Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare's Wife

Anne Hathaway Shakespeare (died 6 August 1623)

An unhappy marriage? A forced marriage? A happy marriage? A dutiful but dull wife? A despised wife? A cherished wife? The reason for Shakespeare's "escape" to London? The reason for his return to Stratford every year, and the wife he returns to when he retires? 

A 1708 drawing of "Shakespear's consort”
that may--but probably does not--
represent Anne Hathaway

Such have been--and remain--the contradictory views of Anne Hathaway, the wife of William Shakespeare. Of course, whatever the case may have been, the cards were stacked against her. As Germaine Greer writes in Shakespeare's Wife, 

Until our own time, history focussed on man the achiever; the higher the achiever the more likely it was that the woman who slept in his bed would be judged unworthy of his company. Her husband's fans recoiled from the notion that she might have made a significant contribution towards his achievement of greatness.

And so, in his best-selling Will in the World: How Shakespeare Came to Be Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt believes that one way Shakespeare "came to be" Shakespeare was by leaving Anne Hathaway behind. His chapter title is particularly telling about the way things are going to go: "Wooing, Wedding, and Repenting." For Greenblatt, Anne at first represented "an escape": a safe choice, an exciting choice (Anne "was in the unusual position of being her own woman," independent and with her own financial resources), her sexuality offering a "compelling dream of pleasure." 

While noting that "Shakespeare's marriage has been the subject of almost frenzied interest," Greenblatt is eager to join in, suggesting that, while Anne Hathaway "had something of an inheritance," it wasn't all that much ("she was hardly a great heiress"). He happily agrees with those who suspect "that Will was dragged to the altar." 

And while Greenblatt acknowledges that "the state of [Shakespeare's] feelings at the time of his wedding is not known, and his attitude toward his wife during the subsequent thirty-two years of marriage can only be surmised," surmise he does. According to Greenblatt, Shakespeare "was curiously restrained in his depictions of what it is actually like to be married." Shakespeare found it "difficult to portray or even imagine fully achieved marital intimacy" but, rather, his plays "register the frustrated longing for spousal intimacy." Shakespeare could not, Greenblatt asserts, "find what he craved, emotionally or sexually, within his marriage." At best his marriage with Anne is "a mismatch."

By contrast, Greer's work is advocacy--to counter Greenblatt's contention about marriage as it's represented in Shakespeare's plays, she notes that the plays repeatedly show "constant wives redeem unjust and deluded husbands." And, as she contends, "No one has ever undertaken a systematic review" of the life of Anne Hathaway--or her potential contributions to Shakespeare's life and work--"while every opportunity to caricature and revile her has been exploited to risible lengths." Greer's Shakespeare's Wife is a work of advocacy, but it is also an extraordinary example of careful and thorough archival work. 

And as for Greenblatt's "Wooing, Wedding, and Repenting" chapter title? Greer has a few doozies of her own: the Introduction is subtitled "considering the poor reputation of wives generally, in particular the wives of literary men, and the traditional disparagement of the wife of the Man of the Millenium" (in 1999, Shakespeare was voted the "British Person of the Millenium" by BBC4 radio listeners); chapter 10, "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"; chapter 17, "in which Shakespeare returns to the town some say he never left and lives the life of an Anglican gentleman while Ann continues to live the life of a puritan townswoman," and chapter 21, "in which the intrepid author makes the absurd suggestion that Ann Shakespeare could have been involved in the First Folio project, that she might have contributed not only papers but also money to indemnify the publishers against loss and enable them to sell a book that was very expensive to produce at a price that young gentlemen could pay."

As Greer acknowledges, for many scholars (like Greenblatt?), "most" of her book will be regarded as "heresy":

The Shakespeare wallahs have succeeded in creating a Bard in their own likeness, that is to say, incapable of relating to women, and have then vilified the one woman who remained true to him all his life, in order to exonerate him. There can be no doubt that Shakespeare neglected his wife, embarrassed her and even humiliated her, but attempting to justify his behaviour by vilifying her is puerile. The defenders of Ann Hathaway are usually derided as sentimental when they are trying simply to be fair. It is a more insidious variety of sentimentality that wants to believe that women who are ill treated must have brought it upon themselves.

Anne Hathaway lived long enough to see a monument for her husband built in Stratford, but she is not buried with him. She is buried separately, her headstone bearing the following inscription: "Here lyeth the body of Anne wife of William Shakespeare who departed this life the 6th day of August 1623 being of the age of 67 years."

