Shakespeare

She was eight years his senior – in the year of their marriage he was eighteen and she was twenty-six – but, in a period of shorter life expectancy, the disparity in age would have seemed greater then than now. It was an unusual arrangement, since in the sixteenth century it was customary for the man to marry a younger woman. The difference in age has of course aroused much speculation, primarily concerned with the wiles of an older female in coaxing an inexperienced young man into bed and eventual marriage. Yet it might, on the contrary, suggest sexual self-confidence on Shakespeare’s part. In any case the suspicion does less than justice to Shakespeare’s judgement and intelligence which, even at the age of eighteen, might have been acute. It is also an insult to Anne Hathaway who, like many of the silent wives of famous men, has endured much obloquy. Those biographers who enjoy dramatic speculation, for example, have noted that Shakespeare’s history plays harbour many manipulative older women, whose beauty seems mysteriously to wither on the vine. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream (138) Hermia cries out, “O spight! too olde to be ingag’d to young” and the Duke in Twelfth Night offers some advice-“Let still the woman take /An elder then her selfe”-and goes on to caution (1896-9):

Then let thy Loue be yonger then thy selfe,

Or thy affection cannot hold the bent;

For women are as Roses, whose faire flowre

Being once displaid, doth fall that verie howre.

But it is probably best to refrain from maladroit interpretation. In the Duke, Shakespeare has created a notorious sentimentalist. It could just as well be argued that, because the females in Shakespeare’s drama are literate, so must have been the women around him.

It is not known whether Anne Hathaway could read or write. There was no real opportunity which would have enabled her to learn how to do so and, in any case, 90 per cent of the female population of England were illiterate at that time. It has often been supposed that Shakespeare’s two daughters were also illiterate, and so we are faced with the irony of the greatest dramatist in the history of the world surrounded by women who could not read a word he wrote.

There is a sonnet placed as the 145th in Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence, which seems oddly situated and out of context. The last two lines suggest that it was in fact composed for Anne Hathaway and has some claim to being the first extant work of William Shakespeare-

“I hate” from “hate” away she threw,

And saued my life, saying “not you.”

Hate away is equal to Hathaway. The entire poem is a conventional and youthful paean to a kind and loving mistress, with “lips that Loues owne hand did make.” It is interesting as a token of Shakespeare’s early ambitions as a poet. He must have borrowed the sonnet form from a contemporary collection such as Tottel’s Miscellany, where the work of Wyatt and Surrey was to be found, or perhaps from the first published sonnet sequence in English, Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia, which was published in the summer of 1582. It may have proved the spur to Shakespeare’s invention. He reached for the form naturally and instinctively; this early poem is fluent and forceful, a harbinger of his triumphant mastery of that genre.

It is to be hoped that “Loues owne hand” had something to do with the match, since Anne Hathaway was four months pregnant by the time of their marriage day. It was not unusual in this period for couples to cohabit before their wedding. Their Stratford neighbours, George Badger and Alice Court, Robert Young and Margery Field, had a similar arrangement. It was also customary for both parties to make a “troth-plight,” a verbal contract of marriage before witnesses which was also known as “hand-fasting” or “making sure.” So Alice Shaw of Warwickshire declared to William Holder, of the same county, that “I do confesse that I am your wief and have forsaken all my frendes for your sake and I hope you will use me well.”¹ The man took the woman’s hand, and repeated the same pledge. Only after such a “troth-plight” could the woman give up her virginity. The marriage ceremony came later. It was a code of honour, marked out by both social and sexual discipline; there were of course different forms of “making sure,” varying from a private pledge to a ceremony with a prayer book. But its ubiquity can be measured in the fact that between 20 and 30 per cent of all brides bore children within the first eight months of marriage.