The opportunity to set up housekeeping for themselves was interpreted by some of the ballad-writers as an incentive for premarital sex (italics mine):
Faith, boys and girls, and knaves and trulls,
There can be no dividing.
They must be matcht and will be pitched,
Somewhere to have a biding.
‘Tush!’ quoth old Rule, ‘Man, you’re a fool.
Don’t those so that have riches?
But now they’ll prevent the impediment,
For down goes cloak, and bag and breeches.16
(The reference to preventing an impediment is also germane.)
John Shakespeare’s affairs were in such disarray in the autumn of 1582 he was in no position to offer his teenage son and pregnant bride free board and lodging. In the late Elizabethan household food accounted for nearly half of all outgoings; the relative cost of food can be assessed from the fact that workers who were not fed by their masters received double the rate of pay offered to workers who were given meals. A man who had been assessed as having no goods whatever that could be distrained to pay his debts could not afford to take on numerous servants (as Greenblatt supposes) or invite his son’s family to eat him out of house and home.
The puritan divine William Whateley of Banbury, who often preached at Stratford, admonished the young man seeking to marry:
When thou art married, if it may be, live of thyself with thy wife in a family of thine own, and not with another in one family, as it were, betwixt you both…The mixing of governors in an household, or subordinating or uniting of two masters or two dames under one roof doth fall out most times to be a matter of much unquietness to all parties. To make the young folks so wholly resign themselves unto the elder as not to be discontented with their proceedings, or to make the elder so much to deny themselves as to condescend unto the wills of the younger…[is] in the common sort of people altogether impossible. Whereof as young bees do seek unto themselves another hive, so let the young couple [seek] another house…17
Joan Hathaway might have been able to feed her stepdaughter and stepson-in-law from the yield of her half-yardland but she would not have been expected to do so. If Will was not prepared to take over the work of a husbandman, it would have been folly to have offered him houseroom at Hewlands Farm. The matrimonial bed stood in the parlour at the top of the stairs; Richard Hathaway’s widow was hardly likely to have handed it over to the newly-weds, and even less likely to send them to sleep with the younger children. We may conclude that it is as unlikely that Ann brought Will to live at Shottery as that he brought her to Henley Street. If the worst came to the worst and the newly-weds could not find a home of their own the chances are they would each have returned to the house of their parents to live apart until some habitation could be found for them. In The Witch of Edmonton by Dekker, Ford and Rowley, Frank Thorney has not the wherewithal to set up house with his pregnant bride, Winifred, who must go to live with her uncle. She laments:
You have discharged
The true part of an honest man. I cannot
Request a fuller satisfaction
Than you have freely granted, yet methinks
’Tis a hard case, being man and wife,
We should not live together.
When Frank tells her that he will visit her once a month she wails:
Once every month?
Is this to have a husband?18
It was because married people were expected to set up housekeeping on their own that the age at marriage in Elizabethan England was so high:
marriage was an act of profound importance to the social structure. It meant the creation of a new economic unit as well as a lifelong association of persons previously separate and caught-up in existing families. It gave the man full membership of the community, and added a cell to village society. It is understandable, therefore, that marriage could not come about unless a slot was vacant, so to speak, and the aspiring couple was to fill it up. It might be a cottage which had fallen empty, so that a manservant and a womanservant could now marry and go to live there as cottagers. For the more fortunate it would be a plot of land which had to be taken up and worked by some yeoman’s or some husbandman’s son, with his wife to help him. It might be a bakery, or a joinery, or a loom which had to be manned anew. This meant that all young people ordinarily had to wait before they married, unless they were gentlefolk, though they might well have to wait even then for rather different reasons. Therefore the age at marriage would necessarily tend to be high…19
Ann is typical of Laslett’s early modern bride; it is her husband who is the exception to the rule, being himself a minor, with a mother who has a two-year-old child and could still produce more. The presence of another breeding woman in the house would have been unusual, if not positively indecorous.
