Shakespeare's Wife (23 page)

Gilbert, born in October 1566, would have reached his majority in 1587, which is about when most scholars think Shakespeare took himself off. Gilbert was never to marry.

The state of marriage was thought a desirable one, both for mutual comfort and support, and for raising children to carry on the family name, and young men of Stratford were expected to marry once they had completed their apprenticeship. Bachelors aged more than thirty were rare; so much so that the compilers of the 1595 list of maltsters felt it necessary to explain that John Page, ‘a smith by trade' was ‘a man never married'.
⁹⁵

Never married men were not rare in the Shakespeare household, which contained three of them. In Shakespeare's plays brotherhood is not an easy relationship. We have only to think of Orlando's fratricidal brother, and the usurping younger brother of the exiled duke in
As You Like It
, of Richard III, of Prospero's treacherous younger brother and Sebastian plotting against his brother the King of Naples in
The Tempest
, not to mention the bastard brothers, Faulconbridge in
King John
, Don John in
Much Ado
and Edmund in
King Lear
. Brotherhood in Shakespeare is far more problematic than marriage.

 

CHAPTER ELEVEN

of how one Stratford boy became a leading printer, and another wrote a sexy poem that became a notorious best-seller, being literally read to pieces, and Ann buried her only son

All her life Ann Shakespeare could rely on the support and guidance of her brother Bartholomew Hathaway, and never did she need it more than in the difficult years when her children were small. He, it will be remembered, was married three weeks after their father's death, on 25 November 1581, to Isabel Hancocks of Tredington. He was then farming in Tredington and Tysoe, as well as cultivating half of the Hewlands yardland and helping his stepmother and half-siblings to run their part of the Shottery farm. His first son, named for his father Richard, was christened at Tysoe. In April 1583, shortly before his sister bore her first child, Bartholomew took a lease on a house in Ely Street and moved his family to Stratford. It is possible, but not likely, that Ann and her family lived there with him—indeed it is possible that she was married from her brother's house in Tysoe. One thing we can be sure of is that Bartholomew took his responsibilities as head of the Hathaway-Gardner family seriously. It is not inconceivable that he decided to base himself in Stratford because of concern for his sister, by then probably his closest surviving relative. When Bartholomew's second child was born in January of the next year, she was christened Annys, and it seems likely that her aunt Ann was her godmother. (When Annys was married in 1610 it was as ‘Ann' Hathaway.) Two years later another boy was born and christened John; two years later a new baby died before it could be baptised, and two years after that, in 1590, Edmund came along. The name is not a common one in Stratford, and it may be that he was named for his young uncle, Edmund Shakespeare.

As Bartholomew was a constant presence in Ann's life, it is fitting to give some account of him, if only to correct the erroneous impression often given that he was some kind of dependant of Shakespeare's. He was god-fearing, hard-working and astute and could both read and write. By 1605 he was of sufficient substance to be appointed one of the four churchwardens of Holy Trinity, a position that he held for four years.
¹
To be eligible for the post he had to have an income of at least £200 a year.

These officials upon whom the administration of the church and parish so much depended, were chosen from ‘the better sort', the more substantial men of the parish and the borough. Their chief duties…were:

1. to ‘present' or report all offenders to the [vicar's] court;

2. to certify the performance of court orders;

3. to see that the church and church property were in good repair;

4. to see that the books and articles required were provided and kept in good condition;

5. to see that all attended church at the required times and behaved themselves there.
²

Hathaway carried out the public services expected of a substantial citizen—as Shakespeare markedly did not. In 1586 he collaborated with Stephen, Richard and Thomas Burman in drawing up the inventory of their Shottery neighbour William Such;
³
in 1608 he led the team that drew up the inventory of the widow Alice Burman.
⁴
In 1616 he signed his full name to the inventory of Humphrey Allen of Old Stratford when the others involved signed by mark.
⁵

In 1610 Hathaway managed to buy for £200 the freehold of the land in Shottery that his family had held in copyhold since 1543. This would not have been as easy as it seems, for at the time powerful consortia were buying up all available arable land. There is no reason whatsoever for supposing that Shakespeare gave Hathaway the money for the purchase. When Bartholomew's son Richard died in 1636 he left important freehold properties in Stratford and five lands in the common fields of Old Stratford, which may have been acquired earlier by his father and transferred to him by deed before his
father made his will.
⁶
If Shakespeare had abandoned his wife and children, Bartholomew Hathaway would have been in the best position to bring the case to the attention of the authorities; if he did not—we do not have all the records for the Vicar's Court—it must be because his brother-in-law's absence from home was condoned, and his sister was managing without him.

