Shakespeare's Wife (9 page)

Ann's could have been the crime of cradle-snatching as described in
The Golden Book of Christian Matrimony
: ‘When a wicked subtle and shameless woman enticeth an ignorant young man from his father, which with great expenses, travail and labour hath brought him up, when she blindeth him with love and at the last getteth him away under the title of marriage.'
¹⁰
If Will Shakespeare had been a young man with prospects there might have been some point in entrapping him, but he wasn't. The family's disgrace was known to everyone in
Stratford even before John Shakespeare became involved in a violent quarrel with four of his neighbours, against whom he was forced to take out an injunction ‘for fear of death and mutilation of his limbs'. Will was certainly young and witty, possibly handsome, but he had nothing else to offer the kind of girl who, as a sober, industrious, patient, frugal wife, would help him repair his family's ruined fortunes. Perhaps Will was like Bassanio in
The Merchant of Venice
, a gambler in love, risking his whole future on winning a wife. And perhaps the quiet woman of Hewlands Farm was like the doyenne of Belmont, constrained by her dead father's will to seek a better match than a penniless boy. Bassanio is worse than penniless; after squandering his own fortune he has entered over ears in debt.

 

'Tis not unknown to you, Antonio,

How much I have disabled mine estate,

By something showing a more swelling port

Than my faint means would grant continuance.

Nor do I now make moan to be abridged

From such a noble rate, but my chief care

Is to come fairly off from the great debts

Wherein my time (something too prodigal)

Hath left me gaged. To you Antonio

I owe the most in money and in love,

And from your love I have a warranty

To unburthen all my plots and purposes

How to get clear of all the debts I owe. (I. i. 122–34)

 

In case we have not quite grasped the nature of the case, he reiterates:

 

I owe you much, and (like a wilful youth)

That which I owe is lost…(146–7)

 

Shakespeare, of course, was ‘a wilful youth'. Bassanio gambles, and he wins the prize, the mistress of Belmont, who seems a great deal wiser and more mature than he is himself.

‘Hanging and wiving go by destiny,' according to the proverb, but, unlike Portia's father, Elizabethans were not content to leave such an
important matter to luck. To make a difficult matter more difficult a sea-change was happening in the basic concepts that ruled wedding and wiving, as we can see from the case of Mary Darrell and the clergyman-poet Barnabe Googe which was submitted to the arbitration of the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1563. Mary was originally sought in marriage by John Lennard, of Chevening, near Tunbridge Wells, for his eighteen-year-old son Sampson. Lennard claimed to have been first approached by the Darrells who proposed their daughter as a match for his son, and that, far from being averse to the match, Mary showed as much eagerness as feminine modesty would permit. The Darrells praised young Lennard, who stood to inherit a fortune, insisting on his suitability for their daughter; Lennard demurred, perhaps because he considered his boy too young. Lennard interviewed Mary several times:

 

I had divers talks with the maid for my son in his absence and yet no more than she was glad of, and then delivered me by her parents…at our last talk, hearing her mild and loving answers with full consent to have my son, who I know loved her entirely, and therefore I having good liking in me that he should be her husband, nature wrought in me to lay my right hand on her breast and to speak thus in effect: ‘Then I see that with God's help the fruit that shall come of this body shall possess all that I have, and thereupon I will kiss you.' And so indeed I kissed her. I gave her after this silk for a gown (she never wore none so good), and she, in token of her good will, gave my son a handkerchief and, in affirmance of this, her father wrote a letter to me by her consent…
¹¹

 

To a modern sensibility Lennard's behaviour is repellent. The courting of Mary Darrell had reached the stage of a match concluded, with letters and tokens exchanged. Because Lennard's son had not been present the agreement was not a full contract, but a pre-contract, which would have to be formally set aside before a contract with any other party could be entered into. It may seem peculiar that the lover himself had apparently not asked the lady for her hand—indeed he might never have spoken with her at all—but a modest young woman was supposed, not to see for herself whether she fancied a given man,
but to acquiesce in the choice of others, in this case both sets of parents. When Lennard visited the Darrells at Bartholomewtide he told Mary and her parents that he had heard talk that she was to be married, which surprised him.

