Shakespeare: A Life (15 page)

One concludes that most of the poet's schoolmates and some of his
friends were unexceptionally Protestant, but a nucleus of Catholics lay
near the centre of his early acquaintanceship; he was surely not
surprised by those of the old allegiance among Hathaway's friends -- or
perhaps by Anne's regular church-going. Like others, she had, at
some point, accepted an Anglican faith which had kept an old order of
priests and bishops with a doctrine that admitted of belief in the Real
Presence in consecrated bread and wine; her conformity may or may
not have been painful for her, but it was to be matched by William's
practice.

Whether by calculation or
instinct, he had been careful in one way. He had not courted above his
social degree, or, in effect, matched the later presumption of his
friend Richard Tyler, who was named in the first draft of the
playwright's will. As a butcher's son, born in 1566, Tyler in the
1580s married Susanna Woodward of Shottery, after which Susanna was
disinherited by an angry grandfather, who seems to have felt that a
butcher's son was a poor choice for the eldest daughter of M
^r
Richard Woodward of Shottery Manor, who entertained the likes of Sir Fulke Greville.

On the other hand, William can hardly have acquired a maturity of
outlook that years would have given Anne. She had not acquiesced at a
casual moment, but when her circumstances were changed radically by
loss. Less than three months after their father's death Bartholomew
had wed Isabel Hancocks of Tredington and gone to live at Tysoe -twenty
miles south of Hereford. He was the brother closest to her in age, and
it is likely that Anne became a godmother to his child.
(Bartholomew's daughter 'Annys' -- or 'Anne' in her marriage register --
was baptized on 14 January 1584 after he had decided to return to
Stratford.
¹⁰
) It may not follow that, after her brother had left Hewlands, her
loneliness, age, or a quarrel with her father's widow had led Anne to
take a lover. But William was rewarded partly because of displacements
in her life; she would have been of use to her father and brother, and
after losing them she had found this rather elegant young man of
Henley Street, a son of her father's friend, ardent in his need for
her. Now, however, she had to face the consequences of becoming
pregnant-her social humiliation and the ruin of her life. Just how

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much William valued her maturity, or the kindness Whittington appears
to credit her with, we do not know. But he was evidently in love, and
his problem in November was to arrange for his future as quickly as
he could.

The urgency of his situation must have touched his parents sharply.
Under the elms of Henley Street with its dogs, carts, dust, and clamour a
few craftsmen knew a consoling normalcy, but in the troubled Midlands
the glovers' trade had its endemic difficulties, as it fell into
deeper decline. The Shakespeares' family included five living
children-William, Gilbert, Joan, Richard, and the 2-year-old Edmund -and
John Shakespeare with his large responsibilities had more cause for
anxiety. In the last Trinity term ( 15 June-4 July 1582) he had been
compelled, at any rate, to seek legal sureties of the peace against
Ralph Cawdrey, William Russell, Thomas Logginge, and Robert Young'for
fear of death and mutilation of his limbs'.
¹¹
The formulaic phrase might seem to apply literally to Ralph Cawdrey
the butcher, who once assaulted John Shakespeare's brother-in-law,
Alexander Webbe. But Cawdrey had become a respected figure at 'halls'.
William's father had sat with him at council in September, and had
sought sureties not because (in the legal formula) he feared 'death or
mutilation', but because he needed a respite from suits by creditors.

A family scandal could further
damage his trade. If the vicar's court noticed a sexual offence, the
lovers might be asked to apologize publicly on a Sunday. That could
bring a mild ignominy down upon a family. In fact, rash lovers did not
always avoid semi-public disgrace even if they married: Fulke
Sandells's son later heard from a vicar's apparitor simply because his
wife gave birth too soon after their wedding.

Gossip and rumour, in themselves, could cause an alert court to
summon a pregnant woman and her lover, and as Anne's condition became
obvious it could have attracted attention, so she may have left
Hewlands by November. But the evidence is unclear, in any case: her
November locale is given as "Temple grafton', in a Worcester entry

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that errs with her surname (' Whateley'). Temple Grafton was a
settlement outside the parish but only three and a half miles west of
Shottery and south of the Alcester road. (The hamlet was about five
miles from Henley Street.) If she huddled there William perhaps felt
obliged to ask for his father's consent to marry, and his mother's
willingness to share a home with his bride.

