Shakespeare's Wife (6 page)

If any person be advanced into an office or dignity of public administration, be it either ecclesiastical, martial or civil, the herald must not refuse to devise to such a public person, upon his instant request, and willingness to bear the same without reproach, a coat of arms, and thenceforth to matriculate him, with his intermarriages and issues descending, in the register of the gentle and noble.
²¹

Though this first attempt was abandoned, Robert Cook, the Clarenceux King of Arms, drew a paper ‘pattern' or sketch of the Shakespeare coat which would show a spear of gold ‘steeled argent' on a bend sable on a field of gold; the crest was a silver falcon gentle ‘displayed', that is, with wings spread, holding a spear or on a wreath of gold plaited with sable. A copy of the paper sketch was probably to be seen somewhere in the house at Henley Street, while the children were regularly regaled with tales of the Shakespeares' ‘valiant service' under Henry VII, and how closely they were related to the grand Ardens of Park Hall. The more desperate their circumstances, the more Mary would have clung to her dream of gentility.

Mary would have been feeling dark enough in November 1578 when her husband was obliged to mortgage part of her inheritance, the house and fifty-six acres of land in Wilmcote, without the galling awareness that the person who lent them the £40 on the property was her eldest sister's husband, Edmund Lambert. As Lambert and Edward Cornwell, Mary's sister Margaret's second husband, had already gone surety for Shakespeare for £5 borrowed from Roger Sadler, which he had failed to repay, Lambert was probably confident that when the repayment date came around Shakespeare would default, the property would be forfeit and he, Lambert, would remain in possession. At the same time the Shakespeares conveyed another eighty-six acres to associates of Robert Webbe, son of another of Mary's sisters, for a set period after which it was to be returned for the use of the heirs of Mary's body. In 1579 the Shakespeares also surrendered their ninth part of the two houses and a hundred acres in Snitterfield, which they sold to Robert Webbe for £4.

At Michaelmas 1580 Shakespeare failed to repay the £40 borrowed on Asbyes and the Lamberts remained in possession. It was tough enough for Mary to realise that her inheritance was all but gone, without the knowledge that the £40 raised from the mortgage had disappeared as well when the Court of Queen's Bench fined Shakespeare the huge sum of £20 for failing to appear to find security for keeping the Queen's Peace, and then made him pay up another £20 when two men for whom he had gone surety failed to appear.
²²
John Shakespeare may have been unwise in both his borrowings and his lending, but in normal times he would have got away with it. What
made the difference was that by 1580 the midlands were sliding into economic recession. The most likely cause of John Shakespeare's inability to pay his debts was that his clients had defaulted on debts owed to him; clearly his colleagues still considered him an honourable man, for they gave him every chance to recover, and did not remove him from the list of aldermen and elect another in his place until September 1586. This by the way is proof, if proof were needed, that John Shakespeare was not a Catholic but a full member of the reformist brotherhood. No tolerance whatever was extended by the Corporation to papists who defaulted.

Six or seven years before Mary needed to begin worrying about having no property to offer with a son in hopes of making a good match, Will pre-empted her by impregnating Ann Hathaway and marrying her forthwith. William's marriage was probably felt by Mary as a severe blow. She and her children were slipping in the world, as her sisters' families prospered, some of them at her expense. In 1587 Edmund Lambert died, still in possession of Asbyes. John then embarked on legal action, not to recover the property from the heir, John Lambert, but for an additional £20 which he said had been promised him in return for delivery of unencumbered title. The unpleasantness would drag on almost to the end of his life; in 1597 the case was heard in Chancery, and again in 1599. Such legal action was costly, not only in money (for both sides) but also in ill feeling.

Marriage was far from universal in Elizabethan England but, even so, the Shakespeares' making no attempt to find a wife for any one of three boys, especially after their son and heir had made what might be regarded as an unsuitable match, is peculiar. Gilbert would have attained his majority in October 1587; unless his father really and truly had no money whatsoever Gilbert must have been a worthwhile marriage prospect for someone. If Mary had been on good terms with her sisters and their progeny, she would have had hundreds of possible candidates from whom to choose a likely girl for her boys. If on the other hand her sisters and their husbands regarded John Shakespeare as a jumped-up wastrel who had impoverished his wife and children, they would have been reluctant to match any of their daughters or nieces with any of his sons. Mary Shakespeare was to find wives for none of her sons; her daughter was left to find a husband for herself.