 

They all three answered me, and others for me, very often, that it was not so and that Master Googe was but a suitor. To prove that to be true, the parents sent me a letter sent to Master Googe of late wherein she termeth him to be but a suitor and prayeth him to leave his suit, and the parents still say that he hath no hold of her, except by secret enticement, against their will, he hath caught some word of her, a thing odious to God and not to be favoured by man.
¹²

 

Part of the ‘secret enticement', as here alleged, was Googe's writing of poems to Mary. A similar situation is complained of in
A Midsummer Night's Dream
when Egeus appears before Theseus:

 

Full of vexation come I, with complaint

Against my child and daughter, Hermia.

Stand forth, Demetrius. My noble lord,

This man hath my consent to marry her.

Stand forth, Lysander. And, my gracious Duke,

This man hath bewitched the bosom of my child.

Thou, thou, Lysander, thou hast given her rhymes,

And interchanged love-tokens with my child.

Thou hast by moonlight at her window sung,

With faining voice, verses of feigning love,

And stol'n the impression of her fantasy…

(I. i. 22–31)

 

What Archbishop Parker decided to do when confronted with the case of Barnabe Googe and Mary Darrell was to remove Mary from her parents' house and make her a ward of the court while the case was considered. The ecclesiastical authority decided for the lovers, and denied the claim of both the Lennard and the Darrell families. On 5 February 1564 Barnabe and Mary were married, and went on to have eight children.

In
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, Lysander defends his claim in unambiguous terms:

 

You have her father's love, Demetrius.

Let me have Hermia's. Do you marry him. (93–4)

 

He gets his laugh before Egeus snaps back:

 

Scornful Lysander! True, he hath my love,

And what is mine, my love shall render him,

And she is mine, and all my right of her

I do estate unto Demetrius. (95–8)

 

This is now serious. Egeus has invoked the law of
feme coverte
, which explicitly denies a woman's agency and treats her as a ‘chattel' or movable possession of her father or husband. Lysander comes back with an argument that church authorities would have understood. All things being equal, there is nothing to choose between Demetrius and him; this being the case the lady should have the casting vote.

 

I am, my lord, as well derived as he,

As well possessed. My love is more than his,

My fortunes every way as fairly ranked…(99–101)

 

Hermia meanwhile has sounded a new note: she will accept a life of celibacy rather than marry a man to ‘whose unwished yoke [her] soul consents not to give sovereignty' (81–2). The idea of winning the
soul
's consent by courtship is new; in his response to Hermia, Theseus reinforces the underlying concept of marriage as a spiritual partnership by describing his marriage day as ‘the sealing day' between his love and him ‘For everlasting bond of fellowship' (84–5).

The Googe story ended happily, but the seduction of country girls by wandering poets did not always end so. In
Love's Labour's Lost
, the dairymaid Jaquenetta is described by Costard as ‘a true girl'. It is her misfortune to be seduced by the posturing fool Armado. The child Moth rails against him, to no avail:

…to jig off a tune at the tongue's end, canary to it with your feet, humour it with turning up your eyelids, sigh a note and sing a note, sometime through the throat as if you swallowed love with singing love, sometime through the nose as if you snuffed up love by smelling love, with your hat penthouse-like over the shop of your eyes; with your arms crossed on your thin-belly doublet like a rabbit on a spit, or your hands in your pocket, like a man after the old painting, and keep not too long in one tune but a snip and away. These are compliments. These are humours. These betray nice wenches, that would be betrayed without these…(III. i. 9–23)

Poetry was almost certainly part of Shakespeare's armamentarium as a lover, and he would surely have deployed it as part of his courtship of Ann Hathaway, but the truth of the matter could be anything but pleasant. It should not be forgotten that, when his gloving business was thriving, John Shakespeare employed women to sew up the gloves, putting together the cut-out skins or ‘tranks'. The thought that the son of the house might have seduced one of the girls working in his father's workshop may be unattractive but it is a more usual, if less romantic, scenario than the one that has Will waylaying a milkmaid on her way to pasture and chanting woeful ballads to her eyebrow. Women in service have always been vulnerable to the sexual advances of their employers and their sons. The church courts took a particularly dim view of sexual exploitation of servants, because employers and their wives were considered to stand
in loco parentis
. If it was known in Stratford that Will Shakespeare had made one of his father's workers pregnant, it would have been more shame to him than to her, and that circumstance alone could explain why his parents did not refuse their consent to his marriage. It would have been the worse for him because she was not a stranger but the daughter of a respected parishioner. The possibility should not be altogether discounted. However, even as early as 1582, John Shakespeare was probably no longer working as a glover.

