Shakespeare

It is not known whether an approximation to the Catholic marriage service took place in the ancient church of Temple Grafton. Given the affinities of the priest, however, this seems likely. If so, the ceremony was conducted in Latin and took place between the canonical hours of eight and twelve in the morning. The favoured day was Sunday. It began at the church porch, where the banns were recited three times. Anne Hathaway’s dower, of £6 13s 4d, was then displayed and exchanged. She was no doubt “given” by Fulke Sandells or John Richardson who had stood surety in Worcester. The woman stood on the left side of the groom, in token of Eve’s miraculous delivery from Adam’s left rib; they held hands as a symbol of their betrothal. In the church porch the priest blessed the ring with holy water; the bridegroom then took the ring and placed it in turn on the thumb and first three fingers of the bride’s left hand with the words “In nomine Patris, in nomine Filii, in nomine Spiritus Sancti, Amen.” He left it on this fourth finger, since the vein in that finger was supposed to run directly to the heart. The couple were then invited into the church, where they knelt together in order to partake in the nuptial Mass and blessing; they wore linen cloths or “care cloths” upon their heads to protect them from demons. It was also customary for the bride to carry a knife or dagger suspended from her girdle, the reasons for which are uncertain. (Juliet possesses a dagger, with which she stabs herself.) The bride’s hair was unbraided, hanging loose about her shoulders. After the Mass it was customary for a festive procession to return from the church to the house where a wedding feast, or “bride-ale,” was prepared. The newly joined couple might then receive gifts of silver, or money, or food. The guests were in turn often given presents of gloves – since Shakespeare’s father was a glove-maker, there was no great difficulty in procurement. So we leave them on this apparently auspicious day.

Part II. The Queen’s Men

Richard Tarlton, the most popular comedian of the Elizabethan age.

CHAPTER 18 To Tell Thee Plaine, I Ayme to Lye with Thee

At some point after the wedding Shakespeare made his way to London. We do not know the year of this very significant transition, but he must have left Stratford by 1586 or 1587.

There are references in several of his plays to an unhappy separation immediately after a wedding, but these may all be wholly dramatic devices. John Aubrey has a note on the subject. “This Wm being inclined naturally to Poetry and acting, came to London I guesse about 18, and was an Actor at one of the Play-houses and did act exceedingly well.”¹ Aubrey would then “guesse” his removal to London just after his marriage, as others have also supposed, but this seems to defy common sense and practical decency. We may give him the benefit of a little time with his bride. The probability must be that William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, with their expected child, returned to the bridegroom’s home in Henley Street. It was customary for a newly married couple to set up house with their own resources but, if that were not possible, the groom’s father would offer lodging. With such a young bridegroom as Shakespeare, this must have been a necessity.

It has been supposed that the newly married couple moved into the back extension of the house, with its own solar (or upstairs room) and staircase. But this was probably not constructed until 1601, so the available space in Henley Street was even by Elizabethan standards nicely filled. There was not much privacy, but privacy was not itself considered essential or even particularly important. It was already a large family, with Shakespeare’s four younger siblings – Gilbert, Joan, Richard and Edmund, whom we may safely call the forgotten family of the dramatist – as well as four adults, but this was the kind of household to which Mary Arden and Anne Hathaway were accustomed. The ménage was soon enlarged by three children of Shakespeare’s own, so it would have been crowded and noisy. And what of Shakespeare himself? In the sixteenth century a married man could not enter a university or be formally apprenticed to a trade. Before his removal to London we may imagine that he led an ordinarily conventional outward life as a lawyer’s clerk.

His first daughter, Susannah, was born in May 1583; the name itself, suggesting purity and spotlessness, derives from the Apocrypha. It may have been an assertion of virtue after a birth perilously close to the wrong side of marriage. Although the name later became popular in the circles of the religious reformers, at least if Puritan literature is anything to go by, it was already familiar enough in Stratford itself. Three female children were baptised with that name in the spring of 1583.