Shakespeare's Wife (11 page)

One scholarly tradition treats the entry in the Bishop of Worcester's transcript as evidence that Ann and Will were married in Temple Grafton. The parish registers of the ancient church of Temple Grafton, built by the Knights Templar in Saxon times, do not begin until 1612. The Vicar of Temple Grafton in 1582 was John Frith, who was, according to a puritan survey of the Warwickshire clergy, ‘an old priest and unsound in religion. He can neither preach nor read well. His chiefest trade is to cure hawks that are hurt or diseased, for which purpose many do usually repair to him.'
²⁵
In 1580 Bishop Whitgift's officers had had to require Frith to indemnify the church against any litigation arising out of marrying without licence anyone ‘at any times prohibited by the ecclesiastical laws'. If Frith was a Catholic and married Will and Ann as Catholics, we might wonder why they put themselves through the laborious business of the bond in the first place. It seems rather that Ann Whateley of Temple Grafton has nothing to do with the case.

If Ann Whateley is another Ann altogether but the William the same, we could decide that Ann Hathaway rescued her lover before he made a terrible mistake, and found himself yoked for life to the wrong Ann. For all their frantic fantasising, this possibility never occurs to the Shakespeareans, who have never swerved in their conviction that it was the woman Shakespeare married who was the wrong one. For them ‘Ann Whateley' must have been the love of his life, simply because she got away. Anthony Burgess lets his fantasy rip.

It is reasonable to believe that Will wished to marry a girl called Anne Whateley…Sent on skin-buying errands to Temple Grafton, Will
could have fallen for a comely daughter, sweet as May and shy as a fawn. He was eighteen and highly susceptible. Knowing something about girls he would know that this was the real thing. Something, perhaps, quite different from what he felt about Mistress Hathaway of Shottery.

Burgess has decided that Ann Whateley, about whom we know nothing, is beautiful, sweet and shy; he calls Ann Hathaway ‘Mistress' for no other reason than that it makes her sound forbidding, spinsterish, schoolmarmy even. The ‘something different' that Shakespeare feels is ‘the real thing'. The argument could as easily be reversed; Ann Hathaway could have been the real thing, Ann Whateley the decoy. Burgess and most of his ilk prefer to believe that Shakespeare married the wrong girl. ‘But why, attempting to marry Anne Whateley had he put himself in the position of having to marry the other Anne? I suggest that, to use the crude but convenient properties of the old women's-magazine morality stories, he was exercised by love for the one and lust for the other…'

Burgess is not at all troubled by the thought that Will had had sex with Ann Hathaway without loving her, and he clearly doesn't care whether Ann loved Will, as I'm sure she did. Burgess thinks that Ann Hathaway allowed Will to make love to her simply because she was easy, and that Will took advantage simply because he was incontinent.

I consider that the lovely boy Will probably was—auburn hair, melting eyes, ready tongue, tags of Latin poetry—did not, having tasted Anne's body in the spring, go eagerly back to Shottery through the early summer to taste it again. Perhaps Anne had already said something about the pleasures of love in an indentured bed, away from cowpats and the pricking of stubble in a field, and the word
marriage
frightened Will as much as it will frighten any young man.
²⁶

Burgess's calendar is askew. Ann's baby, born in May, must have been conceived in the third or fourth week of August. The association of stubble with spring or early summer is not one a country person would make. Cowpats are found in stubble only after the cows have been let into the fields after the harvest. If Titania could find a bank
where the wild thyme grows, we might conclude that Ann and Will could too. England was not then farmed every inch; all around Stratford there were hay and water meadows, and grazing commons, and fallow land, plus wilderness and wood. Shakespeare loved the summer meadows, where the young courting couples wandered in the deep grass and lay down together.