 

CHAPTER FIVE

of the making of a match, of impediments to marriage and how to overcome them, of bonds and special licences and pregnancy as a way of forcing the issue, of bastards and bastardy, and the girl who got away

We don't know whether Ann Hathaway's ‘friends' ever made any effort to find her a husband. She may have had a swain before Will came into the picture. In
As You Like It
, even Audrey the goatherdess has a twenty-five-year-old swain whose name, amusingly enough, is William. When challenged, William readily confesses that he loves Audrey but, disconcerted by Touchstone's meretricious eloquence, he gives way to him without a struggle.
¹
We are not told how long William had been courting Audrey in his wordless and good-natured fashion; we watch helpless as the opportunist Touchstone, who has met Audrey and wooed her between one scene of the play and the next, wins her away from William and probably ruins her life.

Though Ann's friends would have understood that negotiating a match for her was part of their duties under her father's will, they were under no obligation to initiate the process. In reserving a marriage portion for Ann out of his estate, her father may have provided a disincentive rather than an incentive for finding her a husband. The widowed mistress of Hewlands Farm could have valued Ann too much as a maiden aunt, working unpaid to support the household, to set about scraping together the cash to cover her dowry bequest. Ann may well have become resigned to the idea that she was destined to work as an unpaid servant in someone else's household for the rest of her life, until the boy from Stratford began accosting her as she went about her daily tasks. She would probably have
thought him too young; he may have taken it upon himself to prove to her that he was not.

Tudor marriage negotiations were often broken off for months at a time as parents and friends wrangled over the precise arrangements for the disposal of property or the rights of any children in the property of either parent and so on back and forth. The death of a father necessitated a complete rejigging of all the terms of the agreement. The fact that no marriage contract between Will and Ann has survived doesn't mean that there wasn't one. Sandells and Richardson would have been involved in the negotiations from the outset, possibly long before the death of Richard Hathaway. If this was the case, negotiations would have been abandoned when Hathaway fell ill. A pregnancy might have been the only way the young couple could get them started again.

Holden's view is that, after the mythical ‘roll in the hay', ‘the autumn of 1582 saw Anne Hathaway telling her late father's friends that she was pregnant by young Will Shakespeare…'
²
The implication is that Ann was informing on her lover to men who would grab the figurative shotgun and prod him down the aisle with it. All we know for sure is that Fulke Sandells, the overseer of Ann's father's will, and John Richardson, one of the witnesses, both men of substance, acted for the couple in securing a special licence and putting up the bond that would enable them to marry with a single calling of the banns. Both parties to a marriage were legally required to call the banns, that is, to announce the intended marriage in both parish churches on three successive Sundays, and to ask anyone who knew of grounds why the marriage should not proceed to come forward and state the case. The banns might not be called during Advent and Christmastide. In 1582 Advent Sunday fell on 2 December and Christmastide ended on the octave of the Epiphany, 13 January. Applications for special licences were relatively common; in 1582 the Consistory Court of Worcester granted ninety-eight of them. Puritan reformers inveighed against what they saw as the survival of a popish scheme to wring money from the faithful, and argued that solemnisation of marriage should be performed throughout the liturgical year, without penalties.

That November the banns could have been called on any of four
Sundays, 4, 11, 18 and 25 November, and on the Feast of St Andrew, 30 November. If the banns were not called before the special licence became necessary, we should probably conclude that it was because the match had not been agreed. Nobody would have committed the huge sum of £40 required for the bond if it could have been avoided or if there was the slightest chance of forfeiting it. Ann did not need to argue her case to anyone; she was a spinster and at her own disposal, but only misogyny would assume on the available evidence that she was pushing for the marriage and Will was resisting.