Most of Shakespeare's heroes and heroines are motherless. The few mothers who do appear in Shakespeare's plays are anything but motherly, from the cannibal mother Tamora in
Titus Andronicus
to the neurotically affected mother of Juliet, the mother of Richard III who curses her womb and the Countess of Rossillion in
All's Well
who simply dislikes her son. At best mothers are ineffectual, like Queen Elizabeth in
Richard III
, Lady Faulconbridge in
King John
and Lady Macduff, and at worst depraved, like Gertrude and Lady Macbeth.

 

CHAPTER THREE

of Ann Hathaway's looks and demeanour, of age at marriage in the 1580s, the courtship of older women by younger men and whether Shakespeare's wife could read

We know from the stone over Ann Shakespeare's grave that she was born eight years before her husband. What we shall never know is how or when she and Shakespeare met, though we do know that their parents had known each other since the 1550s. It is assumed that she was the mover in the courtship, simply because she was older.To Katherine Duncan-Jones,

it seems more likely that her father's death left the unmarried Agnes or Anne…without much parental care or control, and as a mature and spirited country girl she exploited her freedom to consort with the local youth. A combination of boredom with the sexual curiosity natural to his years led to Shakespeare's dalliance with her, and to what was probably his first experience of sex.

For some reason Duncan-Jones chooses to exaggerate Shakespeare's immaturity: ‘In the early modern period puberty occurred, on average, four or five years later than it does today. Some boys of eighteen or nineteen were still able to sing treble.' There is, of course, no reason to believe that Shakespeare's vocal cords were undeveloped or that the boys she refers to were not singing falsetto. Will did impregnate Ann after all, and, according to Duncan-Jones, in very short order. ‘Ann was unlike many young women of her age not only in being unmarried, but also in being to some extent free and independent.'
¹

Ann was also like many young women of her age in being unmarried. About 20 per cent of her female contemporaries would
die without ever having been married, so spinsters of twenty-six were not at all rare. Unmarried women over the age of twenty-one were all ‘free', in the sense that they could earn money and keep or spend it as they chose, as married women could not, and they could marry without waiting on their parents' wishes. In Elizabethan England there were probably more women over the age of twenty-one who were fatherless than whose fathers were still living. As for the suggestion that Ann was ‘to some extent…independent', she could have been a girl of independent means, if property had been entailed on her by her mother's family, but such an arrangement would have left a paper trail that has yet to be discovered.

Even if Ann did have some property of her own, as a husbandman's daughter she would not have been expected to pass her life in idleness. As small children she and her brother would have been sent into the fields to scare away birds from the crops, and perhaps even to pick stones out of the soil. At an early age she would have learnt how to milk her father's ewes—

 

Each shepherd's daughter with her cleanly pail

Has come afield to milk the morning meal.
²

 

What the family did not drink for breakfast, together with what she milked in the evening every day from April to October, would have been fermented until it separated to curds and whey. The whey was the family's usual drink; the curds were made into cheeses, soft for immediate consumption and hard for keeping.

Before 1534 the making of hard cheeses was done in the cool vaults of the monasteries; after the dissolution farmers took over the cheese-making themselves with rather variable results. In the 1580s cows were still a relative rarity in Warwickshire compared to sheep, but Ann may well have had a cow or two to take care of. Though the herding of the animals was mostly men's work, women could do it at a pinch. Milking and the preparation of milk products on the other hand was exclusively women's work. Ewes the milkmaid could handle by herself; if she was dealing with a cow, she needed a cowherd to hold the halter to control the beast. Women also looked after the smaller creatures, the chickens, ducks and geese.

 

My love can milk a cow

And teach a calf to suck

And knows the manner how

To set a brooded duck
³

 

Most of Hathaway's neighbours would have fattened a pig or two each year on skim milk, root vegetables and the acorns and chestnuts of the woodlands and commons. If the jobs connected to her home farm were covered, a girl was as likely as a boy to be placed out to service on someone else's farm. For all we know Ann never lived at the house in Shottery, for she could have been placed in service as a girl of six or seven. It is only in the halcyon imagination of bardolaters that Ann could have sat around for twenty-six years waiting for a boy to set her cap at.