Yet he was not quite so dependent on them as is often implied.
Ecclesiastical laws had loopholes, and Richard Cosin (the bishop's
chancellor at Worcester) had power to override a refusal of consent
and issue a licence.
¹²
Nevertheless whatever their surprise, the young man's parents had
reason to favour a wedding once they knew of Anne's condition, quite
apart from a craftsman's fear of scandal and the real disgrace of
bastardy. Anne, of course, was no stranger to them, but the child of
an honourable yeoman William's father had aided; they were likely to
find her age and practicality of benefit to their son, a young man
lively, eloquent, with a 'mint of phrases in his brain' perhaps, but
of small practical experience. In one light, William was both more and
less than a mere individual; he was a guarantor of his family's
futurity, his father's investment and hope, since he would inherit;
and those with property to bequeath seldom objected to an heir's early
marriage.
¹³
A son who wed early might count on having a grown heir in his
lifetime, so that heritable land would not devolve (with wardship
complications) on a mere child.

His
mother, no doubt, wished him to acquit himself well, and as
arrangements were made near the month's end, some wind may have gone
out of William's sails. His real troubles, so far as one intuits them,
began with marriage, as in a sense his possibilities did. He had no
choice
but
to take on abrupt responsibility -- to be a husband, a
father. So his initiative was undercut; his situation in November was
hardly that of August. In yielding to exigencies late in the year his
summer romance must have begun to seem humdrum, undramatic, dull,
without risk, boring to an active mind. Also there were besetting
aspects of such a dilemma, for a complex young man sensitive to local
opinion; he was likely to regard any excitement, dread, regret, or
embarrassment he felt in November in many different lights, as his
mind circled round all sides of a topic. He probably began, though,

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soon enough to see his predicament in ironic perspective, and so
assumed a path that would help him to take a robust, amused, varyingly
ironic view of marital affairs later. At the moment he had to think of
banns, fees, sureties, a visit to the consistory court, a licence, and
the inexorable approach of a hasty wedding.

He appears to have journeyed to the bishop's court at Worcester, late
in November, with the farmers Fulke Sandells and John Richardson. Since
the first was a supervisor and the second a witness of Hathaway's will,
the two yeomen, in effect, represented Anne's father. Sandells, at
31, seems to have been as taciturn as his dry, laconic Baldon Hill
deposition suggests; he had no reason to be convivial with a youth who
had compromised Hathaway's daughter. But both Shottery farmers agreed
to post as surety for the marriage licence the large sum of £40, to be
forfeited if the validity of the union were impeached.

In the consistory court's licence entry, he was now matched with a
ghost; the wording of the entry (dated 27 November) applies absurdly
to a union 'inter
willelmum
Shaxpere et Annam whateley de Temple
grafton'. But clerks were lax with names of brides; one Stratford
marriage bond later seems to permit a wedding of a bridegroom with his
own curate, and another, in 1625, allows that ' John Francis and
Edmund Canninge' may wed (but 'Joan' could be spelled 'John').
¹⁴
Some confusion about Anne's locale, perhaps, was bound to occur if
she was living outside the parish. The chance that she was staying with
Whateleys is remote, though Whateleys were in the diocese and the
name had been prominent at Stratford since the town's incorporation. The
best explanation of 'Annam. whateley' may be that the court's clerk
was beset by a tithe dispute, involving William Whateley, the vicar of
Crowle, on the same day Shakespeare appeared. That suggestion with
relevant evidence was offered by Joseph Gray in
Shakespeare's Marriage
,
a main source for moderate commentators ever since (though Gray does
not quite explain 'Temple grafton'). Anyway, a clerk's error has made '
Anne Whateley'into an enduring spook.

