Escalus, the honest councillor, describes the duke as ‘rather rejoicing to see another merry, than merry at anything that professed to make him rejoice. A gentleman of all temperance.’ Similar words would be used of Shakespeare by his contemporaries. Later commentators would prefer him to have had more in common with Lucio than Escalus. We have no evidence, beyond the ghostly presence of the dark lady in the sonnets, that Shakespeare was a whoremaster. Some of his writing about sex with prostitutes could be thought to suggest that he was revolted by the very idea.
The brothel in Pericles, the play Shakespeare is thought to have written in collaboration with the brothel-keeper George Wilkins, is one of the most wretched places in Shakespeare. The pimps are angry that they are losing custom because of a shortage of wenches. ‘We were never so much out of creatures. We have but poor three and they can do no more than they can do, and they with continual action are even as good as rotten…’ (IV. ii. 6–9). The imagery becomes more disgusting: ‘The stuff we have, a strong wind will blow it to pieces, they are so pitifully sodden’ (17–18). And more threatening:
Thou sayest true. There’s two unwholesome, a’conscience. The poor Transylvanian is dead that lay with the little baggage.
Ay, she quickly pooped him. She made him roast meat for worms. (19–23)
In Cymbeline, when Iachimo sees Imogen for the first time, he rhapsodises on the distorted taste that could prefer bought sex to conjugal relations with such a woman.
It cannot be i’th’eye, for apes and monkeys,
’Twixt two such shes, would chatter this way, and
Contemn with mows the other. Nor i’the judgment,
For idiots, in this case of favour, would
Be wisely definite, nor i’th’appetite.
Sluttery to such neat excellence opposed
Should make desire vomit emptiness,
Not so allured to feed. (I. vi. 40–7)
Imogen listens, uncomprehending. Ignoring her bemusement, Iachimo raves on:
The cloyed will—
That satiate yet unsatisfied desire, that tub
Both filled and running—ravening first the lamb,
Longs after for the garbage. (49–51)
Iachimo’s disgust may not be Shakespeare’s, and some would argue that, if it was, it could well have been self-disgust. Iachimo tells Imogen that, given a wife as superlative as she, he is astounded that her husband has become a whoremonger,
should I (damned then)
Slaver with lips as common as the stairs
That mount the Capitol, join gripes with hands
Made hard with hourly falsehood (falsehood, as
With labour), then by-peeping in an eye
Base and illustrous as the smoky light
That’s fed with stinking tallow…(I. vi. 6–12)
to be partnered
With tomboys hired with that self exhibition
Which your own coffers yield? With diseased ventures
That play with all infirmities for gold
Which rottenness can lend nature? Such boiled stuff
As well might poison poison? (122–7)
Such hymns of horror cannot tell us whether Shakespeare ever had dealings with the women of the stews and back alleys. In All’s Well That Ends Well, Helen muses on the fact that her young husband who hates her has just enjoyed sex with her thinking she was someone else.
But, O strange men!
That can such sweet use make of what they hate,
When saucy trusting of the cozened thoughts
Defiles the pitchy night. So lust doth play
With what it loathes, for that which is away. (IV. v. 21–5)
Perhaps Ann too thought bitter thoughts as she lay in her matrimonial bed alone. Perhaps she indulged fantasies of disguising herself as a boy and riding to London, to feel Will’s arms about her again, only to reflect ruefully that she might find him with someone else. We can only wonder if she heard a story going round the Inns of Court in the spring of 1602. In his diary for 13 March John Manningham, a student at the Middle Temple who had it from another student, entered it so:
Upon a time, when Burbage played Richard III, there was a citizen grew so far in liking with him that, before she went from the play, she appointed him to come that night unto her by the name of Richard the Third. Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before, was entertained, and at his game ere Burbage came. Then, message being brought that Richard the Third was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third.27
Ann would have found it very difficult if, as she went about her daily business, to market or to church, the maltworms of Stratford were sniggering over such tales. Any hope that such gossip would not make it back to Stratford is, I suspect, vain, especially as Thomas Greene, Town Clerk of Stratford and Ann’s star boarder at New Place, was a Middle Templar and one of Manningham’s friends. Sex with a healthy city wife was relatively safe, but hard to come by.