One very heavy task that always fell to women was laundry. The bigger the family, the more babies to appear, the heavier the work. Washing was not done weekly, because the linen took too long to dry. It was mostly, though not only, in the summer that smocks and sheets, bed-and childbed-linen were washed and thrown over bushes and on to the grass to bleach in the sun. Farmer's daughters were dressed in a fashion that displayed their industry and expertise. While women of higher rank, citizens' and merchants' wives, wore heavy gowns of dark coloured stuffs, the milkmaids dressed in white shifts, under skirts of red flannel or sheep's russet, and stiff waistcoats of buckram or durance, scrubbed dazzling white, with a white neckerchief or scarf under a broad-brimmed straw hat.

 

Upon her back she wore

A fustian waistcoat white.

Her body and her stomacher

Were fastened very tight…

Her neckerchief of Holland sure…
⁴

 

In
Greene's Vision
, Tomkins the wheelwright falls in love with a ‘maid that every day went to sell cream in Cambridge'.

A bonny lass she was, very well tucked up in a russet petticoat, with a bare hem and no fringe, yet has she a red lace and a stomacher of tuft
mockado and a partlet cast over with a pretty whip, and dressed she was in a kerchief of holland for her father was a farmer. Her girdle was green, and at that hung a large leather purse with fair threaden tassels, and a new pair of yellow gloves, tufted with red raw silk very richly…
⁵

Milkmaids were stout and straight, strong enough to carry two bulky wooden pails suspended from a yoke across their shoulders, and sure-footed enough not to slop the precious milk out of the pails as they travelled over the uneven ground. Spilt milk was a disaster, and milkmaids wept piteously over it, afraid of being beaten.
⁶
In the long days of summer, when all her morning chores were done, the farmer's daughter could drive her cows and sheep to pasture, and lie with her gossips in the deep grass, watching her animals graze, singing songs and telling stories to pass the lazy time till the next milking.

 

Oh the wench went neatly,

Methought it did me good

To see her cheery cheeks

So dimpled o'er with blood,

Her waistcoat washèd white

As any lily-flower.

Would I had time to talk to her

The space of half an hour.
⁷

 

Supposing Ann was living at Hewlands at the time of her father's death, it was up to her stepmother whether she remained working there as an unpaid family-and farm-servant or left home to work elsewhere. As she and Shakespeare were not married in Stratford, and marriages generally took place in the parish where the bride was resident, it seems likely that at the time of her wedding Ann was not living in Shottery. Some commentators think that she had decamped to Temple Grafton. Perhaps she had found work in a Gardner household or with kin of her mother's in another parish.

Most versions of what befell William go more or less like this: ‘Sometime that August, after wandering the mile or so west down the
rural footpath to the tiny village of Shottery, the worldly eighteen-year-old committed an indiscretion that would profoundly affect the rest of his life. Was it a careless roll in the hay…?'
⁸
As we have seen the Shakespeares and the Hathaways knew each other, so there is no need to suppose that one day, quite by chance, Shakespeare wandered too close to Shottery and got snared by ‘a homely wench'. Ann was no wench; even if she had been in service, she would have been employed at a higher rate than a mere wench. Landholders were of higher status than glove-makers, especially glove-makers who were broke and had lost their own land. How hard is it to believe that eighteen-year-old Shakespeare was so enamoured of a twenty-six-year-old that he wooed her and ultimately won her? As an elder sister Ann probably spent much of her time looking after her younger siblings. When she walked the Hewlands cows to Shottery common, the younger children would have come with her to play on the green under her watchful eye, as she and the other Shottery girls sang and dittied through their favourite ballads.

