Never durst poet touch a pen to write
Until his ink was tempered with love’s sighs.8
Young lovers in Shakespeare’s plays all behave in much the same way. They don’t eat and don’t sleep, but mooch around on their own in the forest or down by the river, carving names in the bark of trees and making up songs and sonnets. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the young lords who join the King of Navarre in his academy no sooner glimpse the ladies in the park than they fall to rhyming. In this they are led by the ludicrous phony Armado, who addresses his effusions to a milkmaid who cannot read: ‘Assist me, some extemporal god of rhyme, for I am sure I shall turn sonnet. Devise, wit, write pen; for I am for whole volumes in folio’ (I. ii. 172–4).
The satirist Berowne is the next to turn poet, gnashing his teeth to think that he is being driven by mere lust, ‘the liver vein, that makes flesh a deity, a green goose a goddess; pure, pure idolatry’.
When shall you see me write a thing in rhyme?
Or groan for Joan? or spend a minute’s time
In pruning me? When shall you hear that I
Will praise a hand, a foot, a face, an eye,
A gait, a state, a brow, a breast, a waist,
A leg, a limb—? (IV. iii. 179–84)
But he falls for it anyway. Ultimately all the young lords in Love’s Labour’s Lost woo the ladies in verse, but the ladies remain unimpressed. The princess is unmoved by ‘as much love in rhyme as could be crammed up in a sheet of paper’ (V. ii. 6–7); Rosaline makes mock of Berowne’s hyperboles; Katharine reacts more sharply to the ‘thousand verses’ she gets:
A huge translation of hypocrisy,
Vilely compiled, profound simplicity. (V. ii. 51–2)
The ladies set out to teach the young gentlemen a lesson. Stung by their mockery Berowne eschews versifying:
O never will I trust to speeches penned
Nor to the motion of a school-boy’s tongue…(V. ii. 402–3)
Ultimately the clever young lords are all rejected by the ladies, and the play of mock wooing ends in confusion. Was Shakespeare sending himself up in this early play? Was he remembering his own callow wooing? There are those who would say yes, and that the play is yet more evidence that in marrying Ann he made a disastrous mistake.
In As You Like It, the ‘young and tender’ boy, the ‘youth’ Orlando turns poet for Rosalind, hanging poems on trees and carving her name in their bark.
O Rosalind, these trees shall be my books,
And in their barks my thoughts I’ll character,
That every eye which in this forest looks,
Shall see thy virtue witnessed everywhere.
Run, run, Orlando, carve on every tree
The fair, the chaste, the unexpressive she. (III. ii. 5–10)
Did seventeen-year-old Shakespeare do as much? He was probably capable of this kind of thing:
From the east to western Ind,
No jewel is like Rosalind.
Her worth being mounted on the wind,
Through all the world bears Rosalind.
All the pictures fairest lined
Are but black to Rosalind.
Let no face be kept in mind
But the fair of Rosalind. (III. ii. 86–93)
And so forth. The tetrameters, the metre of doggerel, are bad in truth, and savagely mocked by Touchstone.
Sweetest nut hath sourest rind;
Such a nut is Rosalind.
He that sweetest rose will find
Must find love’s prick and Rosalind. (III. ii. 107–10)
Rosalind remarks a tad sourly that some of the verses ‘had in them more feet than the verses would bear’. But this is before she knows that the writer is ‘young Orlando’. Jaques too decries his attempts: ‘I pray you mar no more trees with writing love-songs in their barks.’ And Orlando, like a shrewish boy, snaps back: ‘I pray you mar no more of my verses with reading them ill-favouredly’ (III. ii. 255–6). In Jaques’s famous description of the seven stages in the life of man, the lover, ‘Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress’ eyebrow’ comes directly after the schoolboy, which would suggest someone rather younger than eighteen. Commentators on Shakespeare’s life have tended to assume that there was no time for a proper courtship, because Shakespeare was so young when he was married, but he could have been making a nuisance of himself and disfiguring the trees round Shottery for years before Ann finally stooped to his lure. Elizabethans recognised no interim period between child and adult; there was no concept of adolescence or of teenage. According to Roger Ascham: ‘from seven to seventeen, young gentlemen commonly be carefully enough brought up: But from seventeen to seven and twenty (the most dangerous time of all in a man’s life and most slippery to stay well in) they have commonly the rein of all license in their own hand…’.9
Ann’s could have been the crime of cradle-snatching as described in The Golden Book of Christian Matrimony: ‘When a wicked subtle and shameless woman enticeth an ignorant young man from his father, which with great expenses, travail and labour hath brought him up, when she blindeth him with love and at the last getteth him away under the title of marriage.’10 If Will Shakespeare had been a young man with prospects there might have been some point in entrapping him, but he wasn’t. The family’s disgrace was known to everyone in Stratford even before John Shakespeare became involved in a violent quarrel with four of his neighbours, against whom he was forced to take out an injunction ‘for fear of death and mutilation of his limbs’. Will was certainly young and witty, possibly handsome, but he had nothing else to offer the kind of girl who, as a sober, industrious, patient, frugal wife, would help him repair his family’s ruined fortunes. Perhaps Will was like Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice, a gambler in love, risking his whole future on winning a wife. And perhaps the quiet woman of Hewlands Farm was like the doyenne of Belmont, constrained by her dead father’s will to seek a better match than a penniless boy. Bassanio is worse than penniless; after squandering his own fortune he has entered over ears in debt.
’Tis not unknown to you, Antonio,
How much I have disabled mine estate,
By something showing a more swelling port
Than my faint means would grant continuance.
Nor do I now make moan to be abridged
From such a noble rate, but my chief care
Is to come fairly off from the great debts
Wherein my time (something too prodigal)
Hath left me gaged. To you Antonio
I owe the most in money and in love,
And from your love I have a warranty
To unburthen all my plots and purposes
How to get clear of all the debts I owe. (I. i. 122–34)
In case we have not quite grasped the nature of the case, he reiterates:
I owe you much, and (like a wilful youth)
That which I owe is lost…(146–7)
Shakespeare, of course, was ‘a wilful youth’. Bassanio gambles, and he wins the prize, the mistress of Belmont, who seems a great deal wiser and more mature than he is himself.
‘Hanging and wiving go by destiny,’ according to the proverb, but, unlike Portia’s father, Elizabethans were not content to leave such an important matter to luck. To make a difficult matter more difficult a sea-change was happening in the basic concepts that ruled wedding and wiving, as we can see from the case of Mary Darrell and the clergyman-poet Barnabe Googe which was submitted to the arbitration of the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1563. Mary was originally sought in marriage by John Lennard, of Chevening, near Tunbridge Wells, for his eighteen-year-old son Sampson. Lennard claimed to have been first approached by the Darrells who proposed their daughter as a match for his son, and that, far from being averse to the match, Mary showed as much eagerness as feminine modesty would permit. The Darrells praised young Lennard, who stood to inherit a fortune, insisting on his suitability for their daughter; Lennard demurred, perhaps because he considered his boy too y
oung. Lennard interviewed Mary several times:
I had divers talks with the maid for my son in his absence and yet no more than she was glad of, and then delivered me by her parents…at our last talk, hearing her mild and loving answers with full consent to have my son, who I know loved her entirely, and therefore I having good liking in me that he should be her husband, nature wrought in me to lay my right hand on her breast and to speak thus in effect: ‘Then I see that with God’s help the fruit that shall come of this body shall possess all that I have, and thereupon I will kiss you.’ And so indeed I kissed her. I gave her after this silk for a gown (she never wore none so good), and she, in token of her good will, gave my son a handkerchief and, in affirmance of this, her father wrote a letter to me by her consent…11
To a modern sensibility Lennard’s behaviour is repellent. The courting of Mary Darrell had reached the stage of a match concluded, with letters and tokens exchanged. Because Lennard’s son had not been present the agreement was not a full contract, but a pre-contract, which would have to be formally set aside before a contract with any other party could be entered into. It may seem peculiar that the lover himself had apparently not asked the lady for her hand—indeed he might never have spoken with her at all—but a modest young woman was supposed, not to see for herself whether she fancied a given man, but to acquiesce in the choice of others, in this case both sets of parents. When Lennard visited the Darrells at Bartholomewtide he told Mary and her parents that he had heard talk that she was to be married, which surprised him.
They all three answered me, and others for me, very often, that it was not so and that Master Googe was but a suitor. To prove that to be true, the parents sent me a letter sent to Master Googe of late wherein she termeth him to be but a suitor and prayeth him to leave his suit, and the parents still say that he hath no hold of her, except by secret enticement, against their will, he hath caught some word of her, a thing odious to God and not to be favoured by man.12
Part of the ‘secret enticement’, as here alleged, was Googe’s writing of poems to Mary. A similar situation is complained of in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when Egeus appears before Theseus:
Full of vexation come I, with complaint
Against my child and daughter, Hermia.
Stand forth, Demetrius. My noble lord,
This man hath my consent to marry her.
Stand forth, Lysander. And, my gracious Duke,
This man hath bewitched the bosom of my child.
Thou, thou, Lysander, thou hast given her rhymes,
And interchanged love-tokens with my child.
Thou hast by moonlight at her window sung,
With faining voice, verses of feigning love,
And stol’n the impression of her fantasy…
(I. i. 22–31)
What Archbishop Parker decided to do when confronted with the case of Barnabe Googe and Mary Darrell was to remove Mary from her parents’ house and make her a ward of the court while the case was considered. The ecclesiastical authority decided for the lovers, and denied the claim of both the Lennard and the Darrell families. On 5 February 1564 Barnabe and Mary were married, and went on to have eight children.
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Lysander defends his claim in unambiguous terms:
You have her father’s love, Demetrius.