In Middleton’s A Mad World My Masters (1605) a female member of the audience cries out in rapture after hearing a prologue: ‘O my troth! An I were not married, I could find it in my heart to fall in love with that player now and send for him to a supper. I know some i’the town that have done as much…’ (V. ii. 33–5). A later account ironically describes a ‘virtuous player’: ‘The waiting-women spectators are over ears in love with him, and ladies send for him to act in their chambers.’28 If we stick to the Bard’s own words about lust, we shall find nothing that makes light of lechery, or even common or garden promiscuity.
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action, and, till in action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoyed no sooner, but despisèd straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had,
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad,
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so,
Had having and in quest to have, extreme,
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe,
Before a joy proposed, behind a dream.
All this the world well knows, yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell. (129)
If Ann had not misdoubted that some fine lady of the capital would throw her modest country charms into the shade, she would have been a very unusual woman. However, she had more immediate concerns. In 1587, following on from a winter of high prices and scarcity, a ‘burning ague’ appeared in Stratford. Ann brought her little family through it. Somehow in these years of dearth she was finding ways to feed them the kind of nourishing food that would protect them from the yearly visitations of infectious disease.
In Westward Ho written by Dekker and Webster for the Admiral’s Men in 1604, Mistress Justiniano is asked by her husband, who has ruined them by his prodigality, gambling, riding abroad, consorting with noblemen and ‘building a summer house’, and has even sold the house she lives in: ‘Why do you not ask me now what shall you do?’ She replies, as Ann might have done to Will in 1585, 1586, 1587 or whenever: ‘I have no counsel in your voyage, neither must you have any in mine…Fare you well. Let not the world condemn me if I seek for my own maintenance.’29
CHAPTER TEN
suggesting that, having sent her boy husband to seek his fortune, with three small children to look after, Ann Shakespeare found work she could do indoors, and with the help of her haberdasher brother-in-law might even have prospered
In considering what it might be that Ann Shakespeare did once her husband set off for parts unknown, farming comes soonest to mind. Ann’s stepmother Joan Hathaway was one of many Warwickshire women farming on their own account. When Elizabeth Smart of Bishopton died in 1585, she had five flitches of bacon stored in her house, two live pigs, two geese and a gander, twelve hens and a cock, a co
w and a heifer, as well as wheat and barley to the value of £4.1 In the inventory of the Hathaways’ neighbour, the widow Elizabeth Pace, drawn up by Richard Burman, John Richardson and Thomas Burman in January 1589, we find ‘three kine…three calves…five horses and mares…eighteen sheep and a colt’.2 In 1590 Roger Burman’s widowed daughter, Ann Pace, was farming her own copyhold yardland in Shottery.3 Ann Nash, mother of Shakespeare’s friend Anthony Nash, widowed in 1587, farmed four and a half yardlands in Welcombe.4 Ann would have known Roger Burman’s widow, Alice. She would farm in Shottery for sixteen years after her husband died in 1592.When Alice died in 1608, she left, as well as two cows, a year-old heifer and ten sheep, a crop of corn valued at £20.5 The Warwickshire Corn Enquiry of 1595 lists several female heads of farming households:
Anne Baker hath four quarters of rye, six quarters of barley and five of household
Alice Wall ten quarters of rye, fourteen quarters of barley, two quarters of peas, thirteen acres of barley to sow and seven acres of peas, seven of household.6
In Shottery Joan Hathaway was one of three widows farming at the end of 1595. John Richardson’s widow was preparing to sow thirty-two acres with barley, and twenty-one with peas; she had in hand nine quarters of wheat, nineteen of barley and fifteen of peas; after seed corn was taken out she had eighteen quarters left ‘to serve her house and the market’.7 Widow Burman was to sow twenty-four acres of barley and twelve of peas, to support a household of six.8 With only fifteen acres to farm, Ann’s stepmother was still well able to support her household of six.9
These women would not have done all the work of the farm themselves—the number in the household would have included farm-servants—but women did do heavy work. When the Avon suddenly flooded on the morning of 18 July 1588, among workers trapped by the rising waters was a young woman: ‘It did take away suddenly one Sale’s daughter of Grafton out of Hillborough meadow removing of a hay cock…’10 The young woman had apparently been intending to shoulder the haycock and carry it, possibly the mile or two uphill to Temple Grafton. John Locke wrote in his diary about Alice George who was born in 1562:
When she was young she was fair-haired and neither fat nor lean, but very slender in the waist, for her size she was to be reckoned rather amongst the tall than the short women. Her condition was but mean, and her maintenance her labour, and she said she was able to reap as much in a day as any man, and had as much wages.11
Women who were employed at harvest as ‘shearers’, cutting corn with sickles, got the same wages as mowers; ‘we should do them an injury if we should take them from their company and not make them equal to those in wages they can equalize in work’.