 

The lark that tirra-lirra chants,

With hey! with hey! the thrush and the jay,

Are summer songs for me and my aunts

While we lie tumbling in the hay.
⁹

 

If Ann wasn't living in or near Stratford from September 1581 till after her marriage, the roll-in-the-hay hypothesis becomes more difficult to sustain. Still, a boy may walk many a long mile in search of somewhere to sow a wild oat. As for the suggestion that Ann was hanging around Stratford ‘consorting with the local youth', if she had behaved in such a way in a God-fearing rural town like Stratford with a population of less than 2,000 she would have found herself up before the Vicar's Court in less time than it takes to sow a wild oat.If any such baggage had attempted to embroil Alderman Shakespeare's son, his friends on the Corporation would have run her out of town. A good deal of effort was expended by the Corporation in ridding the town of women of ill repute. When Richard Quiney was sworn in as Bailiff of Stratford in 1592, one of his first acts was to appoint a committee ‘to discover and notify the
presence, with a view to their removal from the borough, of undesirable women'.
¹⁰

The lament of the maiden for whom no husband has been found by parents or friends is a cliché of ballad literature, as for example in
I can, I will no longer lie alone
(1612–13).

 

'Tis my cruel friends have me o'erthrown…

 

What though my parents strive to procure

That I should a maiden still endure?

Do they what they will, I must have one.

I can nor will no longer lie alone.
¹¹

 

At twenty-six Ann Hathaway is thought to have been just such a caricature, desperate for a husband, any husband.

 

A blithe and bonny country lass…

Sat sighing on the tender grass

And weeping said, ‘Will none come woo me?'

A smicker boy, a lither swain…

That in his love was wanton fain

with smiling looks came straight unto her.

 

Whenas the wanton wench espied…

The means to make herself a bride,

she simpered smooth like bonny bell.

The swain that saw her squint-eyed kind…

His arms about her body twined,

and said ‘Fair lass, how fare ye? Well?'

 

The country-kit said, ‘Well, forsooth…

But that I have a longing tooth,

a longing tooth that makes me cry.'

‘Alas,' said he, ‘What garrs thy grief?'…

‘A wound,' quoth she, ‘without relief.

I fear a maid that I shall die.'

 

‘If that be all,' the shepherd said…

‘I'll make thee wive it, gentle maid,

and so recure thy malady.'

Hereon they kissed with many an oath…

And 'fore God Pan did plight their troth,

and so to the church apace they hie.
¹²

 

In this ballad, ‘Coridon's Song', by Thomas Lodge, published in
England's Helicon
(1600), responsibility for the clapped-up marriage is equally distributed between the needy maid and the opportunistic boy. Post-Victorian commentators are not so even-handed; the presumed mismatch between Ann and Will is seen as entirely down to Ann, who is taken to have been well past her sell-by date, because the received wisdom was that early modern Englishwomen married in their early teens. When Peter Laslett published his ground-breaking work
The World We Have Lost
in 1965 it contained many surprises, not least of which was the age at which Elizabethans married: ‘We have examined every record we can find…and they all declare that, in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, marriage was rare at these early ages and not as common in the late teens as it is now.'
¹³

What Laslett and the Cambridge Group found when they examined a thousand licences issued by the Diocese of Canterbury between 1619 and 1660 was that the commonest age of brides was twenty-two, and the average mean age even higher, twenty-four. Further research has come up with a mean age at marriage of twenty-six or-seven for early modern Englishwomen and twenty-eight for men.
¹⁴
What was remarkable about Ann Hathaway's wedding is not that at twenty-six she was so old, but that her husband was so young. As Laslett's researchers found of their original thousand cases, ‘Only ten men married below the age of 20, two of them at 18, and the most common age was 24…'
¹⁵

The mating of younger men with older women, though unusual, occasioned no outrage in the sixteenth century. Indeed, for apprentices, far from their families, kept on hard rations and often beaten, marrying the master's widow was the kind of dream-wish that fuelled many ballads and popular romances.
¹⁶
In Part II of Thomas Deloney's
The Gentle Craft
we find an elaborated tale of the Widow Farmer's love for William, the most menial of her servants. William has dared
to woo his mistress quite aggressively and has been demoted to the scullery for his pains, a punishment which he bears in good part because he truly loves her. Widow Farmer invites her friends and suitors to dinner. All her other menservants are called to the table, only to be dismissed for their cockiness and insolence when they refuse the menial job of fetching the oysters. Up from the scullery with the oysters comes William in his greasy work clothes. Widow Farmer takes his grubby hand in hers, kisses him and presents him to the company as her chosen husband.