Shakespeare's Wife (34 page)

 

Accuse me thus: that I have scanted all

Wherein I should your great deserts repay,

Forgot upon your dearest love to call,

Whereto all bonds do tie me day by day,

That I have frequent been with unknown minds,

And given to time your own dear-purchased right,

That I have hoisted sail to all the winds

Which should transport me farthest from your sight.

Book both my wilfulness and errors down,

And on just proof surmise accumulate.

Bring me within the level of your frown,

But shoot not at me in your wakened hate.

Since my appeal says I did strive to prove

The constancy and virtue of your love. (117)

 

There can be no proof that this is a husband speaking to a wife, but there are strong hints. The person to whom ‘all bonds' tie a man can only be the woman to whom he has been bound in marriage. Shakespeare had certainly spent his precious time with all kinds of riff-raff, leaving Ann to grow old without him. The cheek of the final couplet has its literary precedent in famous stories like that of Patient Grissill, who endured all kinds of torments without ever being heard to condemn the man who inflicted them upon her. The penitent mood continues until Sonnet 126, which lacks its final couplet, and seems otherwise oddly out of sequence. Kerrigan interprets it as an envoi, a deliberate ending of the sequence. The next sequence concerns the dark lady. In reading these sonnets Ann would have realised, perhaps for the first time, that her husband had been besotted with a courtesan who seduced one of his adored young men.
⁹
The matter was fairly recent; the poet describes his ‘days as past the best'.

Michael Wood finds in Sonnet 145 a key to the mystery of Shakespeare's marriage:

one can never judge a relationship from the outside…Reading between the lines [of Sonnet 145] she would be the rock on which he relied through his life, supporting his career in London. Perhaps he really did mean that she had ‘saved my life'. Years later those words stood when he published the poem. And later still Ann would desire to be buried with him.
¹⁰

Though some caution is in order—it was not Shakespeare who published the poem and we have only late-seventeenth-century gossip about where Ann desired to be buried—Wood's almost unconscious absorption of an impression of Ann as rock-like strikes
me as justified. There are some who want to believe that she reproached her husband for blazoning abroad his infidelities, others that she nagged and railed and drove him further out of her life.
¹¹
She is as likely to have refused to read the sonnets or to have them read to her. She was after all part of his reality, not his fantasy. My own feeling is that she was indeed given a copy of the sonnets and not by her husband, that at first she scorned to read them behind his back, and when she did begin to read them she was shaken, moved and impressed. Some she would have seen before, but not all. Then she would have tucked the little book deep inside the coffer where she kept her own possessions, opened her Bible and prayed for them both. If her husband had never raised the question of the sonnets with her, I doubt she would have raised it with him. She may have permitted herself the odd grim little smile.

 

They that are rich in words must needs discover

That they are poor in what makes a lover.
¹²

 

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

of the poet's younger daughter Judith and the Quiney family, of Ann as maltster and money-lender, and the deaths of Mary and Edmund Shakespeare

Though Shakespearean scholars have not been much interested in Judith Shakespeare, the novelist William Black found her so interesting that he spun his romance of Judith Shakespeare into three volumes, though it is actually quite short. Black's Judith is the prettiest damsel in Warwickshire, who trips about the leafy lanes gathering flowers and occasionally slips up to Shottery to visit ‘Grandmother Hathaway', naying and forsoothing as she goes. She is tricked by Leofric Hope into selling him the script of one of her father's plays and almost pines to death under her father's displeasure. End of story.
¹

Scholars too, bereft of anything like fact, occasionally permit themselves a little idle speculation. One thinks Judith was Shakespeare's favourite. Another decides that she was afflicted by guilt for the death of her twin. Yet another that her father punished her for it: ‘Judith, it seems, was not a favourite daughter. She may have suffered in her father's eyes, from having had the insensitivity to stay alive so many years after the death of her much-loved twin brother at the age of eleven.'
²
No one would have loved Hamnet better than his twin, or been more traumatised by his death, unless it was the mother of both of them. If Shakespeare was so unjust as to shun his daughter because of her bereavement, he cannot have been the man we think he was.

What is undeniable is that Judith Shakespeare reached the ripe age of thirty-one unmarried. As we have seen, in Shakespeare's time fewer women married than do today. Many women were in service, and unable to marry or even to entertain offers of marriage without
the permission of their employers. Others had no dowries or portions to put towards the establishment of a household. Still others, at their own disposal and earning an independent living, saw no reason why they should jettison their freedom and their property by submitting to the rule of a man.

