III. i. 21–6)

 

Of course Luciana is speaking to the unmarried Antipholus, who then to her horror begins to court her, calling her:

 

mine own self's better part,

Mine eye's clear eye, my dear heart's dearer heart,

My food, my fortune, and my sweet hope's aim,

My sole earth's heaven, and my heaven's claim. (III. i. 61–4)

 

When Luciana beetles off to inform her sister of this turn of events she describes his hyperboles as ‘Words that an honest suit might move'. Antipholus's eulogy of a wife as the helpmeet and pledge of salvation comes from the same psalm, cxxviii, to which Adriana refers in her lament. Though this paradisaical communion between spouses cannot happen on earth, it is what will characterise their relationship in heaven, according to the protestant champions of marriage.

 

Marriage, to all, whose joys two parties be,

And doubled are by being parted so,

Wherein the very act is chastity,

Whereby two souls into one body go,

It makes two one, whilst here they living be,

And after death in their posterity.
²⁹

 

Even before the mystery of her husband's strange behaviour has been solved, Adriana recovers her balance as a wife, with the aid of some rough talk from the abbess. We never see Adriana and Antipholus of Ephesus kiss and make up. Greenblatt, who hasn't noticed the aged spouses at all, thinks this odd and significant.

The situation seized Shakespeare's imagination, as if the misery of the neglected or abandoned spouse was something he knew personally and all too well. Amid the climactic flurry of recognitions, the play does not include, as it would have been reasonable to expect, a scene of marital reconciliation.
³⁰

That was because, even for the most rhapsodic panegyrists of marriage, the perfect union of spouses is not of this world but the next. Time and again Shakespeare confronted the two-in-one paradox of marriage, knowing it to be a contradiction in terms while celebrating its saving grace and power. Greenblatt goes on to discuss the one interchange between Leontes and Hermione in
The Winter's Tale
which seems to him to have the right touch of conjugal familiarity. In this play, as in
The Comedy of Errors
, an errant husband is saved by his wife; Hermione preserves unbroken the integrity of their union by removing herself from him who would have destroyed it, and making herself dead to the world, living as chaste and cloistered a life as the abbess. Will and Ann too seem to have lived most of their married life apart, unable even to communicate with each other. For all that, Ann, at least, was true to her bond.

 

CHAPTER EIGHT

of pregnancy, travail and childbirth, of christening and churching, and the society of women

Ann conceived forty weeks and a few days before her baby was christened on Sunday 26 May, Trinity Sunday, 1583, that is, in mid-to late August. At the time her friends made their trip to the Consistory Court at Worcester she was between twelve and fourteen weeks pregnant. In the weeks that had elapsed since her missed period she and Will had told her friends and his parents of their situation, secured his parents' consent, and taken advice from their local curate or the vicar himself as to how to proceed. Even if they guessed that a trip to the Consistory Court would be necessary they could not have known how much and what kind of paperwork would have to be prepared, if the journey was not to be fruitless. Officers of the court visited Stratford from time to time, but from the wording of the bond it seems that it was signed in Worcester. If Ann's pregnancy was no sooner verified than the arrangements for a marriage began to be put in place, we ought at least to consider the possibility that what has been assumed by almost all observers to have been an unfortunate accident was anything but.

Anthony Holden's version of events is more or less typical:

Whatever Will's feelings, two of the late Farmer Hathaway's close friends, Fulke Sandells and John Richardson, came knocking on the door of the Shakespeare home in Henley Street that autumn demanding that the son of the house do the right thing by their deceased friend's homely daughter. Or so we may surmise…
¹

There were no pregnancy tests in 1582; Ann's pregnancy, especially behind the wooden busk that women then wore, would not have
been evident. And if it had been, no shame would have attached to bride or groom on that score. Elizabethan parish registers show many christenings within three or four months of the parents' marriage, and the register of Holy Trinity is no exception. Of the twenty couples who were married there in 1582, five do not appear again in the register, probably because the brides have gone to live in their husbands' parishes elsewhere. Of the remaining fifteen brides, five were pregnant at the time of the solemnisation. Joan Slye, who married George Careless on 16 March, bore a son who was christened Nicholas on 13 June the same year, three months later. Joan Atford who married Robert Hall on 14 June bore a daughter who was christened Elizabeth on 5 November, less than five months later. Mary Mason, married to John Smith on 14 October, bore a son who was christened John on 21 January, three months later. In at least one case we may suspect the activities of the church court, intervening to regularise an irregular union; Margaret Meadowcraft bore and buried a bastard daughter, Frances, in January 1577; when she was married to (another) Robert Hall on 4 November she was pregnant again and bore a daughter who was christened Grace on 18 June the following year. Anne Such and Richard Sutton, who were married on 9 November 1582, were Ann's neighbours in Shottery. Their first child, a boy called John, was buried at Holy Trinity on 10 June 1583. Margery Field (sister of the printer of
Venus and Adonis
) married the Stratford dyer Robert Young on 16 October 1586; the couple's first child was baptised on 10 May 1587. As long as the solemnisation had been understood to be following on, it could have been delayed until the penitential season was over, without Ann's pregnancy being much more visible or any more shocking than it was in November.