With them to Worcester Sandells and Richardson had to take a slew of supporting documentation, all which would have had to be sworn and notarised, including an allegation giving correct names and addresses of both parties plus evidence of the consent of parents or guardians in the case of the minor, William. Being at her own disposal Ann would have signed the allegation for herself or, more likely, made her mark. She and William's parents would also have been required to sign a statement that to the best of their knowledge there was no legal impediment to the marriage, no prior contract and no question of consanguinity. The £40 bond, ‘quadraginta libris bone et legalis monete Anglie', was to indemnify the court in case of a challenge; the £40, the price of a middle-sized house, would become payable only in the event that the marriage was invalid. Neither the bride nor the groom was required to attend the court. The bond itself was written in Latin with an English explanation of the terms:

The condition of this obligation is such that if hereafter there shall not appear any lawful let or impediment by reason of any precontract consanguinity affinity or by any other lawful means whatsoever but that William Shakespeare of the one party and Ann Hathaway of Stratford in the Diocese of Worcester maiden may lawfully solemnise matrimony together and in the same afterwards remain and continue like man and wife according unto the laws in that behalf provided and moreover if there be not at this present time any action suit quarrel or demand moved or depending before any judge ecclesiastical or temporal for and concerning any such lawful let or impediment. And moreover if the said William Shakespeare do not proceed to solemnisation of marriage with the said Ann Hathaway without the
consent of her friends. And also if the said William do upon his own proper costs and expenses defend & save harmless the Right Reverend Father in God Lord John Bishop of Worcester and his officers for licensing them the said William and Ann to be married together with once asking of the banns of matrimony between them and for all other causes that may ensue by reason or occasion thereof that then the said obligation to be void and of none effect or else to stand & abide in full force and vertue
³

Once the special licence had been obtained and only one proclamation of the banns was required it could be made at the door of the church on the day of the marriage itself.

The amount of money at risk seems higher than would be required simply to enable a marriage with only one asking of the banns. It has always been assumed that Ann had no other suitor than Shakespeare; if negotiations for a marriage with someone else had been begun before Ann's father's death, and had reached a stage of commitment, we would have another motive for speed and privacy in the circumstances. Ann's brother Bartholomew married three weeks after his father's death; in his case the commitment had reached its final stage and the marriage went ahead regardless. Bartholomew's son and daughter were later to marry a sister and brother, and Ann may have been in line for a sensible marriage with one of her brother's brothers-in-law before she fell in love with a boy genius.

There is another possible impediment to the marriage of Will and Ann. If Richard Hathaway stood godfather to Richard Shakespeare, and/or Joan Hathaway to Joan Shakespeare, Will and Ann would have found themselves within the prohibited degrees of spiritual consanguinity. Godparents were treated within the canon law as parents; in the eyes of the church their children and their godchildren were spiritual brothers and sisters and could not marry without special dispensation from the bishop's court. The doctrine of spiritual affinity had occasioned a very satisfactory flow of revenue to the ecclesiastical courts and was bitterly resented by the populace. It was hard enough finding suitable mates for one's children without running into a web of affinity that effectively rendered all the neighbours ineligible.
⁴
Spiritual consanguinity or ‘cognatio spiritualis' as a ‘diriment
impediment of marriage', that is, grounds for dissolving a marriage already celebrated, had been attacked by Luther. In England the reform of the canon law was long in coming; neither the Henrician Canon nor Cranmer's proposed reform of the canon law was ever put into effect. The Elizabethan settlement, which held that ‘no prohibition, God's law except, shall trouble or impeach any marriage outside Levitical law', did not address itself specifically to the question. Whether or not spiritual consanguinity was still in force seems to have been a matter of custom.