One way of assessing Judith Shakespeare's life career is to look at what became of the cohort of girls born in Stratford in 1585. Holy Trinity register shows thirty-nine girls (besides Judith) born that year; three (including girl twins) were baptised and buried on the same day; three more lived two weeks, another five weeks, another nine months; twin girls died young, one aged one year and the other in the plague year of 1588, along with another of Judith's age peers; two more died at the age of twelve. One-third of the girls born that year did not reach marriageable age, which leaves twenty-six who might have. Of these only three were married in Holy Trinity Church: Katherine Rose married John Tipping in 1604, Margaret Moore married John Molnes in 1605 and Isabel Loxley alias Cockes married Thomas Mayhew on 31 May 1606. Joan Yate was buried unmarried in 1606. Which leaves twenty-two girls—slightly more than half of the cohort—who were christened but neither married nor buried in Stratford. Women of the same names can be found marrying elsewhere, in London, for example, but, failing further evidence, it would be foolhardy to identify them with the Stratford-born girls.

This is not the first time we have encountered the phenomenon of vanishing girls. Ann Shakespeare's sister Catherine Hathaway is one such, and her half-sister Margaret another. Their disappearance from the Stratford records is most likely the result of their going into service and marrying, possibly, and dying, certainly, elsewhere. In their case, the family survived in Stratford for generations; in the cases of many in Judith's cohort the families too disappeared, so we probably have to conclude that in a period of intense social disruption they moved away beyond our ken, to developing manufacturing and commercial centres, to Coventry and Birmingham and to London. One who remained was Eleanor Verney, who went into the service of Joan Bromley, widow of the carrier Edward Bromley who died in 1606. We know of Eleanor only because in 1609 she was sent by her employer to serve a subpoena on Sir Edward Greville's henchman
Peter Rosswell. In the Court of Requests she deposed that, as she handed him the writ, he ‘did violently snatch from her the said writ and refused to redeliver it unto her, and delivered his staff he then had in his hand to a stander-by who therewith did assault and beat this deponent out of the house'.
³
Disturbingly enough, among those called to answer in the case was Gilbert Shakespeare.
⁴
Eleanor was probably placed in Joan Bromley's service in 1596 by the Overseers of the Poor, after her father's burial as a pauper.
⁵

At every level of society, households could not be run without servants, who were often poor relations. Richer households took on servants of a higher class, better educated and better paid; the poorest households kept foot-boys and maids of all work on rations even harder than their own. Once in service a woman became a member of the family, and might seldom if ever hear her own family name. Time and again we encounter in the records references to servants by their masters' names; they may even be buried without their own names, which neither the clergy nor their parishioners could supply.
⁶
It would be no disgrace to the Bard to learn that both his daughters lived and worked in the houses of others; even the noblest families in the land would have to say the same. The most glamorous household to work in was, of course, the court of James I, where Shakespeare himself was a servant.

In 1611 when Judith was twenty-seven, she and Master Thomas and Mistress Lettice Greene witnessed a deed of enfeoffment for widowed Elizabeth Quiney and her son Adrian.
⁷
Lettice misspelt her own name in careful italic script that contrasts with her husband's beautiful signature (very different from the scribble of his memoranda), but Judith could only manage the kind of wobbly double squiggle that shows that she was quite unused to holding a pen. Widow Quiney did not sign either, but her mark, an E entwined with a dribbly Q, was a better effort than Judith's. Perhaps Ann's star boarders haled Judith along with them from New Place to make up the numbers for the necessary witnessing of the deed, which transferred ownership of the lease of a house in Wood Street to William Mountford in return for the very large sum of £131. The appearance of Judith's name on the document might be no more than coincidence but, as the family's private affairs were
involved, it seems improbable that a stranger would have been chosen to act as witness.

Judith was unlikely to have been Bess Quiney's gossip; spinsters of twenty-seven are not often chums of widows of forty-seven. As a grass widow herself for so many years, Ann Shakespeare is a likelier candidate for that role. The Quiney house, which stood in the High Street, two streets away from New Place, housed no fewer than sixteen people. It seems as likely as not that at some point Judith did become one of them. She may have entered Bess Quiney's household in the sequel to the events of May 1602, or she may have already been there for years, nursemaiding the younger children, governessing or helping Bess Quiney continue the mercery business. It may seem odd that Ann Shakespeare would take on servants of her own, while her daughter worked for a wealthier woman, but it was not in the least unusual. In fact, the pattern is so universal as to constitute a principle of social organisation and mobility that can be seen at work in Tudor and Jacobean society from the top down.

If Judith Shakespeare had entered the service of the Quiney family it was probably long before 1602 when Richard Quiney was killed. By then she would have been seventeen. Usually girls of eleven or so, but sometimes as young as nine, were taken on for training in the special skills needed by the employers' household. Until at least the mid-1590s Shakespeare was certainly not a wealthy man, and no attention would have been paid to providing Judith with an education that she did not need. By the time the family acquired New Place, it would have been too late. We may be sure, I think, that Judith could read her Bible, and she evidently couldn't write with a pen, but she might well have been able to enter transactions in chalk on a slate or keep track of them with wooden tallies. Richard Quiney was a country mercer and Bess Quiney was a country mercer's daughter. If, as seems likely, Richard Quiney made use of his enforced sojourns in London to buy stock, it would have been up to his wife to keep track of it, and keep the ‘mercer's book' up to date. Besides the fact that she was so often pregnant or recovering from a confinement, Bess Quiney had the additional challenge of her husband's working almost full-time for the Corporation, having to spend months on end in London, when she had to run the business single-handed. If Judith had been
taken on as an assistant in their retail trade she should have had to serve an apprenticeship, in which case her parents would have had to pay for her indentures. If this was the case she would have become a member of the Quiney household at about the same time that her twin brother died, in 1596.