If Ann had no visible means of support and couldn’t go out to work, her in-laws would not have been expected to take on the responsibility. Since the enactment of the Poor Law of 1563, justices of the peace had the duty of collecting and administering funds for relief of the poor. While Ann’s children were still so small that she couldn’t go out to work she could either have been given a dole to live on or she and they could have been sent to separate wards in the poor house. Elizabeth Sadler, deserted wife of Thomas Sadler, son of the John Sadler who was Bailiff of Stratford in 1570, was admitted to the almshouses in 1601, her mother-in-law having agreed to raise her two sons but not to support her.12 The same option would have been available to Mary Shakespeare, if she and her husband had been better off than they were. They could have taken Ann’s children and left her to fend for herself.
Women made up a high percentage of the settled poor people (people, not being vagrants, who received parish poor relief), sometimes outnumbering men by as many as two to one, and heading a disproportionately large number of households as widows or deserted wives. In the 1570 Norwich census of the poor, 62 per cent of the total number of adults over sixteen were women.13
If Ann and her family had ended up on the parish, menial work would have been found for all four of them. The worst work was picking oakum for a mere four pence a week. In 1560 the Westminster Workhouse set to work children over six but under twelve winding quills for weavers.14
The records of poor relief in Holy Trinity parish are incomplete, but there is no sign that Ann ever received help, which suggests that somehow she managed to support her three children. Work available to an unskilled woman was sporadic and very poorly paid. In the Minutes and Accounts of the Stratford Corporation we find entries for ‘dressing and sweeping the school house’ after the builders had completed its refurbishment, almost certainly women’s work, for which was paid eight pence.15 In the accounts submitted on 1 March 1576, we read that three pence was paid to ‘Mother Margaret’ for ‘making clean before the chapel’. In the accounts for 1576 women are listed as being paid for a variety of jobs, ‘for drawing of straw in the chapel garden’, twelve pence, for taking food to the gardener, four pence, to Jane Salt ‘for drawing of straw’, three pence, to Empson’s wife, for carrying straw, two pence, to the gardener’s wife for drawing of straw, four pence, and to Jane Plummer for the same, two pence.16 A ‘poor woman’ was paid one penny ‘for bearing in of chips’, and ‘Conway’s wife’ also got a penny for carrying a load of sand.17 Conway’s wife Margaret appears in the accounts again, as the recipient of two pence for ‘making clean the gaol’ in 1581 and four pence for doing the same job in 1586.18
In the annual account for 1577 are three entries of four pence each paid to ‘a poor woman sweeping before the chapel’ and once again in 1578. The second and third times the payment appears in 1578 the person ‘making clean without the chapel’ is identified as Margaret Smith; in 1579 she is once more ‘the woman that sweepeth about the chapel door’ and her wages are given as sixteen pence, while ‘Bennett’s wife’ who sweeps the Hall is paid two pence.19 In 1580 Margaret’s year’s wages were twenty pence, plus an extra penny ‘for sweeping the street after the tiler’.20 The next year, her wages sank back to sixteen pence.21 In 1582 Smith was again paid sixteen pence; in the entry for the sixteen pence paid to her the next year she is called simply ‘old Margaret’. In the same account we find Alice Earl, who would be buried as a pauper In December 1596, receiving three pence for carrying lime from the Hall to the bridge.22 By 1585 Margaret Smith, her wages still sixteen pence, has become ‘lame Margaret’.23 We find Margaret’s burial on 15 May 1586 in the Holy Trinity register. By the will that William Gilbert had written for her on 11 April, Margaret