For an honest woman, who was not free with her favours, premarital pregnancy was no disgrace at all. When Laslett's researchers took the trouble of comparing the register of marriages with the register of christenings in the same parish, they were surprised to see just how many of the christenings of first children occurred within nine months of marriage. They didn't have the luxury of comparing parish registers all over England so they couldn't come up with an overall figure, but in some parishes nearly a third of all first-borns were christened within eight and a half months of the solemnisation of marriage.

More than half of those babies who arrive early had been conceived within the three months before the marriage ceremony and not earlier…these first results of study show that premarital pregnancy was common in England, so common in Colyton and Wylye that it hardly seems possible that the affianced couple was everywhere expected to maintain chastity until after the church celebration was over.
²

Thomas Deloney gives us a more reliable insight into Elizabethan attitudes to pregnancy in
Jack of Newbury
. While he was a house-guest of Jack's, a gentleman called Sir George Rigley seduced one of Jack's maidservants under the promise of marriage. When she found herself with child and reminded him of his promise, Rigley replied:

‘Why thou lewd paltry thing, comest thou to father thy bastard upon me? Away, ye dunghill carrion, away! Hear you, good housewife, get you among your companions and lay your litter where you list, for if you trouble me any more, by Heaven I swear, thou shalt dearly abide it', and so, bending his brows like the angry god of war, he went his ways, leaving the child-breeding wench to the hazard of her fortune, either good or bad.
³

Jack, who as the woman's employer stood
in loco parentis
, chose to believe his maidservant's word against the gentleman's. Determined that his guest should not dishonour his house he contrived an almost Shakespearean ruse. He told Rigley that he had chanced upon a rich young widow who, because she thought she might be pregnant by her late husband, was refusing all suitors. He advised Rigley to woo her, win her and bed her. Rigley proffered his suit to the supposed widow, who was actually the maidservant disguised in a French hood, and was accepted. The marriage was solemnised at the Tower of London without delay. When Rigley realised how he had been tricked, ‘he fretted and fumed, stamped and stared like a devil'.

‘Why!' quoth Master Winchcomb, ‘What needs all this? Came you to my table to make my maid a strumpet? Had you no man's house to dishonour but mine? Sir, I would you should well know, that I account the poorest wench in my house too good to be your whore, were you
ten knights, and, seeing you took a pleasure to make her your wanton, take it no scorn to make her your wife, and use her well too, or you shall hear of it.' And ‘Hold thee Joan,' quoth he, ‘there is a hundred pounds for thee. And let him not say thou camest to him a beggar.'
⁴

Shakespeare's feelings about premarital pregnancy can perhaps be deduced from his treatment of Jaquenetta's pregnancy in
Love's Labour's Lost
. It is announced at the Masque of the Nine Worthies, in front of the whole company including the king and princess. Costard, who would have liked Jaquenetta for himself, shouts out to Armado, playing the role of Hector: ‘Fellow Hector, she is gone. She is two months on her way…Unless you play the honest Troyan, the wench is cast away. She's quick. The child brags in her belly already. 'Tis yours' (V. ii. 666, 667–8). Costard threatens Armado with whipping, the penalty for fornication. Armado, who is a complete fraud, as poor as Shakespeare must have been in 1582, unable even to afford a shirt, eventually vows ‘to Jaquenetta to hold the plough for her sweet love three year'. Jaquenetta is not rendered unworthy of Armado's love simply because she is pregnant by him. Theirs will be a crazy mésalliance, but the person who must bear the blame for that is not Jaquenetta but the poseur who besieged her with letters dotted with Latin tags, with songs and sonnets and ‘whole volumes in folio'. Who knows but with Jaquenetta's help the fake gentleman might well make an honest farmer? Was Ann Will's Jaquenetta? According to Anthony Burgess, Will's discourse was garnished with Latin tags.
⁵
Was he more like Armado than Romeo?

