It is not known if Will’s parents approved of the marriage of their eighteen-year-old son to the pregnant twenty-six-year-old bride. Then as now, in England eighteen would have been regarded as young for a man to marry; the mean age upon marriage for males in Stratford in 1600 (the earliest date for which there are reliable figures) was twenty-eight. And it was unusual for a man to marry a woman so much his senior; women in this period were on average two years younger than their husbands. The exceptions were generally among the upper classes, where marriages were in effect property transactions between families and very young children could be betrothed. (In such cases, the marriages were not consummated until years after the wedding, and the newlyweds often waited a very long time before they began to live together.) In the case of Anne Hathaway, the bride had something of an inheritance, but she was hardly a great heiress—in his will her father had stipulated that she was to receive six pounds thirteen shillings fourpence on her marriage—and a financially embarrassed, communally prominent John Shakespeare might have hoped that his son’s bride would bring a larger dowry. Had they bitterly objected, Shakespeare’s parents could have made a legal fuss, since their son was a minor. (The age of majority was twenty-one.) They did not do so, perhaps because, as legal records show, Shakespeare’s father had been acquainted with Anne’s father. Still, it is likely that in the eyes of John and Mary Shakespeare, Will was not making a great match.
And Will? Through the centuries eighteen-year-old boys have not been famously eager in such situations to rush to the altar. Will might, of course, have been an exception. Certainly, he was able as a playwright to imagine such impatience. “When and where and how / We met, we wooed, and made exchange of vow / I’ll tell thee as we pass,” Romeo tells Friar Laurence on the morning after the Capulet ball; “but this I pray, / That thou consent to marry us today” (2.2.61–64).
Romeo and Juliet’s depiction of the frantic haste of the rash lovers blends together humor, irony, poignancy, and disapproval, but Shakespeare conveys above all a deep inward understanding of what it feels like to be young, desperate to wed, and tormented by delay. In the great balcony scene, though they have only just met, Romeo and Juliet exchange “love’s faithful vow” with one another. “If that thy bent of love be honourable, / Thy purpose marriage,” Juliet tells Romeo at the close of the most passionate love scene Shakespeare ever wrote, “send me word tomorrow.” When she knows “Where and what time thou wilt perform the rite,” she declares, “All my fortunes at thy foot I’ll lay, / And follow thee, my lord, throughout the world” (2.1.169, 185–86, 188–90).
Hence the urgency of Romeo’s visit to the friar early the next morning, and hence the wild eagerness of Juliet for the return of her nurse, whom she has sent to get Romeo’s response. “Old folks, many feign as they were dead,” the young girl complains, “Unwieldy, slow, heavy, and pale as lead.” When the nurse finally trundles in, Juliet can scarcely pry the all-important news from her:
NURSE: I am a-weary. Give me leave a while.
Fie, how my bones ache. What a jaunce have I!
JULIET: I would thou hadst my bones and I thy news.
Nay, come, I pray thee speak, good, good Nurse, speak.
NURSE: Jesu, what haste! Can you not stay a while?
Do you not see that I am out of breath?
JULIET: How art thou out of breath when thou hast breath
To say to me that thou art out of breath?
The excuse that thou dost make in this delay
Is longer than the tale thou dost excuse.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
What says he of our marriage—what of that?
(2.4.16–17, 25–46)
Exasperated impatience has never been more deftly and sympathetically chronicled.
Romeo’s urgency is sketched rather cursorily; it is Juliet’s that is given much fuller scope and intensity. Similarly, it is eminently likely that Anne, three months pregnant, rather than the young Will, was the prime source of the impatience that led to the bond. To be sure, this was Elizabethan and not Victorian England: an unmarried mother in the 1580s did not, as she would in the 1880s, routinely face fierce, unrelenting social stigmatization. But the shame and social disgrace in Shakespeare’s time were real enough; bastardy was severely frowned upon by the community, as the child would need to be fed and clothed; and the six pounds thirteen shillings fourpence would only be given to Anne when she found a husband.
