Shakespeare's Wife (7 page)

Then did she set her black man by her white side and, calling the rest of her servants (in the sight of her friends) she made them do reverence unto him, whom they for his drudgery scorned so much before. So, the breakfast ended, she willed them all next morning to bear him company to the church, against which time William was so daintily tricked up, that all those which beheld him confessed he was a most comely, trim and proper man, and after they were married, they lived long together in joy and prosperous estate.
¹⁷

In another of Deloney's novellas,
Jack of Newbury
, Jack begins life as John, servant to a wealthy widow who is being courted by three men of substance. She tells John that she loves another, who is none of the three, and he advises her: ‘For your body's health, your heart's joy and your ears' delight, delay not the time, but entertain him with a kiss, make his bed next yours and chop up the match in the morning.'
¹⁸
The widow, piqued, responds that if he had announced to her that he wanted to marry, she would not be so indifferent. He gives the answer that Will might have given if Ann had directly or indirectly proposed to him:

It is not wisdom for a young man that can scantly keep himself to take a wife; therefore I hold it the best way to lead a single life, for I have heard say that many sorrows follow marriage, especially where want remains, and beside, it is a hard matter to find a constant woman, for as young maids are fickle, so are old women jealous.
¹⁹

Winter comes and with it a hard frost; the widow sups with John and gives him sack to drink; then she puts him to bed in his master's
feather bed, slips in beside him and stays all night. In the morning she bids him fetch a link and light her way to the chapel, where she is to meet a bridegroom. As he stands with her in the winter-dark chapel John realises that the expected bridegroom is none other than himself. The widow gently reminds him: ‘Stand not strangely, but remember that you did promise me on your faith not to hinder me when I came to the church to be married, but rather to set it forward: therefore set your link aside and give me your hand'.
²⁰
After some only-to-be-expected vicissitudes, ‘they lived long together in most godly, loving and kind sort, till in the end she died, leaving her husband wondrous wealthy'. Sir Sidney Lee might be shocked by the widow's forward behaviour but Shakespeare and his contemporaries were by no means so hidebound. The extraordinary career of theatrical impresario Philip Henslowe was made possible only by his marrying in 1577 the widow of the Earl of Montague's bailiff, whose servant he had been.
²¹

In
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
we do not know how old Silvia is, or how young Valentine might be, but we do know that Silvia, besides being Valentine's social superior, is maturer and wiser than he, whether she is chronologically older or not. As even his servant Speed can figure out, Sylvia teaches Valentine how to woo her.

 

My master sues to her, and she hath taught her suitor,

He being her pupil, to become her tutor…

Herself hath taught her love himself to write unto her lover.

(II. i. 129–30, 158)

 

Rosalind too, in
As You Like It
, undertakes to teach the boy Orlando how to love her.

In
Twelfth Night
, the ‘youth' Cesario is sent to woo ‘a virtuous maid, the daughter of a count that died some twelvemonth since'. Orsino assumes that because Cesario is a boy he will succeed in his suit where his own has failed.

 

She will attend it better in thy youth

Than in a nuncio's of more grave aspect…

For they shall yet belie thy happy years

That say thou art a man. Dian's lip

Is not more smooth and rubious. Thy small pipe

Is as the maiden's organ, shrill and sound…(I. iv. 27–8, 30–3)

 

When Cesario makes a disturbance at her gate Olivia asks her majordomo: ‘Of what personage and years is he?' (I. v. 150). And Malvolio makes answer:

Not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy. As a squash is before 'tis a peascod, or a codling when 'tis almost an apple. 'Tis with him in standing-water, between boy and man. He is very well-favoured, and he speaks very shrewishly. One would think his mother's milk were scarce out of him. (151–6)

The supposed boy achieves access where no man could, but there is nothing bashful in his suit. He describes what he would do to win Olivia from her obduracy.

 

Make me a willow cabin at your gate,

And call upon my soul within the house.