On the day of her marriage Ann should have received the ten marks promised her in her father’s will and Will should have matched it with ten marks of his own. Twenty marks would have been more than enough to cover the rent of an adequate dwelling. The most costly item of furniture would have been the marital bed. If the newly-weds had found a plot of four acres or more to buy, they would have had the right to erect a cottage on it, and they might still have got some change out of their twenty marks. There is at least a chance that for a year or two or even more Will and Ann experienced love in a cottage. Nowadays a ‘cottage’ is thought of as a detached dwelling with a particular kind of garden and roses round the porch. ‘Ann Hathaway’s Cottage’ is just such a cottage, with an inappropriate garden that is more Helen Allingham than Shakespeare. An Elizabethan cottage is an altogether humbler habitation, built on waste land or a road verge, with no rights to the surrounding land. People driven off the land by changes in land tenure and use had no option but to find shelter where they could. The authorities struggled to control the situation. In 1589 a new statute was passed: ‘No man may at this day build such a cottage for habitation unless he lay unto it four acres of freehold land, except in market towns or cities or within a mile of the sea, or for habitation of labourers in mines, sailors, foresters, sheepherders &c’.20
In August 1599, Lady Margaret Hoby ‘walked with Mr Hoby about the town to spy out the best places where cottages might be builded’21 as diligent landlords the Hobys were apparently intending to provide basic accommodation for the poorest of their employees, and at the same time to reduce the likelihood of their squatting in inconvenient places and unsuitable buildings. Some private landlords in Stratford did build cottages for rent; in 1614 or so Philip Rogers, a Stratford apothecary, leased a group of five cottages from Richard Lane and sub-let them to poor inhabitants.22
If Ann’s cottage had been thrown up on the banks of the Avon she might have made her living as the family of Dekker’s Patient Grissill did. The action of the play, originally performed by the Admiral’s Men in 1603, is patently incredible, which makes it all the more important that the circumstantial detail be familiar. Grissill lives with her father in a cottage by a river; with Babulo, the comedy hired help, they make a living by gathering osiers and plaiting them into baskets. Her sole possessions are her straw hat, her threadbare russet gown and her earthen pitcher in which ‘many a good mess of water gruel’ has been made. When her scholar brother Laureo turns up, lamenting that he has been forced by poverty to abandon his university studies, his father makes the best of it:
Welcome, my son. Though I am poor
My love shall not be so. Go, daughter Grissill,
Fetch water from the spring to seethe our fish
Which yesterday I caught. The cheer is mean,
But be content. When I have sold these baskets
The money shall be spent to bid thee welcome.23
It is Grissill’s fate to be married to a marquess and dressed in silks, and then persecuted and rejected. When she is clothed once more in her russet and sent back home, with her pitcher and her twin boy and girl, her father simply says as Ann might have, ‘We’ll wor
k to find them food’ (IV. ii. 90). It is only proper to point out that basket-makers are never mentioned in the Stratford muniments, but it stands to reason that there must have been some living along the Avon, anywhere where there was a ‘rank of osiers by the murmuring stream’.24 Baskets are not the kinds of wares that are hawked from place to place; traditionally they are made on the spot and to order. The young Shakespeares are unlikely to have survived by basket-making, unless like Janiculo they had hired help. People who lived on the other side of Stratford near the heath made ‘besoms’ or birch-brooms to sell. Even the poorest of householders in the 1580s could find people poorer than themselves who would work for a relatively small proportion of what they earned, sometimes for no more than a pallet in an outhouse and belly-cheer.
The main action of As You Like It takes place in the ‘Forest of Arden’ which is ostensibly in France but occasionally recognisable as Warwickshire. When Rosalind disguised as Ganymede hears from Corin the shepherd that his master has put up for sale ‘his cote, his flocks and bounds of feed’ she asks him:
I pray you, if it stand with honesty,
Buy thou the cottage, pasture and the flock,
And thou shalt have to pay for it of us. (II. iv. 89–91)
Corin thus becomes their agent and buys the dwelling, the pasturage and the flock with the ladies’ gold (III. v). The cottage is referred to several times, once as ‘a sheepcote fenced about with olive trees’,
down in the neighbour bottom.
The rank of osiers by the murmuring stream,
Left on your right hand, brings you to the place. (IV. iii. 79–81)
Perdita lives in what is several times referred to as a cottage (The Winter’s Tale, IV. i. ii). The first two scenes of Act IV are set in ‘the shepherd’s cottage’, scene iii on ‘a road near the shepherd’s cottage’.
What are described as cottages in late-sixteenth-century Warwickshire are usually three-roomed dwellings made of lath and plaster, consisting of a ‘hall’ (not necessarily spacious), a lower chamber and a single upper chamber, which was often used as storage space for corn, malt, cheeses and bacon. The central feature of the hall was the open hearth where the cooking was done. With luck there would have been a chimney, otherwise the smoke simply made its way out through the thatch, annihilating lice, flies and fleas as it went. Windows were few, small, and unglazed; in bad weather or when the inhabitants were out, the window spaces were shuttered and barred from within. Except for the timber floor of the upper chamber or soller, the floors were either earthen or paved. All the water for cooking and bathing had to be carried in heavy wooden buckets from the nearest well or stream.
The Stratford archives give us no clue whatsoever to the whereabouts of Will Shakespeare and his family in the 1580s. If they had been tenants of the Corporation, their whereabouts would have been a matter of record, but they were not. If they had been private tenants they would have been as hard to pick up as Lewis Hiccox was in Henley Street. If they bought land by private treaty or squatted on vacant land, they would probably have escaped notice altogether. Where changes in land tenure had resulted in depopulation, cottages and farmhouses stood empty; Ann and Will could have squatted or acquired some kind of tenancy in the environs of Stratford. All we can say with a degree of certainty is wherever they found a home it was within the boundaries of the parish, because when their first child was born Will and his friends brought her to the font at Holy Trinity.
Ann Shakespeare was probably clearer about her duties as a wife than her boy husband was about his own role. She had learnt from her Bible that wifehood was the female’s highest calling, instituted by God in the time of man’s innocency, that is, in Paradise, before the Fall: ‘House and riches are the inheritance of the fathers but a prudent wife is of the Lord’ (Proverbs, xix: 14). In Sir John Davies’s thumbnail sketch, we may see perhaps Ann Shakespeare’s role model:
The first of all our sex came from the side of man.