What is actually a very ambiguous situation is seen by modern commentators as an open-and-shut case: ‘The distinct impression given by the bare documentation of these subsequent events is that these two worthies strong-armed young William over to the consistory court at Worcester, some twenty miles from Stratford, before he could flee his obligations.'
⁵
There is no evidence that Shakespeare was ever at the Consistory Court at Worcester. He had no role to play in the negotiations and his presence was not required. There was nothing for him to sign, and as a minor he was not qualified to sign. There was no hearing. He was not to be questioned. Ann would not have been required to be there either. Holden elaborates his untenable case: ‘It has even been suggested that Sandells and Richardson obtained the licence on their own initiative, with or without the knowledge of Shakespeare's father, to ensure that the father of Anne Hathaway's future child duly became her husband.'
⁶

There is nothing, it seems, that ignorance and prejudice will not suggest when it comes to the marriage of Ann Hathaway. Holden's nonsense is derived from the nonsense of the great Sir Sidney Lee, who did not scruple to invent what he did not know about the law governing marriage in the sixteenth century.

The prominence of the Shottery husbandmen in the negotiations preceding Shakespeare's marriage suggests the true position of affairs. Sandells and Richardson, representing the lady's family, doubtless secured the deed on their own initiative, so that Shakespeare might have small opportunity of evading a step which his intimacy with their friend's daughter had rendered essential to her reputation. The wedding probably took place without the consent of the bride
groom's parents—it may be without their knowledge—soon after the signing of the deed.
⁷

Of this there was not the slightest possibility. For anyone under age to marry without parental consent was considered a heinous sin, to which the Consistory Court could never have made itself a party. Will's full consent was necessary too; if he was married according to the order in the Book of Common Prayer, he would have been asked once whether he would and again whether he did take Ann to be his lawful, wedded wife. Yet his great champions would rather believe that he perjured himself than that he honestly and truly took Ann Hathaway to have and to hold. Certainly there could have been opposition to the match, on either side or both sides, especially if a more suitable match had already been mooted. It may have been opposition to their marriage that persuaded the young people to preempt the ceremony, and force the issue by chancing a pregnancy, as others had done before them and were to do after them.

In 1595 Shakespeare's patron, the Earl of Southampton (the same who is thought to have had a fully acted-out homosexual relationship with the Bard), fell seriously in love with one of the queen's maids of honour, the Earl of Essex's beautiful cousin Elizabeth Vernon. Over the next three years he wooed and won her, of necessity surreptitiously, for the queen was notoriously unwilling to countenance the wedding of her maids of honour, especially with any courtier she wanted to keep as one of her own devotees. In 1598 when the affair became known, the infuriated queen banished Southampton from Whitehall and ordered him to accompany Secretary Cecil on an official trip to France. On 1 February Rowland White wrote to Sir Robert Sidney:

My Lord of Southampton is much troubled at her Majesty's strange use of him…Master Secretary hath procured him licence to travel. His fair mistress doth wash her face with too many tears. I pray God his going away bring her to no such infirmity as is, as it were, hereditary to her name.
⁸

At this juncture, the twenty-five-year-old Southampton, abetted by the Earl of Essex and clearly determined to have Elizabeth as his
wife at any cost, took the desperate step of consummating the relationship. By 12 February when White wrote to Sidney again, Elizabeth Vernon was pregnant: ‘My lord of Southampton is gone and hath left behind him a very desolate gentlewoman that hath almost wept out her fairest eyes.'
⁹
The fairness of Elizabeth's eyes is evinced by a series of portraits, which show her to have been a classic Elizabethan beauty with blooming cheeks and lips, dark-grey eyes and masses of auburn hair. It was not until August, when royal attention was distracted by the obsequies for Lord Treasurer Burghley, that Southampton was able secretly to cross the Channel and solemnise his marriage.

Mistress Vernon is from the court and lies in Essex House. Some say she hath taken a venue under the girdle and swells upon it, yet she complains not of foul play but says the Earl will justify it. And it is bruited underhand that he was lately here four days in great secret of purpose to marry her and effected it accordingly.
¹⁰

Southampton then returned to Paris, hoping that his pregnant countess would escape the queen's wrath at least until after her delivery. By 3 September the queen had been informed of the clandestine wedding and commanded Southampton's immediate return from Paris, but he failed to comply. He was probably with his wife when she was brought to bed of a daughter, Penelope, at the beginning of November, and on 11 November he was imprisoned in the Fleet, where he remained until he was needed to support Essex in quelling the Irish Rebellion. Despite the vicissitudes of Southampton's career, which included another four-year period of imprisonment, the couple would go on to have four more surviving children.