We don't know if, in August 1592 when the plague broke out in London with such ferocity that the theatres had to be closed, Shakespeare took refuge in Stratford or elsewhere. Stratford escaped the contagion; the parish registers show that mortality for 1592–3 remained within the normal parameters. Whether Shakespeare chose to wait it out in Stratford or not probably depends as much on where Ann and the children were living as on anything else, for he needed space and quiet to write what would turn out to be a huge best-seller, namely the housewives' favourite poem,
Venus and Adonis
. This would be the first time a work by Shakespeare would appear in print. Whether Ann could read or not, she would not have been allowed to remain in ignorance of this turn of events. Some well-meaning person would have told her that there was a book selling like hot cakes in London with her husband's name on it. Besides, the printer—publisher, Richard Field, was a Stratford man.

Field, three years older than Shakespeare, was the son of the tanner Henry Field, whose shop stood in Bridge Street. In 1579, when he was eighteen his father bound him apprentice to George Bishop, a London stationer, who agreed that he could serve the first six of his seven years of indentures with Thomas Vautrollier, a Huguenot printer in Blackfriars, who as a foreigner was not permitted to take apprentices of his own. Vautrollier may have been a Calvinist; he certainly published the first British editions of Calvin's
Institutes
in French in 1576 and 1584. In 1574 Vautrollier was awarded the patent for printing Latin school texts for ten years; in 1582 he published the
Metamorphoses
in Latin, and in 1574 had published the Latin edition of Ovid's
Fasti
that Shakespeare would later use for
Lucrece
. In 1586 Vautrollier printed Timothy Bright's
Treatise of Melancholy
, which is generally accepted as one of the sources for
Hamlet
. Vautrollier was often away running his Edinburgh printing shop, at which times his wife Jacqueline managed his London business with Field's help.

Field lived the apprentices' dream; on 2 February 1587 he was made free of the Stationers' Company. Five months later Vautrollier died and his widow, who inherited all of Vautrollier's copyrights, his presses, type and devices, took over the business. In February 1588, she married twenty-six-year-old Field, who stepped into the shoes of one of the most prestigious printer—publishers in Britain. Field printed and published
Puttenham's Art of English Poesie
in 1589. Like his master, as a printer Field was probably allowed to take only one apprentice, but there was nothing to stop him employing other people, of whom Shakespeare may for a time have been one.

The Shakespeares and the Fields certainly knew each other. After Henry Field died in 1592, John Shakespeare appraised his goods for probate.
⁷
It may be that when Shakespeare went to London to try his fortune, he based himself at first at Vautrollier's shop. He may have worked there as a proof-reader or assessor of manuscripts for publication, which would partly explain the curious scatter of sources that we find across the whole range of his works, which includes texts in Latin and French and texts which had never appeared in print. Vautrollier published North's translation of Plutarch's
Lives
in 1579, the same year Field joined the shop as an apprentice. Field would go on to print the second edition in 1595, then the third in 1603 and the fourth in 1607. Holinshed's
Chronicles
, another of Shakespeare's most important sources, was sold by five booksellers, of whom one was George Bishop, the stationer to whom Richard Field was originally apprenticed and for whom he was working out the last year of his apprenticeship when the volume was published in January 1587. Field maintained a close working relationship with another of the booksellers, John Harrison. When Field printed and published Shakespeare's
Venus and Adonis
in 1593, it was sold in Harrison's shop; of the twenty-seven books Harrison published between 1590 and 1596, seventeen were printed by Field.

Like all poets of his generation Shakespeare was immersed in Ovid; he certainly used Golding's English translation of the
Metamorphoses
, but he apparently knew the original Latin as well. One of Field's first independent publications was a second edition of the
Metamorphoses
in 1589. Many other major and minor sources for Shakespeare's works can be traced in Richard Field's publishing history. He published Sir
John Harington's translation of
Orlando Furioso
in 1591, and this was used by Shakespeare as a primary source of
Much Ado About Nothing
. He printed the second edition of Robert Greene's
Pandosto
, the main source for Shakespeare's
Winter's Tale
. He printed the first full edition of Spenser's
Faerie Queene
, which influenced Shakespeare in many ways, and in 1598 he printed an edition of Sidney's
Arcadia
, which Shakespeare used as a source for numerous plays, most notably
King Lear
and
Pericles
. In 1599 he printed Richard Crompton's
Mansion of Magnanimity
, which Shakespeare used as a source for
Henry V
, generally considered to have been written at about the same time.