bequeathed one coffer, her brass pot and whatever corn was left in her bag to Richard Holmes, to his son another coffer, and to Joan Johnston and to Isabel Barrymore a kerchief each. These legacies made and her debts paid, she bequeathed the rest of her goods movable and immovable to Agnes Holmes whom she made her sole executrix. Five shillings already in the hands of Richard Holmes were to be bestowed on the day of her funeral, probably in a feast for the poor, including her neighbours in the almshouse.24 Margaret’s will, proved on 6 July, is a dignified little document, a fitting epilogue to an ordered, frugal and useful life. With Margaret gone the chapel environs still had to be swept: in 1587 an unidentified woman received the sixteen pence and in 1588 the money was recorded as paid simply for ‘sweeping about the chapel’.25 In 1589 the rate slumped to twelve pence, paid to ‘a woman’.26 In 1591 the rate was back at sixteen pence, and once again the woman has no name.27
Ann could not have housed, clothed and fed three children on sixteen pence a year. She could have managed on the two pence a day she would have earned working in the fields, helping with the harvest, but the work was seasonal. The rest of the year she would have had to scratch together a pittance by cleaning, washing or cooking for her neighbours, or tending the sick or preparing the dead for burial. If she had been condemned to such drudgery, her babies would have been like the children of many other poor women, neglected, ragged, dirty, and weeping with hunger and cold. If the Bard is not to be suspected of craven and callous behaviour, we have to assume that Ann did have some sort of marketable skill. We don’t know, after all, how the young Shakespe
ares lived before William took himself off to wherever it was that he went. He doesn’t seem to have gone into the whittawing and glove-making business, nor does he seem to have begun sheep-herding or dairying or horse-breaking. If he had he probably would never have become a playwright. It seems more likely that he wandered about like Mr Micawber looking for something to turn up. All that turned up were more mouths to feed.
In our own time the fact that separations are usually initiated by women is most often explained as a consequence of the degree of economic independence they enjoy. Tudor women enjoyed a measure of economic independence that would not be equalled again until our own time. Ann Shakespeare could have been confident of her ability to support herself and her children, but not if she had also to deal with a layabout husband good for nothing but spinning verses, who had the right to do as he pleased with any money she could earn. Ten to one, if he was useless he was also restless. When the chance arose to send him off to London in the train of some dignitary or filling in for someone in a group of players, she could well have jumped at it and sent him south with her blessing.
Alison Plowden gives an admirably concise account of women’s economic activity in the second half of the sixteenth century:
As a career woman the Queen was also unique, and yet for the resolute minority—whether married or single—who found themselves faced with the necessity of earning a living, opportunities, though limited were by no means non-existent. Apart from domestic service—often a stepping-stone to marriage—wet and dry nursing, governessing or a position as a ‘waiting gentlewoman’ in a great household, the commonest female occupations were tailoring, upholstery, millinery, embroidery and related trades. But inn—keeping was also considered acceptable, and there were plenty of laundresses, fishwives and other street vendors, as well as a few wax-chandlers, brewers, bakers and confectioners, and even some female ironmongers and shoemakers. Some enterprising women set up as herbalists, concocting cosmetics and perfumed washes, and, of more dubious respectability, there were astrologers, fortune-tellers and quack medical practitioners.28