 

When daisies pied and violets blue

And lady-smocks all silver-white

And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue

Do paint the meadows with delight…

 

When shepherds pipe on oaten straws

And merry larks are ploughmen's clocks,

When turtles tread and rooks and daws,

And maidens bleach their summer smocks…
²⁷

 

Burgess prefers his imaginary Anne Whateley, ‘chaste, not wanton and forward'. He is neither the first nor the last to stigmatise Ann Shakespeare as promiscuous. She has been accused of adultery with two of her brothers-in-law, and a visiting preacher, on no evidence whatsoever. ‘Will gave in, with bitter resignation, and was led to the slaughter, or the marriage bed. The role of the honourable Christian gentleman was being forced on him.' We may wonder how flattering Shakespeare would have found Burgess's estimate of his character. If any of this had been said in his hearing, he would have been obliged to challenge Burgess in defence of his own honour, to say nothing of his wife's.

 

CHAPTER SIX

of handfasts, troth-plights and bundling, of rings, gauds and conceits, and what was likely to happen on the big day

At some stage in the wooing, wedding and bedding of Ann Hathaway, the couple committed themselves by taking each other's right hand and uttering the words of marriage in the present tense, Will saying ‘I take thee Ann to be my wife' and Ann ‘I take thee William to be my husband'. Once they had done this they were married, whether the event had been witnessed or not. There were other sacramental signs, the exchange of rings and other tokens, the kiss, but the words were what constituted the sacrament. Even if consummation did not follow, the mere saying of the words between two parties was sufficient to render them ineligible for a match with any other party. If the couple cohabited after a handfasting or troth-plight, regardless of whether they had said the words in the present tense or mistakenly in the future tense, they were fast married:

If the parties betrothed do lie together before the condition be performed; then the contract for the time to come is without further controversy sure and certain, for…it is always presupposed that a mutual consent as touching marriage, has gone before.
¹

Scholars annotating the passage in
The Winter's Tale
in which Leontes suggests that his virtuous wife Hermione deserves a name ‘As rank as any flax-wench, that puts to it Before her troth-plight' have generally failed to understand the importance of that ‘before'. The difference between ‘before' and ‘after' was the difference between fornication and matrimony.

This situation could only too easily be manipulated by unscrupu
lous people anxious to set aside valid marriages or to evade their responsibilities. The only remedy was the setting aside of clandestine matches whether valid in the sight of God or not, and requiring marriage to be celebrated publicly according to the laws of God and man before it could be accepted as legally binding. The Council of Trent, acting on the certainty that
de occultis non scrutantur
, ‘what is secret may not be examined', demanded the presence of two witnesses as a condition of valid matrimony. For English protestants the situation remained confused until the Hardwick Marriage Act of 1754. Till then ‘making all sure' in marriage required a belt-and-braces approach.

The action of
Cymbeline
, one of Shakespeare's most mysterious plays, known to us only from the Folio, turns on a ‘handfast'. Imogen, destined by her father for marriage with the brutish son of his second wife, takes pre-emptive action by handfasting herself to Posthumus Leonatus, ‘a poor but worthy gentleman'.

 

She's wedded,

Her husband banished, she imprisoned. All

Is outward sorrow…(I. i. 7–9)

 

The courtier who gives us this information at the beginning of the play is anxious that we should understand that Imogen is truly married: when he refers to Posthumus as ‘he that hath her' he immediately corrects himself—‘I mean that married her…' (18). The queen plots against Posthumus' loyal servant Pisanio, because he is ‘the remembrancer' who will remind Imogen ‘to hold The handfast to her lord' (I. vi. 77–8). With Posthumus out of the way, Imogen is treated by her father and stepmother as if she were still eligible. She and Pisanio are the only ones aware that Cloten is ‘A foolish suitor to a wedded lady That hath her husband banished' (I. vi. 2–3). Cloten upbraids Imogen:

 

Your sin against

Obedience, which you owe your father, for

The contract you pretend with that base wretch,

One bred of alms, and fostered with cold dishes,

With scraps o'th'court, it is no contract, none,

And though it be allowed in meaner parties

(Yet who than he more mean?) to knit their souls

(On whom there is no more dependency

But brats and beggary) in self-figurèd knot,

Yet you are curbed from that enlargement, by

The consequence o'the crown…(II. iii. 108–18)

 

Those who comb Shakespeare's work for possible disparagement of his life with Ann might snatch at the hint that they had nothing but ‘brats and beggary', but the person making the judgment is not Shakespeare but Cloten, the brutish villain of the piece.