Substantially, on 28 November, the bond of sureties shows that
William did not merit a 'special' licence of a kind issued to clerical
bridegrooms and those of more exalted rank than his own. He

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qualified for a 'common' licence, reserved for husbandmen, craftsmen,
and the like. This document was addressed, as a rule, to the minister of
the named church where the wedding was supposed to occur, but we do
not know where his own licence was sent.

Four conditions imposed on the young man all take the form of
unlikely negatives: he must not marry if a legal impediment exists, or
if a suit alleging an impediment is in process, or if he cannot
guarantee the bishop and the bishop's officers immunity from harm
arising from the issuing of a licence, or -- more interestingly -- if
the bride's friends do not approve the match. Two muddy-booted
farmers, it seems, represented Anne's friends, and the word 'impediment'
(which is in the marriage service too) would be recalled by a poet
who wrote, 'Let me not to the marriage of true minds | Admit
impediments'. By the end of the day, he was free to marry. The bond
itself allows

that will
ia
m Shagspere on the one p
ar
tie, and Anne hathwey of Stratford in the Dioces of worcester maiden may lawfully solennize m
at
ri
m
ony together and in the same afterward
es
remaine and continew like man and wiffe.
¹⁵

With the flick of a quill pen Anne has returned, in this document, back to Stratford parish-if she ever left it.

Richard Cosin or his registrar, Robert Warmstry, did remove one
'impediment'. The wedding, by licence, would need to be preceded by
only one reading of banns in church, not three as was more usual, and
that saved an unhelpful delay. The reading of banns was prohibited in
the diocese between Advent Sunday ( 2 December 1582) and the octave of
Epiphany (13 January), during which time weddings, too, were not
customary and in principle not allowed.

Shakespeare's banns were probably read in church on St Andrew's Day,
30 November, and the couple could have wed the next day, before the
prohibited season of Advent (otherwise they would have had to wait
until mid-January). Haste was welcome in light of Anne's situation,
and the ceremony took place in one of several possible locales. John
Haines, the curate, could have married them at St Peter's Bishopton --
north of Shottery -- or, possibly, Thomas Hunt did at All Saints'
Luddington to the south. These were Stratford's two chapelries. But
likelihood, after all, favours Temple Grafton, though

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its mention in the entry is not proof the wedding occurred there; it
would have been an unobtrusive place. Four years later, a Puritan survey
of Warwickshire described the vicar of Grafton, John Frith, as 'an
old priest & Unsound in religion'. As a papist Frith was not up to
much and was not very dangerous: 'he can neither prech nor read well,
his chicfest trade is to cure hawkes y
^t
are hurt or diseased, for which purpose manie doe usuallie repaire to him'.
¹⁶
It is pleasant to think Frith's hawks watched the young couple. Yet
whether they were married at Grafton or not, William and Anne began
wedded life before winter came to Stratford parish.

By December the poet had almost certainly brought Anne to Henley
Street, if she was not there before the wedding. It was normal for a
groom's father to offer the bride room and board for a few years, and
couples gratefully accepted shared lodgings. Anne had her bequest of
10 marks, and William may have had an annuity of £2, plus an extra
year's pay, if he worked for Hoghton, or savings if he had worked
elsewhere. Yet he would have found it hard to set up a new home with his
wherewithal.

Even before any
interlude 'in the Countrey', it seems, he had worked for his father.
He kept on for 'some time' in that employment after thinking it 'fit
to marry', says Nicholas Rowe, who explains the nature of the work
only as 'that way of Living which his Father propos'd to him'.
¹⁷
At any rate, William could have found a pen in his hand rather than a
glover's knife; he became very familiar with legal and business
terms, though he could have picked these up later (he would write
plays partly to suit Inns of Court men); he learned no more of the law
than someone outside the field could have acquired, and he absorbed
what he needed from other professions too. (Juliet's use of 'deed',
'counsel', or 'commission' --
Romeo and Juliet
, IV. i. 57-64 --
for example, need not suggest that he had trained as an attorney.)
Probably he served as a clerk, scrivener, and part-time helper of his
father.

Did a back wing at the
Birthplace afford the newlyweds some privacy? The wing has been said to
have been 'an independent little

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