Now this, as I have already intimated, was not of course the first meeting of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway. But it was certainly the first time William lifted Anne up and carried her in his arms.
By Christmas of that year the pair were married. The licence was applied for at the end of November. It was a special licence, since there was now some haste. Their first child, their daughter Susanna, was born the following May.
I must have been conceived about the same time as Susanna Shakespeare. I doubt, however, if the circumstances were anything like the same. My father made love to my mother in a confession-box.
We may suppose, I trust, that Mr Shakespeare gave his Miss Hathaway a green gown. That is to say, the lovers slipped out from a dance into the night, and by the time they returned to the dance the back of Anne's dancing dress was stained with tell-tale green grass. I like these rural euphemisms. The world would be a more brutal and a less poetic place without them. You can find a use of this 'green-gown' phrase, in the explicit sense of 'giving a girl a green-gown', somewhere in the works of the poet and parson Robert Herrick, but I'm not able to recall the poem by name. Herrick, I think, is one of the few decent and authentic modern poets. Mr Shakespeare might have liked him, had he lived long enough to read him.
I have in my possession one stanza of a very early poem which Mr Shakespeare wrote about Anne Hathaway. That poem was remembered for me, in conversation, by his sister, Mrs Joan Hart. The stanza runs like this:
Thou knowest, my heart, Anne Hathaway!
She hath a way,
Anne Hathaway,
To make thee smart, Anne Hathaway!
Mr Shakespeare's sister was in her older years when she recited this for me from memory, but we can assume that her powers of recollection were undiminished. If the tone of the poem is indicative of mixed feelings then the cause will be made clear enough in later chapters. While I have some reason to believe that Mr Shakespeare loved his wife, I also have every reason to suspect that he sometimes regretted his marriage, seeing it as not so much a love-match as a wedlock forced upon him because he had got Anne with child. Possibly there were moments when he felt that Anne had 'caught' him, and the story which he told me about her misadventure with her sandals in Henley Street was emblematic of his feeling this. Certainly there is nothing of the conventional love-song about the verses remembered by Mrs Hart, and plenty of suspicion concerning Anne's charming 'way' evident in his punning on her surname.
Mrs Hart told me that there were further stanzas in which her brother addressed his own mind and eyes and other parts accordingly. Alas, these (she said) were gone beyond recall. Judging from the manner in which the quoted stanza works by internal rhyme to make Shakespeare's heart to smart, we can well suppose that Anne had a way to make his mind either blind or kind, and his eyes perhaps wise. The way she had to please his other parts might be readily inferred, but we cannot deduce by rhyme what that condition was in which she left them. The refrain would have been the same, in any case.
Mrs Hart also said that her brother told her that Anne Hathaway had fleas in her drawers. I confess I do not know what this means. A country saying, perhaps, like that 'green gowns'? There were no fleas present in the pair of Mrs Shakespeare's drawers which I once had the pleasure of inspecting, as you will in due course hear.
Shakespeare did not marry his Anne in Stratford. The ceremony took place in one of the neighbouring villages, but which one I don't know. Despite strenuous searches, I have been unable to turn up the record. Mrs Shakespeare made clear to me more than once that she did not want to speak about the matter. His sister replied, in answer to a direct question of mine, that it was not Temple Grafton - the significance of which will be made apparent in my next chapter, where Anne Whateley will be considered as rival bride.
In this box I have kept one other piece of verse which is something of a mystery. I shall insert it here although there is no reason for supposing that it really belongs here. Indeed, it may not belong at all in my Life of William Shakespeare.
I include it because I feel it to be of some interest, all the same. I found the verses tucked between the pages of a prayer book in Trinity Church. (It was in the middle of the marriage service, perhaps that's what struck me.) The scrap of thin white paper had been neatly folded and refolded into a tiny square. The handwriting is not Mr Shakespeare's, but I do not know whose it is. Some say that there was a second butcher's boy in Stratford, at the same time as Shakespeare, who also made poetical speeches over the slaughtered calves. Perhaps this little piece of versification is his work. That other butcher's boy died young, so I heard tell, but they are fools who claim that if he had gone on, and run away to London, then he would have turned out to be another William Shakespeare, or even greater.
Shakespeare's sister, when I showed her these verses, insisted that she knew nothing about them. However, when I pressed gently, she did confirm that the subject of the lines would almost certainly have been that Emma Careless already noticed in this book as being the lively wife of John Heicroft, the vicar, the object of some unwelcome attention on the part of Shakespeare's father, and the recorder of the speech-ways of the schoolmaster Jenkins.
Here are the verses:
Careless by name, and Careless by nature,
Careless of fame, and Careless of feature;
Careless of love, and Careless of hate,
Careless if crooked, and Careless if straight;
Careless at table, and Careless in bed,
Careless if maiden, and Careless if wed -
Were you Careful for once to return me my love
I'd care not that Careless to others you'd prove;
I then should be Careless how Careless you were,
And the more Careless you, still the less I should care.
I suppose it is just possible that the lines are by the first butcher's boy, but I doubt it. Emma Careless, incidentally, was a native of Stratford, who married the Reverend Heicroft two years after his arrival in succession to Bretchgirdle. Five children were born to the Heicrofts while they were in Stratford, though three of them died in their cradles, whether due to Emma's carelessness or to some other cause I know not. Heicroft is recorded as having preached special sermons for Lent in 1583 and it was on Trinity Sunday of that year - a red-letter day in the calendar of Trinity Church - that he baptised Shakespeare's daughter, Susanna. A year later he moved with Emma to the richer living of Rowington, some ten miles away as the upstart crow might fly.
Chapter Fifty-Three Shakespeare's other Anne
But what of William Shakespeare's other Anne?
In the episcopal register of the Bishop of Worcester, John Whitgift, under the date of 27th November, 1582, is the following record of a grant of a licence for marriage:
'Item eodem die similis emanavit licencia inter Willelmum Shaxpere et Annam Whateley de Temple Grafton.'
Yet one day later the same source lists 'William Shagspere and Anne Hathwey of Stratford' as being able, since sureties have been provided, to marry with only one reading of the banns instead of the usual three. Since these sureties amounted to the not inconsiderable sum of PS40, it is quite obvious that the couple were in very great haste to marry. Since they were provided by two farmers, John Richardson and Fulke Sandells, who had been friends of the bride's late father, it is equally obvious that the Hathaway clan was pressing for William to make an honest woman of the pregnant Anne.