In
Romeo and Juliet
, when Juliet inadvertently declares her love to Romeo, and he returns it, she describes what has passed between them as a contract. Some of the things she has said could be construed as constituting a troth-plight:

 

be but sworn my love,

And I'll no longer be a Capulet…

Romeo, doff thy name,

And for thy name which is no part of thee

Take all myself. (II. i. 77–8, 89–91)

 

Romeo replies with a version of the words of the handfast: ‘I take thee at thy word' (91). Juliet has committed herself unwittingly, thinking herself to be alone. Nothing about this interchange could possibly bind either of them, except perhaps Juliet's belief that she is so bound:

 

Fain would I dwell on form, fain, fain deny

What I have spoke, but farewell compliment.

Dost thou love me? I know thou wilt say ‘Ay',

And I will take thy word. At lovers' perjuries

They say Jove laughs. O gentle Romeo,

If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully…(130–5)

 

Romeo attempts to swear and fails; nevertheless Juliet considers herself contracted:

 

Well, do not swear. Although I joy in thee

I have no joy in this contract tonight.

It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden…(158–60)

 

As she turns to go, Romeo stops her: ‘O wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?' (167). She replies, ‘What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?' (168). He explains: ‘Th'exchange of thy love's faithful vow for mine' (169). Juliet believes that her vow has already been given. ‘I gave thee mine before thou didst request it…' (170). When she returns she instructs him to arrange the solemnisation of their wedding.

 

If that thy bent of love be honourable,

Thy purpose marriage, send me word tomorrow

By one that I'll procure to come to thee,

Where and what time thou wilt perform the rite…(185–8)

 

‘The rite' is eventually performed off-stage by Friar Lawrence. Romeo promises to tell him ‘when and where and how We met, we wooed and made exchange of vow…' even though, as far as the audience has witnessed, neither of them has made a vow. What is more, no banns have been published and parental consent has not been and will not be given. By the end of Act II scene ii of
Romeo and Juliet
, Juliet is already hopelessly compromised. The friar, ‘a ghostly confessor and a sin-absolver', the like of whom had not been seen in England for more than fifty years, is hardly as cheery and reassuring a character as he is usually played. Juliet is to be shriven—an exotic concept for most of Shakespeare's audience—then married in short order. Romeo, whose vow-making has been anything but satisfactory, tells the friar that his job is to join their hands ‘with holy words'. The friar's answer would have chilled many an anxious parent to the bone.

 

Come, come with me, and we will make short work,

For by your leaves you shall not stay alone

Till holy church incorporate two in one. (II. iv. 35–7)

 

It is the same meddlesome friar who advises Romeo to consummate his marriage before fleeing to Mantua where he will live till they can find a time to ‘blaze', that is, publicly proclaim, the fact of the marriage and reconcile the friends of both parties. Verona is and is not the Warwickshire of the 1590s; what Romeo and Juliet do was identified with the bad old days, but the anxieties evoked by their wilfulness were real and present to Shakespeare's audience. Scandals arising from secret or invented handfastings, troth-plights and weddings occurred every year, and cruel and tyrannical proceedings by parents were not uncommon either. To Shakespeare's audience Capulet's contemptuous treatment of his daughter would have been every bit as shocking as her impetuosity.

In his search for an explanation of the high incidence of premarital pregnancy in early modern England, Laslett came across the Proceedings of the Registry of the Archdeaconry at Leicester, July 1598:

The common use and custom within the county of Leicester…for the space of 10, 20, 30 or 40 years past hath been and is that any man being a suitor to a woman in the way of marriage is upon the day appointed to make a final conclusion of the marriage before treated of. If the said marriage be concluded and contracted then the man doth abide the night the next following after such a contract, otherwise he doth depart without staying the night.
²