About this separate burial, Greenblatt writes, 

When Shakespeare lay dying, he tried to forget his wife . . . And when he thought of the afterlife, the last thing he wanted was to be mingled with the woman he married. There are four lines carved in his gravestone in the chancel of Stratford Church:

GOOD FRIEND FOR JESUS SAKE FORBEARE,
TO DIGG THE DUST ENCLOASED HEARE:
BLEST BE YE MAN YT SPARES THES STONES,
AND CURST BE HE YT MOVES MY BONES.

In 1693 a visitor to the grave was told that the epitaph was 'made by himself a little before his death.' If so, these are probably the last lines that Shakespeare wrote. Perhaps he simply feared that his bones would be dug up and thrown in the nearby charnel house--he seems to have regarded that fate with horror--but he may have feared still more that one day his grave would be opened to let in the body of Anne Shakespeare.

Nice work, Mr. Greenblatt.

Update, 23 April 2025: And now, it seems, Anne Hathaway may well have gone to London with her husband--that he didn't run away and leave her behind in Stratford. For Dalya Alberge's piece in The Guardian, reporting on the new findings by Matthew Steggle, who has identified a letter addressed to “Good Mrs Shakspaire,” living on Trinity Lane, click here. As Steggle notes,  “For Shakespeare biographers who favour the narrative of the ‘disastrous marriage’--in fact, for all Shakespeare biographers--[this] document should be a horrible, difficult problem.”

And another article with a bit more detail, in the New York Times. 

Mary Arden, Shakespeare's Mother

Mary Arden Shakespeare (son baptized 26 April 1564)

We don't know exactly when Mary Arden, William Shakespeare's mother, was born--it may have been as early as 1537, which is the date many sources suggest, though she may have been born as late as 1540. She had eight children between 1558 and 1580. Her third child (and first son) was William--and although we don't know his date of birth either, we do know William Shakespeare was baptized on 26 April 1564, and so I've used that date for this post about his mother, Mary.

We know Mary Arden was the daughter of Robert Arden and his wife Agnes Webbe Hill (Agnes was the widow of John Hill). While the Arden family had a long and distinguished history, Robert Arden himself was not a member of the wealthy and distinguished Arden line--but neither was he impoverished. He was a prosperous man, and his marriage to Agnes enhanced his holdings. When he died in 1556, he left his daughter, Mary, money and land. Mary Arden was also one of the executors of her father's will, which may provide some clue about her age--if she had been born in 1540, she would have been very young to be an executor; a birth in 1537 would have made her about age nineteen.

We don't know exactly when Mary Arden married John Shakespeare, but it was probably in 1557, shortly after her father's death. Her first child, a daughter named Margaret, was baptized in Stratford on 15 September 1558. 

Mary Arden's family may have been Catholic (several recent biographers, notably Stephen Greenblatt, suggest Robert Arden and his family were Catholic). In his biography of Shakespeare, Greenblatt notes that Mary signed legal documents with a mark, which suggests she could probably not write (though neither could her husband, John, who also signed with a mark). Not being able to write didn't necessarily mean that Mary Arden couldn't read, but we don't know. 

Plague broke out in Stratford shortly after William was born--in her biography of Ann Hathaway, the woman who married Shakespeare, Germaine Greer notes, "We can only imagine Mary's terror for her newborn son." Greenblatt speculates too: "Perhaps Mary Shakespeare packed up and took her newborn to the country for several months, away from the pestiferous streets."

We don't know what Mary Arden thoughts were about her husband's downwardly mobile career--in particular about his mortgaging of part of her inheritance in 1578, the sale of some of her property, or his loss of still more her property in 1580, when he failed to repay debts for which the property had been collateral. 

We don't know what she thought of her son's marriage in 1582, or how she regarded her husband's legal actions throughout the rest of the decade of the 1580s. 

We don't know if Mary Arden was at the funeral of her grandson, Shakespeare's son Hamnet, who died in 1596 and was buried on 11 August.

We don't know if she was at the marriage of her granddaughter, Shakespeare's daughter Susanna, on 5 June 1607.

We don't know if she was at the burial of her youngest son, Edward, who was buried on 31 December 1607.

We don't know when Mary Arden died, though her funeral was in September of 1608. We don't know whether Shakespeare left London and attended the funeral in Stratford--there is no evidence for it, though according to Greer, "most scholars" agree he was there "mainly because they think he should have" been there.

Mary Arden did not leave a will.

The house that was long regarded as Mary Arden's house--a large and beautiful timbered frame house visited by thousands and thousands of tourists over the decades since it was bought by the Shakespeare Trust in 1930--is not Mary Arden's house. In 2000 it was correctly identified as a farmhouse owned by Adam Palmer. The actual childhood home of Mary Arden, smaller and much less picture-postcard-worthy, is next door.

There is no biography of Mary Arden. And there is no portrait.

This is not Mary Arden's house.

The newly identified home of Mary Arden