Perhaps Judith was employed to help care for the Quiney children. As we have seen, her mother's child-rearing skills were rather better than average, as she brought the twins through the hazard of multiple birth and all three of them through the annual visitations of epidemic disease. Bess's children were not strong. The spacing of her eleven pregnancies suggests either that she fed her children for a shorter time than usual or that she used wet-nurses. Either way, the consequences for the children could be serious. Bess's seventh child, William, was born in mid-September 1590 and was probably put out to nurse in the neighbourhood of Alveston because all we know of him is that he was buried there on 10 October 1592. Children who died at nurse were usually buried in the wet-nurse's parish rather than brought home for burial. When she buried her husband, Elizabeth had nine surviving children: Elizabeth was twenty, Adrian fourteen, Richard twelve, Thomas not yet eleven; Anne was ten; her second William was not yet nine; Mary was seven, John five and George two years old. A little more than a year later, in August 1603, John died. Ensuing events in Widow Quiney's family support the notion of a settled intimacy with the household at New Place. Soon after her husband's death, Bess began negotiations for the marriage of her eldest daughter, Elizabeth, to William Chandler, stepson of Thomas Greene's wife Lettice.

At about the time of Richard Quiney's death, in 1602, Shakespeare wrote a play about a poor young woman who entered the household of a wealthy widow and endeared herself to her.
All's Well That Ends Well
is a disturbing play, the text of which we know only from the 1623 Folio. As G. K. Hunter put it:

Various palliatives and explanations for the peculiarity of the play have been advanced—ranging from anatomisations of Shakespeare's soul to analyses of his text—and these undoubtedly have their place…The problem that presents itself is: how are we to describe the genuine
effects of this play so that readers (or audiences) can see it as a whole, or at least as a work with a centre? The play has undoubtedly a strongly individual quality, but it is difficult to start from this, since it is mainly a quality of strain.
⁸

Helena is the orphan daughter of a physician, who bequeathed her to the ‘overlooking' of the Countess of Rossillion.

 

I think not on my father,

And these great tears grace his remembrance more

Than those I shed for him. What was he like?

I have forgot him. (I. i. 78–80)

 

So might a little girl say whose father left her for months, perhaps years, at a time to go to an unseen place called London. There were probably repeated scenes in the Shakespeare household like the one described by Thomas Deloney in
Thomas of Reading:

when I set toward this my last journey to London, how my daughter took on, what a coil she kept to have me stay, and I could not be rid of the little baggage a long time, she did so hang about me, when her mother by violence took her away, she cried out most mainly, ‘O my father! My father! I shall never see him again!'
⁹

The abandoned child in
All's Well That Ends Well
wins the love and esteem of the mistress of the household, so that the countess has no difficulty in forgiving her for her presumption in falling in love with the son and heir: ‘Her father bequeathed her to me, and she herself, without other advantage, may lawfully make title to as much love as she finds. There is more owing her than is paid, and more shall be paid her than she'll demand' (I. iii. 96–101). It is a recurrent theme in the literature of women that they are abandoned by those with a duty of love and care and left to fend for themselves in households peopled by indifferent strangers who exploit and abuse them. Judith may be a precursor of the lonely governess of Victorian novels. Like many women raising children in the absence of their father, Ann may have found it very difficult to manage Judith's
resentments and have been relieved when she left home to struggle for acceptance by another family.

It was only to be expected that all the effort would go into securing the most advantageous match possible for the Shakespeares' elder daughter, and smaller provision made for her younger sister. The lot of a younger sister in 1600 was almost as disadvantaged as that of a younger brother. Left to their own devices, younger daughters often came to grief. In service they were more likely to be seduced than courted. Abraham Sturley, gentleman, had ten children; among the disappearing women of Stratford are two of his daughters—Catherine, his fifth child, born in 1585, and Frances, his seventh, born in 1589. Hanna, born in 1591, reappears in the Holy Trinity register, not as a bride, but as the unmarried mother of a bastard daughter who was buried there on 23 December 1611, when she was twenty. Shocking as this may seem, it was not all that unusual even for eminent families; in every case the shamed woman is a younger sister. On 22 March 1598, the bastard daughter of thirty-year-old Joan Gilbert alias Higgs was brought to the font at Holy Trinity and five days later brought to be buried, much to the shame of Joan's father, the Curate of Holy Trinity. He had been married three times, and was the father of at least twelve children, two baptised at Wootton Wawen, and ten at Holy Trinity, of whom Joan was the fourth.