Write loyal cantons of contemnèd love,

And sing them loud even in the dead of night.

Halloo your name to the reverberate hills,

And make the babbling gossip of the air

Cry out, ‘Olivia'! (I. v. 257–63)

 

Though Olivia doesn't marry her original boy lover, who is a girl in disguise, she does marry her twin Sebastian who can be no older than she. There is no good reason to suppose that William wooed Ann after Cesario's fashion; the most we can conclude from the evidence of
Twelfth Night
is that the idea of a youth seducing a woman in mourning didn't paralyse him with horror or drown him in bitter reflection.

Scholars desirous of separating Shakespeare from his pesky wife have taken for granted that all her life she could neither read nor write. They want her, need her to have had no inkling of the magnitude of her husband's achievement.

Of course most of the women in his world had little or no literacy, but the commonness of the condition does not change the fact: it is entirely possible that Shakespeare's wife never read a word that he wrote, that anything he sent her from London had to be read by a neighbour and that anything she wished to tell him—the local gossip, the health of his parents, the mortal illness of their only son—had to be consigned to a messenger.
²²

Greenblatt can see no one to help Ann keep in touch with her husband beyond an Elizabethan version of a courier service. He imagines that any letter of Shakespeare's would have to have been read by a ‘neighbour'. If Shakespeare wrote at all, he would have written as Richard Quiney did, to a kinsman or a close friend, who had the duty of reading the letter to his wife and of penning her response. Abraham Sturley used to sign himself off to Quiney as writing ‘at your own table in your own house', with Elizabeth Quiney beside him, virtually dictating what he was to write.
²³
At least one of Shakespeare's brothers was fully literate and should have kept Shakespeare informed of the health of his parents. Ann's brother could read and write, as could her elder daughter Susanna.
²⁴
Ann did not have to depend on the kindness of strangers or on professional messengers, who did not exist. Early modern letters were not private, but designed to be read aloud, in company. Truly intimate matters were deemed unsuitable for a letter.

Certainly it is possible, even entirely possible, that Ann could not read. It is also possible, given the absolute absence of evidence to the contrary, that she was blind. She may have been illiterate when Shakespeare met her, and he may have spent the long hours with her as she watched her cows grazing on the common, teaching her to read. In his plays he is very well aware of the erotic dimension of the teaching situation, whether it's Henry teaching Katharine English, or Rosalind teaching Orlando how to make love.

Ann's staunchly protestant family would have had her taught to read if only so that she could read her Bible every day. Without a growing passion for reading the Reformation could never have happened. Catholics thought the way to salvation lay through ritual and prayer; protestants put their faith in a book. By the 1580s people who couldn't
read were sensible of a spiritual as well as a social disadvantage. In the winter, when there was little or no work for children in the fields, even the humblest farming villages would set up a dame school, where a woman who could read would teach children who couldn't. The Bible Ann read was probably the Geneva Bible, small in format, low in cost and aggressively marketed up and down the country.
²⁵

In early modern England most of the people who could read were unable to write. Until the study of literacy began in earnest in the 1960s it was generally assumed that only men who had attended a grammar school were able to read or write, and that everyone else bar a few privately educated ladies could do neither. Then to her surprise Margaret Spufford began to come across evidence of pedlars selling ‘little books' up and down the country. She also found the observations of a Jesuit in gaol in Wisbech in the 1580s and 1590s who looked on horrified as large groups of puritans read aloud from their Geneva Bibles: ‘Each of them had his own Bible, and sedulously turned the pages and looked up the text cited by the preachers, discussing the passages among themselves to see whether they had quoted them to the point, and accurately, and in harmony with their tenets.'
²⁶
Thomas Daynes, Vicar of Flixton in Suffolk, was disgusted to see that his parishioners brought their copies of the Book of Common Prayer to church with them, and instead of listening to his puritan harangues went on ‘looking in their books'.
²⁷

David Cressy found a sharp rise in the number of schoolmasters listed by visitations in rural Essex and Hertfordshire from 1580 to 1592.
²⁸
One fifth of the villages in Cambridgeshire had a schoolmaster licensed continuously from 1570 to 1620 but the provision of teaching varied enormously from county to county and even parish to parish. In some places farmers clubbed together and pooled their resources to endow a local school.