As the Field and Shakespeare families were in contact in the months following Henry Field's death in 1592, we might ask ourselves whether Richard, being a publisher of poetry, might not have suggested that Shakespeare, cooling his heels in Stratford, should try his hand at an ‘epyllion'. Since its first publication in 1589, copies of Thomas Lodge's mythical—erotic narrative poem
Scilla's Metamorphosis
had been walking out of the bookshops. Christopher Marlowe was known to be writing an epyllion of his own, an adaptation of Musaeus' story of Hero and Leander, part of which was already circulating in manuscript.

Perhaps Shakespeare penned his sixains at Ann's kitchen table; he might have read them out to her, to see if they made her blush or laugh. The household may have been rather more bookish than is usually thought. Ten-year-old Susanna could both read and write, and perhaps eight-year-old Hamnet too. The children could have been schooled together with their cousin Richard Hathaway, who could also read and write. Richard Quiney's son Richard was about to turn eleven when he wrote to his father in 1598, in Latin, so Susanna could certainly read an English text by the time she was ten.

Perhaps Shakespeare joined the train of the Earl of Southampton, and worked in peace and quiet far from Stratford. The dedication of his poem to Southampton doesn't of itself indicate that he was already enjoying Southampton's patronage. If Shakespeare followed the correct procedure, before publishing a poem with a dedication to the Earl of Southampton, he should have presented him with a copy, and waited for him to read it and give his gracious permission for it to be printed, usually accompanied by a reward of a couple of guineas or
so. Because it is literally unthinkable that anyone would dare to sign a dedication to a person of Southampton's rank using an alias, the signature on the dedication is the best proof we can have that there really was a poet called William Shakespeare. The poem itself is proof that he was already a pretty good poet.

Venus and Adonis
is the one work of Shakespeare's for which scholars feel almost as much distaste as they do for his wife. Year after year of multifarious shakespeareanising goes by without producing a single discussion of the work that was the Bard's principal claim to fame among his contemporaries. Scholars would rather bicker for years over corrupt texts of the plays than address themselves to this authentic and acknowledged text that Shakespeare himself saw through the press.

If Shakespeare didn't put a copy of his published poem into Ann's hands, somebody else surely would have. She may have recognised herself in the desirous older woman and her boy husband in the reluctant young man, and followed with interest the shifts in the poem's mood from stanza to stanza, enjoying the poem's lightness of touch, even as she shrank from its rampant sensuality. However matters transpired, the appearance of
Venus and Adonis
must have changed Ann Shakespeare's quiet life. Everybody was reading it; no fewer than eleven editions of the poem would appear in her lifetime and each had so many readers that only single copies of each edition have survived, the rest being read to pieces. And in every single copy could be seen the full name of the author at the end of the dedication.

What may have made life even more difficult for Ann at this juncture is that the poem was decidedly erotic. In the past erotic poetry had been reserved for the delectation of educated gentlemen, who read it in Latin and Greek. Written in the language of the people,
Venus and Adonis
was one erotic poem that would be passed from hand to hand by excited housewives. In Middleton's
A Mad World My Masters
, first performed in 1605, printed in 1608, Harebrain informs us that he has removed from his wife's possession ‘all her wanton pamphlets, as
Hero and Leander, Venus and Adonis—
oh! two luscious marrow-bone pies for a young married wife' (I. ii. 44–6).

The disgruntled schoolmen sneered. In
The Return from Parnassus
, a self-serving play written by students at St John's College Cambridge, and staged in about 1600, in which they whinge about the decay of learning and their own poor prospects, it is the nincompoop Gullio who can quote
Venus and Adonis
by the yard. ‘Let this duncified world esteem of Spenser and Chaucer, I'll worship sweet Mr Shakespeare, and to honour him will lay his
Venus and Adonis
under my pillow…'
⁸