It should not be thought that because his wife was pregnant Shakespeare was excluded from the usual pleasures of a honeymoon. According to the seventeenth-century midwife Jane Sharp,

…so soon as a woman conceives the mouth of the womb is most exactly shut close, yet can they lie with men all that while, and some women before others will take more pleasure and are more desirous of their husband's company then than before, which is scarce seen in any other female creatures besides, most of them being fully satisfied after they have conceived, but it was needful for Man that it should be so, because polygamy is forbidden by the laws of God.
⁶

Ann had probably assisted at the births of Joan Hathaway's children at Hewlands Farm, so she knew the drill. She would have had her childbed-linen ready. Some of it would have been left to her and her sister Catherine by their mother. In 1665 or so Lady Elizabeth Hatton wrote to her son Christopher whose wife she thought (correctly) was pregnant:

If my guess be true tell her if she will make me a grandmother I have a little shirt and head cloths and biggin which I have kept by me that was the first that my mother wore and that I wore and I am very sure that you wore and have ever since laid it up carefully for your wife.
⁷

More childbed-linen would have been given or lent to Ann by her stepmother Joan Hathaway and perhaps by Mary Shakespeare too. And some of it Ann would have acquired or made for herself. Childbed-linen consisted of bed-linen and clothing for both mother and child. The mother needed forehead cloths, caps, open-fronted shifts suitable for breast-feeding, and skirts, the baby caps, bibs, belly-bands (to tie down the umbilicus), bigons or biggins (bonnets), dimity waistcoats and ‘a fine holland little pillow'. When Ann felt her labour pains beginning she would have sent someone to fetch the midwife, and her married women friends, her gossips, as well. Midwives were usually recruited from the ranks of sober matrons who could be trusted to examine pregnant and newly delivered women, and to testify in the Vicar's Court. In many parishes the midwife was licensed by the bishop or the vicar acting on his authority, but Stratford doesn't seem to have been one of them. No midwife is referred to in the surviving act books of the Vicar's Court. Still, helpers there must have been. Ann would not have been left to labour alone.

If Will had been away from home, word would have been sent to him, for it was generally expected that a husband be on hand during his wife's labour, even though he was not required to render any service to her during it, and there was no question of his actually witnessing parturition. When the midwife arrived she would supervise the closing of all the doors and windows of the dwelling and the drawing of the shutters. All cracks in the walls would have been stuffed with rags, because draughts were believed extremely danger
ous to both mother and newborn. A large fire would have been made on the hearth, with no other light in the room, for it was thought that a woman might become deranged if she was exposed to bright light during labour. Ann's clothing would have been loosened and she would have been encouraged to eat a large knob of butter. Meanwhile, the childbed-linen would be warming on her bed or on straw laid near the fire.

When the patient feels her throes coming, she should walk easily in her chamber, and then again lie down, keep herself warm, rest herself and then stir again, till she feels the waters coming down and the womb open. Let her not lie long abed, yet [if] she may lie sometimes and sleep to strengthen her, and to abate pain, the child will be the stronger.
⁸

When the midwife arrived she may have brought with her a birthing stool. In his version of Eucharius Roesslin's
The Birth of Mankind
, first published in 1545, Thomas Raynaldes makes clear that the use of the stool was spreading into England from continental Europe.
⁹
By the time Ann gave birth, use of the ‘groaning stool' was widespread. Where it was not in use the labouring woman used a bed spread with straw to protect it from soiling by blood, faeces or lochia. ‘Take notice that all women do not keep the same posture in their delivery. Some lie in their beds, being very weak; some sit in a stool or chair, or rest on the side of the bed, held by other women that come to the labour.'
¹⁰

The midwife did not simply attend to physical requirements of the labouring woman.

Also the midwife must instruct and comfort the party, not only refreshing her with good meat and drink, but also with sweet words, giving her good hope of a speedful deliverance, encouraging and enstomaching her to patience and tolerance, bidding her to hold in her breath so much as she may, also striking gently with her hands her belly above the navel, for that helpeth to depress the birth downward.

Good meat and drink included specially sustaining broths or caudles as well as strong beer. Midwives also knew how to support the
perineum: ‘And if necessity require it let not the midwife be afraid nor ashamed to handle the places, and to relax and loose the straits (so much as shall lie in her) for that shall help well to the more expedite and quick labour.'
¹¹

As labour went on, care was taken to refresh and sustain the labouring woman:

If her travail be long the midwife must refresh her with some chicken's broth with the yolk of a poached egg and a little bread, or some wine or strong waters, but moderately taken, and withal to cheer her up with good words and stroking down her belly above her navel gently with her hand, for that makes the child move downwards. She must bid her hold in her breath as much as she can, for that will cause more force to bring out the child.
¹²

Midwives were prepared to take action in cases where the child presented feet first or sideways: ‘If the head of the child do not come forth first, the midwife then must turn the child that the head may come forth first, and let the midwife anoint her hand with oil olive.' If the midwife did not succeed in manually turning the child, both mother and child remained in ‘great peril'. If the contractions looked as if they were weakening, various herbal preparations would be used to provoke them. ‘Also if the woman be in extreme labour, let her take the juice of dittany a dram with the water of fenugreek, or else take of Serapine an ounce, and drink it at three times with the water of cherries, and keep the woman moderately in a temperate heat.'
¹³