The substantial bond to hurry the marriage along was posted by a pair of Stratford farmers, Fulke Sandells and John Rychardson, friends of the bride’s late father. The young bridegroom and father-to-be may have been grateful for this handsome assistance, but it is far more likely that he was a reluctant, perhaps highly reluctant, beneficiary. If the playwright’s imagination subsequently conjured up an impatient Romeo, eager to wed, it also conjured up a series of foot-dragging bridegrooms shamed or compelled to wed the women with whom they have slept. “She is two months on her way,” the clown Costard tells the braggart Armado, who has seduced a peasant girl. “What meanest thou?” Armado demands, trying to bluster his way out of the situation, but Costard insists: “She’s quick. The child brags in her belly already. ’Tis yours” (Love’s Labour’s Lost, 5.2.658–63). Armado is no romantic hero; like Lucio in Measure for Measure and Bertram in All’s Well That Ends Well, he is treated with irony, distaste, and contempt. But these may have been precisely the feelings evoked in Shakespeare when he looked back upon his own marriage.
In one of his earliest works, the 1Henry VI, he had a character compare a marriage by compulsion to one made voluntarily:
For what is wedlock forcèd but a hell,
An age of discord and continual strife,
Whereas the contrary bringeth bliss,
And is a pattern of celestial peace.
(5.7.62–65)
The character is an earl, cynically persuading the king to make what will be a bad match, but the dream of bliss seems valid enough, along with the sense that “wedlock forcèd” is an almost certain recipe for unhappiness. Perhaps at the time he wrote those lines, in the early 1590s, Shakespeare was reflecting on the source of his own marital unhappiness. Perhaps too there is a personal reflection in Richard of Gloucester’s sly observation “Yet hasty marriage seldom proveth well” (3Henry VI, 4.1.18) or in Count Orsino’s advice in Twelfth Night:
Let still the woman take
An elder than herself. So wears she to him;
So sways she level in her husband’s heart.
(2.4.28–30)
Of course, each of these lines has a specific dramatic context, but they were all written by someone who at eighteen years of age had hastily married a woman older than himself and then left her behind in Stratford. How could he have written Orsino’s words without in some sense bringing his own life, his disappointment, frustration, and loneliness, to bear upon them?
Suspicion that Will was dragged to the altar has been heightened by another document. The bond for the grant of a marriage license to Willam Shagspere and Anne Hathwey is dated November 28, but the Worcester archives also record a marriage license dated one day earlier, November 27, for the wedding of William Shaxpere and Anne Whatley of Temple Grafton. As there were other Shakespeares in Warwickshire, a different William could conceivably have happened to wed at just this time. Assuming, however, that such a coincidence would be unlikely, who on earth is Anne Whatley of Temple Grafton, a village about five miles west of Stratford? A woman Will loved and was hastening to marry until he was strong-armed by Sandells and Rychardson into wedlock with the pregnant Anne Hathaway?
The possibility has a novelistic appeal: “And so he was still riding to Temple Grafton in cold November,” wrote Anthony Burgess in a fine flight of fancy, “winter’s first harbingers biting. Hoofs rang frosty on the road. Hard by Shottery two men stopped him. They addressed him by name and bade him dismount.” But most scholars have agreed with Joseph Gray, who concluded i
n 1905, after extensive study, that the clerk who entered the names on the license simply became confused and wrote Whatley instead of Hathaway. Most scholars imagine too that Will was in some measure willing. But the state of his feelings at the time of his wedding is not known, and his attitude toward his wife during the subsequent thirty-four years of marriage can only be surmised. Between his wedding license and his last will and testament, Shakespeare left no direct, personal trace of his relationship with his wife—or none, in any case, that survives. From this supremely eloquent man, there have been found no love letters to Anne, no signs of shared joy or grief, no words of advice, not even any financial transactions.