Between 1580 and 1700, 11 per cent of women, 15 per cent of labourers and 21 per cent of husbandmen, could sign their names, against 56 per cent of tradesmen and craftsmen, and 65 per cent of yeomen…There was…‘general and substantial progress in reducing illiteracy' among all social groups except labourers in the late sixteenth century…
²⁹

In the dame schools girls were taught to read and sew, knit and spin, boys to read, write and cast accounts. We have no idea how many dame schools there were in England in the early modern period but there must have been many more than there were schools where boys were taught by graduates. When Christ's Hospital was founded in 1552, girls as well as boys were admitted; the girls would be taught to read and sew but not to write. Reading was essential if women were to follow their daily devotions, reading the approved verses of the Bible and the psalms allotted for the day; sewing provided for the woman and her family.

Claire Cross, working on the spread of Lollardism in the early sixteenth century, was vividly aware of the importance of women in the process.

It may be that considerably more women than the churchmen suspected acquired the ability to read in order to peruse Lollard books. Certainly a reverence for books characterizes women in a majority of communities, and in several, Lollard women took a major part in organizing book distribution. As mothers and grandmothers they had unique authority over impressionable children, and far more women than have been recorded may have been responsible for helping educate succeeding generations in heresy.
³⁰

John Rhodes published in 1588
The Countryman's Comfort
for ‘the poor Countryman and his family who will ask these vain questions, sometimes saying: “What shall we do in the long winter nights? How shall we pass away the time on Sundays? What would you have us do in the Christmas holidays?” '
³¹

Though there was a Bible in every husbandman's home, there was also literature of more light-hearted kind. Spufford found that there was a mass of literature produced for the delectation and information of the masses, mostly little books or chap books that cost two pence:

The reappearance of a great number of popular songs of satisfying content and artistry…in the half-century or so after 1550, is a form of phenomenon a little like the phenomenon of the Great Rebuilding and is very likely related to it. The same upsurge of spending power in
the countryside that enabled the yeomanry to rebuild their houses, also permitted them to send their sons to school and to free them from the labour force. Children of less prosperous men could perhaps only be spared from school until six or seven, when they were able to become useful wage-earners and so only learned to read.
³²

The sabbatarian Nicholas Bownde lamented in 1595:

In the shops of Artificers, and cottages of poor husbandmen…you shall sooner see one of these new ballads, which are made only to keep them occupied…than any of the psalms, and may perceive them to be cunninger in singing the one than the other. And indeed, the singing of ballads is very lately renewed…so that in every fair and market almost you shall have one or two singing and selling of ballads.
³³

The ballad sellers were often women. As early as 1520 Oxford bookseller John Dorne noted in his day-book that he was selling up to 190 ballads a day at a half-penny each.
³⁴
Ann probably sang ballads as she worked, much to the annoyance of those who thought like Miles Coverdale that ‘women at the rocks and spinning at the wheels should be better occupied than with “hey nonny-nonny—hey trolly lolly” and such-like fantasies'.
³⁵

Autolycus, the pedlar in
The Winter's Tale
, sells literature to both sexes.

He hath songs for man or woman. No milliner can so fit his customers with gloves. He has the prettiest lovesongs for maids, so without bawdry, which is strange, with such delicate burdens of dildoes and fadings, ‘jump her and thump her', and where some stretch-mouthed rascal would, as it were, mean mischief and break a foul gap into the matter, he makes the maid to answer, ‘Whoop! Do me no harm good man'. (IV. iv. 192–200)

In
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Slender recalls that he has lent his book of riddles to Alice Shortcake (I. i. 185).