Again and again in the record we find rather confusing references to the fact that, after the contract to marry is concluded, it is made binding by the beginning of cohabitation, before solemnisation can take place. In
The Christian State of Matrimony
(1543) Heinrich Bullinger deplores the practice: ‘in some place there is such a manner, well worthy to be rebuked, that, at the handfasting, there is made a great feast and superfluous banquet, and even the same night are the two handfasted persons brought and laid together, yea, certain weeks before they go to the church'.
³

If the couple do not sleep together after the troth-plight it is not consummated and may, with difficulty and at considerable expense, be set aside by an ecclesiastical court. The separation of wedding from the solemnisation of matrimony was not, as we might think, a division
of the civil contract from the sacrament, as happens in Europe today, when couples marry in the town hall and then go to church. Rather it is a separation of the actual wedding from the public recognition of that wedding. Under the old dispensation, the actual contract of matrimony, the wedding, had taken place in the church porch; the bridal couple then entered the church not for the wedding but for the nuptial mass, when their union was blessed.

The protestant reformers who drew up the Book of Common Prayer during the brief reign of Edward VI brought the wedding into the church, so that the spouses uttered the words of both the pre-contract and the contract before the altar in full view of their families, friends and neighbours. This was the ideal, but it was far from the real. For several generations local custom had filled the doctrinal void and was not so easily abandoned. Besides, nothing could alter the underlying tenet that if a man told a woman that he was taking her to be his wife, and she replied in kind, in the present tense, they were married in the sight of God. When Edward VI died and Mary acceded to the throne, the Book of Common Prayer was thrown out, and the attempt to make publication of the banns and the church wedding itself a condition of the validity of marriage was abandoned. Catechisms like the Bishop of Lincoln's
Wholesome and Catholic Doctrine Concerning the Seven Sacraments
(1558) reiterated the old Catholic canon law:

although the solemnisation of Matrimony and the benediction of the parties married is made and given in the face of the church by a priest, yet the contract of matrimony wherein this sacrament consisteth, may be and is commonly made by the layman and woman which be married together. And because for lack of knowledge how such contracts ought to be duly made, and for omitting of such things as be necessary to the same, it chanceth oftentimes that the parties change their minds and will not keep that promise of marriage which seemed to have passed between them before, whereupon cometh and groweth between such persons and their friends great grudge and hatred and great suit in the law.

The good bishop then goes on to supply the correct form of words for the contract, and goes to on to reassure the faithful that ‘the parties so
contracting may without scruple or evil conscience for so much live together in godly and chaste matrimony to the good will and pleasure of almighty God'.
⁴

Laslett is tempted to interpret pre-solemnisation cohabitation as a sort of ‘trial marriage', which is a little misleading. If the contract itself was valid, in that there was no legal impediment, the only way the trial marriage could fail would be if one or other partner was incapable of sexual intercourse. This too would become a matter for the ecclesiastical court, which could order an examination of either party or both parties. Hence the rage and disgust of the puritans at the antics of the learned clerics in what was known to the common people as the ‘bawdy' court.

This court poulleth parishes, scourgeth the poor hedge priests, loadeth church-wardens with manifest perjuries, punisheth whoredoms and adulteries with toyish censures, remitteth without satisfying the congregation, and that in secret places, giveth out dispensations for unlawful marriages, and committeth a thousand suchlike abominations.
⁵

The matters that came before the church courts were:

so handled that it would grieve a chaste ear to hear the bawdy pleading of so many proctors and doctors in those courts, and the sumners, yea, and the registrars themselves, Master Archdeacon and Master Chancellor are even fain to laugh it out many times, when they can keep their countenance no longer. An unchaste kind of dealing of unchaste matters: when folk may not marry, what degrees may not marry…
⁶

The assertion by the likes of Anthony Holden that Ann's pregnancy was the result of a single ‘roll in the hay' is more revealing of their own attitudes than of the social context of Ann's pregnancy. Elizabethans were not hillbillies. The marriage prospects of their children were matters of the highest importance. Young people were never unobserved by their neighbours and kin. Demographic historians would not take Nicholas Breton's Countryman as a reliable observer of what really went on, but his is certainly a description of a bucolic ideal, to which village elders could aspire.