One other quasi-legal digression is of some pertinence. If the young Shakespeare had indeed been working in the office of Stratford’s town clerk, he would have become fully acquainted with the case of a young woman who in 1580 drowned in the Avon. The inference was that she had committed suicide but her family, intent upon giving her a proper Christian burial, insisted that she had fallen accidentally into the river while going down to the bank with her milk-pail in order to draw water. The Avon at this juncture, by Tiddington, is known for its overhanging willows and coronet weeds. If she had been found guilty of “felo de se” or suicide, she would have been buried in a hole by a crossroads, at a spot where local folk were permitted to throw stones or broken pots. Henry Rogers conducted the inquest, and arrived at the conclusion that she had indeed met her death “per infortunium” or accidentally. If this suggests images of Ophelia, then it is interesting that the name of the girl was Katherine Hamlett.
All this is speculation, but — if he did begin his career in a lawyer’s office — he did not particularly care for the work. His emergence in London as an actor and dramatist suggests that, at an early stage, he willingly abandoned it. There was another change. A short while after his return to Stratford in 1582, he was courting Anne Hathaway.
CHAPTER 17
I Can See a Church by Day-Light
In As You Like It, the servant Adam suggests that “At seauenteene yeeres, many their fortunes seeke” (746). Shakespeare may have sought his fortune among the Lancastrian families of Hoghton Tower and Rufford Hall, but he had returned to his native town. If he then set to work in a lawyer’s office, he had at least one consolatory prospect. Anne Hathaway was already well known to him. Fourteen years previously John Shakespeare had paid off some of her father’s debts. The Hathaways were in any case long established in the region. They had been resident in the hamlet of Shottery, at Hewland Farm, since the end of the fifteenth century. Shottery was a mile outside Stratford itself, an area of scattered farms and homesteads on the edge of the Forest of Arden. Anne’s grandfather, John Hathaway, was classified as a yeoman and archer; he was esteemed highly enough to have become one of the “Twelve Men of Old Stratford” who presided at the Great Leet or criminal court. Anne’s father, Richard Hathaway, had inherited from him the farm and the property that in subsequent years became known as “Anne Hathaway’s Cottage.”
Richard Hathaway was also a farmer and substantial householder. By his first wife, who came from Temple Grafton, he had three children one of whom was Anne herself. He married again, and had further children. He was eventually “honestly buried” in the manner of the reformed faith, but he named a prominent recusant as an executor of his will; so the religious affiliations of the family, like those of so many other households in the neighbourhood, may have been mixed and ambiguous.
Anne Hathaway was the eldest daughter of the house and as such incurred a fair number of household duties, chief among them the care of her younger siblings. As the daughter of a farming family, too, she learned how to bake bread, to salt meat, to churn butter and to brew ale. In the yard outside the house were poultry and cows, pigs and horses to be fed and reared. Far from being a mésalliance or forced marriage, as some have suggested, the partnership of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway could have been an eminently sensible arrangement. He may even have exercised a good deal of caution, or common sense, in his choice of lifelong partner. This was thoroughly in keeping with his practical and business-like approach to all the affairs of the world.
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.