A sentimental nineteenth-century picture shows Shakespeare at home in Stratford, reciting one of his plays to his family—his father and mother listening from a distance, a dog at his feet, his three children gathered around him, his wife looking up at him adoringly from her needlework—but such a moment, if it ever occurred, would have been exceedingly rare. For most of his married life he lived in London, and Anne and the children apparently remained in Stratford. That in itself does not necessarily imply estrangement; husbands and wives have often been constrained for long periods to live at a considerable distance from one another. But it must have been exceptionally difficult in Shakespeare’s time to bridge this distance, to keep up any intimacy. All the more difficult, of course, if, as seems likely, his wife Anne could not read or write. Of course, most of the women in his world had little or no literacy, but the commonness of the condition does not change the fact: it is entirely possible that Shakespeare’s wife never read a word he wrote, that anything he sent her from London had to be read by a neighbor, that anything she wished to tell him—the local gossip, the health of his parents, the mortal illness of their only son—had to be consigned to a messenger.
Perhaps the optimists are right and their relationship, notwithstanding the long years apart, was a good one. Biographers eager for Shakespeare to have had a good marriage have stressed that when he made some money in the theater, he established his wife and family in New Place, the fine house he bought in Stratford; that he must have frequently visited them there; that he chose to retire early and return permanently to Stratford a few years before his untimely death. Some have gone further and assumed that he must have had Anne and the children stay with him for prolonged periods in London. “None has spoken more frankly or justly of the honest joys of ‘board and bed,’” wrote the distinguished antiquarian Edgar Fripp, pointing to lines from Coriolanus:
I loved the maid I married; never man
Sighed truer breath. But that I see thee here,
Thou noble thing, more dances my rapt heart
Than when I first my wedded mistress saw
Bestride my threshold.
(4.5.113–17)
But if these lines were, as Fripp thought, a recollection of the dramatist’s own feelings many years before, the recollection was far more bitter than sentimental: they are spoken by the warrior Aufidius, whose rapt heart dances at seeing the hated man he has long dreamed of killing.
It is, perhaps, as much what Shakespeare did not write as what he did that seems to indicate something seriously wrong with his marriage. This was an artist who made use of virtually everything that came his way. He mined, with very few exceptions, the institutions and professions and personal relationships that touched his life. He was the supreme poet of courtship: one has only to think of the aging sonneteer and the fair young man, panting Venus and reluctant Adonis, Orlando and Rosalind, Petruccio and Kate, even twisted, perverse Richard III and Lady Anne. And he was a great poet of the family, with a special, deep interest in the murderous rivalry of brothers and in the complexity of father-daughter relations: Egeus and Hermia, Brabanzio and Desdemona, Lear and the fearsome threesome, Pericles and Marina, Prospero and Miranda. But 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 was curiously restrained in his depictions of what it is actually like to be married.
To be sure, he provided some fascinating glimpses. A few of his married couples have descended into mutual loathing: “O Goneril!” cries the disgusted Albany, in King Lear. “You are not worth the dust which the rude wind / Blows in your face.” “Milk-livered man!” she spits back at him. “That bear’st a cheek for blows, a head for wrongs: . . . Marry, your manhood! mew!” (4.2.30–32, 51–69). But for the most part, they are in subtler, more complex states of estrangement. Mostly, it’s wives feeling neglected or shut out. “For what offence,” Kate Percy asks her husband, Harry (better known as Hotspur), in 1 Henry IV, “have I this fortnight been / A banished woman from my Harry’s bed?” She has in point of fact committed no offence—Hotspur is deeply preoccupied with plotting a rebellion—but she is not wrong to feel excluded. Hotspur has chosen to keep his wife in the dark:
But hark you, Kate.
I must not have you henceforth question me
Whither I go, nor reason whereabout.
Whither I must, I must; and, to conclude,
This evening must I leave you, gentle Kate.
(2.4.32–33, 93–97)
The rebellion is a family affair—Hotspur has been drawn into it by his father and his uncle—but though the fate of his wife will certainly be involved in its outcome, the only knowledge she has of it is from words she has overheard him muttering in his troubled sleep. With bluff, genial misogyny Hotspur explains that he simply does not trust her:
I know you wise, but yet no farther wise
Than Harry Percy’s wife; constant you are,
But yet a woman; and for secrecy
No lady closer, for I well believe
Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know.