Let me have Hermia’s. Do you marry him. (93–4)
He gets his laugh before Egeus snaps back:
Scornful Lysander! True, he hath my love,
And what is mine, my love shall render him,
And she is mine, and all my right of her
I do estate unto Demetrius. (95–8)
This is now serious. Egeus has invoked the law of feme coverte, which explicitly denies a woman’s agency and treats her as a ‘chattel’ or movable possession of her father or husband. Lysander comes back with an argument that church authorities would have understood. All things being equal, there is nothing to choose between Demetrius and him; this being the case the lady should have the casting vote.
I am, my lord, as well derived as he,
As well possessed. My love is more than his,
My fortunes every way as fairly ranked…(99–101)
Hermia meanwhile has sounded a new note: she will accept a life of celibacy rather than marry a man to ‘whose unwished yoke [her] soul consents not to give sovereignty’ (81–2). The idea of winning the soul’s consent by courtship is new; in his response to Hermia, Theseus reinforces the underlying concept of marriage as a spiritual partnership by describing his marriage day as ‘the sealing day’ between his love and him ‘For everlasting bond of fellowship’ (84–5).
The Googe story ended happily, but the seduction of country girls by wandering poets did not always end so. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the dairymaid Jaquenetta is described by Costard as ‘a true girl’. It is her misfortune to be seduced by the posturing fool Armado. The child Moth rails against him, to no avail:
…to jig off a tune at the tongue’s end, canary to it with your feet, humour it with turning up your eyelids, sigh a note and sing a note, sometime through the throat as if you swallowed love with singing love, sometime through the nose as if you snuffed up love by smelling love, with your hat penthouse-like over the shop of your eyes; with your arms crossed on your thin-belly doublet like a rabbit on a spit, or your hands in your pocket, like a man after the old painting, and keep not too long in one tune but a snip and away. These are compliments. These are humours. These betray nice wenches, that would be betrayed without these…(III. i. 9–23)
Poetry was almost certainly part of Shakespeare’s armamentarium as a lover, and he would surely have deployed it as part of his courtship of Ann Hathaway, but the truth of the matter could be anything but pleasant. It should not be forgotten that, when his gloving business was thriving, John Shakespeare employed women to sew up the gloves, putting together the cut-out skins or ‘tranks’. The thought that the son of the house might have seduced one of the girls working in his father’s workshop may be unattractive but it is a more usual, if less romantic, scenario than the one that has Will waylaying a milkmaid on her way to pasture and chanting woeful ballads to her eyebrow. Women in service have always been vulnerable to the sexual advances of their employers and their sons. The church courts took a particularly dim view of sexual exploitation of servants, because employers and their wives were considered to stand in loco parentis. If it was known in Stratford that Will Shakespeare had made one of his father’s workers pregnant, it would have been more shame to him than to her, and that circumstance alone could explain why his parents did not refuse their consent to his marriage. It would have been the worse for him because she was not a stranger but the daughter of a respected parishioner. The possibility should not be altogether discounted. However, even as early as 1582, John Shakespeare was probably no longer working as a glover.
CHAPTER FIVE
of the making of a match, of impediments to marriage and how to overcome them, of bonds and special licences and pregnancy as a way of forcing the issue, of bastards and bastardy, and the girl who got away
We don’t know whether Ann Hathaway’s ‘friends’ ever made any effort to find her a husband. She may have had a swain before Will came into the picture. In As You Like It, even Audrey the goatherdess has a twenty-five-year-old swain whose name, amusingly enough, is William. When challenged, William readily confesses that he loves Audrey but, disconcerted by Touchstone’s meretricious eloquence, he gives way to him without a struggle.1 We are not told how long William had been courting Audrey in his wordless and good-natured fashion; we watch helpless as the opportunist Touchstone, who has met Audrey and wooed her between one scene of the play and the next, wins her away from William and probably ruins her life.
Though Ann’s friends would have understood that negotiating a match for her was part of their duties under her father’s will, they were under no obligation to initiate the process. In reserving a marriage portion for Ann out
of his estate, her father may have provided a disincentive rather than an incentive for finding her a husband. The widowed mistress of Hewlands Farm could have valued Ann too much as a maiden aunt, working unpaid to support the household, to set about scraping together the cash to cover her dowry bequest. Ann may well have become resigned to the idea that she was destined to work as an unpaid servant in someone else’s household for the rest of her life, until the boy from Stratford began accosting her as she went about her daily tasks. She would probably have thought him too young; he may have taken it upon himself to prove to her that he was not.
Tudor marriage negotiations were often broken off for months at a time as parents and friends wrangled over the precise arrangements for the disposal of property or the rights of any children in the property of either parent and so on back and forth. The death of a father necessitated a complete rejigging of all the terms of the agreement. The fact that no marriage contract between Will and Ann has survived doesn’t mean that there wasn’t one. Sandells and Richardson would have been involved in the negotiations from the outset, possibly long before the death of Richard Hathaway. If this was the case, negotiations would have been abandoned when Hathaway fell ill. A pregnancy might have been the only way the young couple could get them started again.