I thither am returned, where first our sex began.
I do not visit much, nor many when I do.
I tell my mind to few, and that in counsel too.
I seem not sick in health, nor sullen but in sorrow.
I care for somewhat else than what to wear tomorrow.25
Women themselves had even more rigorous expectations of wives, if we are to judge by this chorus from Elizabeth Cary’s closet Tragedy of Mariam:
’Tis not enough for one that is a wife
To keep her spotless from an act of ill,
But from suspicion she should free her life,
And bare herself of power as well as will.
’Tis not so glorious for her to be free
As by her proper self restrained to be.26
Stephen Greenblatt argues rather quaintly:
It is, perhaps, as much what Shakespeare did not write as what he did that seems to indicate something seriously wrong with his marriage…though wedlock is the promised land toward which his comic heroes and heroines strive, and though family fission is the obsessive theme of the tragedies, Shakespeare is curiously restrained in his depictions of what it is actually like to be married.27
Greenblatt then lists fascinating glimpses of spousal interaction in Shakespeare’s plays, Goneril and Albany arguing, Kate Percy rejected by Hotspur, Edmund Mortimer and his Welsh wife unable to communicate, Portia and Brutus ditto. The inference seems to be that other authors do show us happy married life and the communion of spouses. There is almost no literature in any language known to me in which we are shown around a functional marriage. Though marriage is the happy ending of most works with happy endings, we are not invited to hang about and watch the spouses interacting. We get inside marriages only when they are dysfunctional. Then the sacredness of marriage, its shared privacy, its skinless intimacy can be dissected, the awfulness of the symbiosis drawn out and displayed like the living guts of the dying heretics on Tower Hill. Shakespeare is not Edward Albee or John Updike. Besides, despite his public profession, he seems to have been a very private man. It is not simply that we have no letters from him to Ann or vice versa; we have no letters from him to anyone. We assume that his sonnets are private, but in fact we can’t be sure that he was writing them in his own persona.
It seems as likely that Shakespeare protected Ann’s privacy as that he was so alienated from her he couldn’t bring himself to write about husbands and wives at all. Greenblatt sees that Shakespeare understood something of what Ann had to endure during his long absences, and gives the obvious example of Adriana’s outcry in The Comedy of Errors:
How comes it now, my husband, O how comes it
That thou art thus estrangèd from thyself?—
Thyself I call it, being strange to me
That, undividable, incorporate,
Am better than thy dear self’s better part.
Ah, do not tear thyself away from me,
For, know, my love, as easy mayst thou fall
A drop of water in the breaking gulf,
And take unmingled thence that drop again
Without addition or diminishing,
As take me from thyself, and not me too. (II. ii. 122–32)
Greenblatt comments: ‘The scene in which these words are spoken is comical, for Adriana is unwittingly addressing not her husband but her husband’s long-lost identical twin. Yet the speech is too long and the pain too intense to be altogether absorbed in laughter.’28 This is true, as far as it goes. Greenblatt does not notice that Adriana’s figure of the drop in the ocean is part of an important image cluster in the play, which is by no means as uniformly funny as he thinks, unless you think having people sentenced to death, robbed, hounded and driven to distraction is good for a laugh and nothing else. A closer look at a play that wears its profundity lightly will tell us much more about Shakespeare’s attitude to marriage.
The play opens with an aged father on trial for his life; Egeon, a Syracusan merchant, has fallen foul of the Ephesian authorities who have p
laced an embargo on trade with Syracuse. Any merchants who, cannot raise sufficient ‘guilders to redeem their lives’ will be executed:
if any Syracusan born
Come to the bay of Ephesus he dies,
His goods confiscate to the duke’s dispose
Unless a thousand marks be levied
To quit the penalty and to ransom him.
Thy substance, valued at the highest rate,
Cannot amount to a hundred marks,
Therefore by law thou art condemned to die. (I. i. 18–25)
There is nothing very amusing about any of this, especially to anyone who knew what persecution John Shakespeare was enduring at the hands of capricious authority back in Stratford. Egeon answers:
Yet this is my comfort: when your words are done
My woes end likewise with the evening sun. (26–7)
The duke is moved to a minimum degree of mercy.
Yet will I favour thee in what I can.
Therefore merchant I’ll limit thee this day
To seek thy health by beneficial help.
Try all the friends thou hast in Ephesus.
Beg thou, or borrow, to make up the sum,
And live. If no, then thou art doomed to die. (49–54)
We don’t see Egeon again until the final scene of the play. He is brought on ‘barehead with the headsman and other officers’, bound, as if on his way to execution. He stands silent as Adriana pleads with the duke to order the abbess of the nearby convent, where her errant husband has found sanctuary, to open the gates. Egeon does not speak until he has seen his son’s long-lost twin, whom of course he takes for the son he knows. He pleads with him to pay his ransom, and is denied. His prospects of survival having withered away, the gate of the convent suddenly opens to reveal the abbess with the other Antipholus. She is the deus ex machina. She is also Egeon’s wife. As she originally presented him with twins, she presents them now on stage together for the first time. The words of redemption are spoken by her.