And so far will I trust thee, gentle Kate.
(2.4.98–103)
The words are all good-humored and exuberant, in the way most of the things Hotspur says are, but the marriage they sketch is one at whose core is mutual isolation. (The same play, 1 Henry IV, gives another, more graphic vision of such a marriage in Edmund Mortimer and his Welsh wife: “This is the deadly spite that angers me: / My wife can speak no English, I no Welsh” [3.1.188–89].)
Shakespeare returned to the theme in Julius Caesar, where Brutus’s wife, Portia, complains that she has been deliberately shut out of her husband’s inner life. Unlike Kate Percy, Portia is not banished from her husband’s bed, but her exclusion from his mind leaves her feeling, she says, like a whore:
Am I yourself
But as it were in sort or limitation?
To keep with you at meals, comfort your bed,
And talk to you sometimes? Dwell I but in the suburbs
Of your good pleasure? If it be no more,
Portia is Brutus’ harlot, not his wife.
(2.1.281–86)
The question here and elsewhere in the plays is the degree of intimacy that husbands and wives can achieve, and the answer Shakespeare repeatedly gives is very little.
Shakespeare was not alone in his time in finding it difficult to portray or even imagine fully achieved marital intimacy. It took decades of Puritan insistence on the importance of companionship in marriage to change the social, cultural, and psychological landscape. By the time Milton published Paradise Lost, in 1667, the landscape was decisively different. Marriage was no longer the consolation prize for those who did not have the higher vocation of celibacy; it was not the doctrinally approved way of avoiding the sin of fornication; it was not even principally the means of generating offspring and conveying property. It was about the dream of long-term love.
But it is not clear how much of this dream could have been envisaged when Will agreed, whether eagerly or reluctantly, to marry Anne Hathaway. It is no accident that Milton wrote important tracts advocating the possibility of divorce; the longing for deep emotional satisfaction in marriage turned out to depend heavily upon the possibility of divorce. In a world without thi
s possibility most writers seemed to agree: it was better to make jokes about endurance, pass over most marriages in discreet silence, and write love poetry to anyone but your spouse. Dante wrote the passionate La vita nuova not to his wife, Gemma Donati, but to Beatrice Portinari, whom he had first glimpsed when they were both children. So too Petrarch, who was probably ordained as a priest, wrote the definitive European love poems—the great sequence of sonnets—to the beautiful Laura, and not to the unnamed, unknown woman who gave birth to his two children, Giovanni and Francesca. And in England, Stella, the star at which Sir Philip Sidney gazed longingly in his sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella, was Penelope Devereux, married to someone else, and not his wife, Frances Walsingham.
It was reasonable to hope for stability and comfort in marriage, but not for much more, and if you did not find anything that you wanted, if relations deteriorated into sour-eyed bitterness, there was no way to end the marriage and begin again. Divorce—even as an imagined solution, let alone a practical one—did not exist in 1580 in Stratford-upon-Avon, not for anyone of Shakespeare’s class, scarcely for anyone at all. Like everyone who wedded at that time, he married for life, whether the marriage turned out to be fulfilling or disastrous, whether the person he had chosen (or who had chosen him) continued after a year or so to touch his heart or filled him with revulsion.
Yet diminished cultural expectations can at best only partially explain Shakespeare’s reluctance or inability to represent marriage, as it were, from the inside. For he did in fact register the frustrated longing for spousal intimacy, though he attributed that longing almost exclusively to women. Along with Kate Percy and Portia, there is Shakespeare’s most poignant depiction of a neglected wife, Adriana in The Comedy of Errors. Since The Comedy of Errors is a farce and since it is based on a Roman model that has absolutely no emotional investment in the figure of the wife—Plautus jokingly has her put up for sale at the close of his play—it is all the more striking that Shakespeare registered so acutely her anguish: