The only certainty we possess for this early period of Shakespeare’s adulthood is that in late November 1582, a clerk at Worcester recorded that William Shakespeare had applied for a licence to marry. The bride, according to the ledger, was not Anne Hathaway but Anne Whateley of nearby Temple Grafton – a mystery that has led some biographers to suggest that Shakespeare courted two women to the point of matrimony at the same time, and that he stood up Anne Whateley out of duty to the pregnant Anne Hathaway. Anthony Burgess, in a slightly fevered moment, suggested that young Will, ‘sent on skin-buying errands to Temple Grafton’, perhaps fell for ‘a comely daughter, sweet as May and shy as a fawn’.
In fact, Anne Whateley probably never existed. In four hundred years of searching, no other record of her has ever been found. The clerk at Worcester was not, it appears, the most meticulous of record keepers. Elsewhere in the ledgers, in the same hand, scholars have found ‘Barbar’ recorded as ‘Baker’, ‘Edgcock’ confused with ‘Elcock’ and ‘Darby’ put in place of ‘Bradeley’, so turning Hathaway into Whateley was by no means beyond his wayward capabilities. Moreover – for Shakespeare investigators really are tireless – the records also show that in another book on the same day the clerk noted a suit concerning a William Whateley, and it is presumed that the name somehow stuck in his mind. No one, however, has yet found a convincing explanation for how Temple Grafton came into the records when the real bride was from Shottery.
The marriage licence itself is lost, but a separate document, the marriage bond, survives. On it Anne Hathaway is correctly identified. Shakespeare’s name is rendered as ‘Shagspere’ – the first of many arrestingly variable renderings. The marriage bond cost £40 and permitted the marriage to proceed with one reading of the banns instead of the normal three, so that it might be conducted the sooner. The £40 was to indemnify the Church authorities against any costly suits arising from the action – a claim of breach of promise, for instance. It was a truly whopping sum – something like £20,000 in today’s money – particularly when one’s father is so indebted that he can barely leave his own house for fear of arrest and imprisonment. Clearly there was much urgency to get the couple wed.
What makes this slightly puzzling is that it was not unusual for a bride to be pregnant on her wedding day. Up to 40 per cent of brides were in that state, according to one calculation, so why the extravagant haste here is a matter that can only be guessed at. It was unusual, however, for a young man to be married at eighteen, as Shakespeare was. Men tended to marry in their mid- to late twenties, women a little sooner. But these figures were extremely variable. Christopher Marlowe had a sister who married at twelve (and died at thirteen in childbirth). Until 1604 the age of consent was twelve for a girl, fourteen for a boy.
We know precious little about Shakespeare’s wife and nothing at all about her temperament, intelligence, religious views or other personal qualities. We are not even sure that Anne was her usual name. In her father’s will she was referred to as Agnes (which at the time was pronounced with a silent g, making it ‘ANN-uss’). Agnes and Anne were often treated as interchangeable names. We know also that she was one of seven children and that she evidently came from prosperous stock: though her childhood home is always referred to as Anne Hathaway’s cottage, it was (and is) a handsome and substantial property, containing twelve rooms. Her gravestone describes her as being sixty-seven years old at the time of her death in 1623. It is from this alone that we conclude that she was considerably older than her husband. Apart from the gravestone, there is no evidence for her age on record.
We know also that she had three children with William Shakespeare – Susanna in May 1583, and the twins Judith and Hamnet in early February 1585 – but all the rest is darkness. We know nothing about the couple’s relationship – whether they bickered constantly or were eternally doting. We don’t know if she ever accompanied him to London, saw any of his plays, or even took an interest in them. We have no indication of any warmth between them – but then we have no indication of warmth between William Shakespeare and any other human being. It is tempting to suppose that they had some sort of real bond for at least the first years of their marriage – they had children together on two occasions, after all – but it may actually be, for all we know, that they were very loving indeed and enjoyed a continuing (if presumably often long-distance) affection throughout their marriage. Two of the few certainties of Shakespeare’s life are that his marriage lasted till his death and that he sent much of his wealth back to Stratford as soon as he was able, which may not be conclusive proof of attachment, but hardly argues against it.
So, in any case, we have the position of a William Shakespeare who was poor, at the head of a growing family, and not yet twenty-one – not the most promising of situations for a young man with ambitions. Yet somehow from these most unpropitious circumstances he became a notable success in a competitive and challenging profession in a distant city in seemingly no time at all. How he did it is a perennial mystery.
One possibility is often mentioned. In 1587, when Shakespeare was twenty-three, an incident occurred among the Queen’s Men, one of the leading acting troupes, that may have provided an opening for Shakespeare. Specifically, while touring the provinces, the company was stopped at Thame, a riverside town in Oxfordshire, when a fight broke out between William Knell, one of the company’s leading men, and another actor, John Towne. In the course of their fight, Towne stabbed Knell through the neck, mortally wounding him (though evidently in self-defence, as he was subsequently cleared of blame). Knell’s death left the company an actor short, and raised the possibility that they recruited or were joined by a stage-struck young William Shakespeare when they passed through Stratford. Unfortunately, there is no documentary evidence to connect Shakespeare to the Queen’s Men at any stage of his career, and we don’t know whether the troupe visited Stratford before or after its fateful stop in Thame.
There is, however, an additional intriguing note in all this. Less than a year later Knell’s youthful widow, Rebecca, who was only fifteen or sixteen, remarried. Her new partner was John Heminges, who would become one of Shakespeare’s closest friends and associates and who would, with Henry Condell, put together the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works after Shakespeare’s death.
But a few intriguing notes are all that the record can offer. It is extraordinary to think that before he settled in London and became celebrated as a playwright, history provides just four recorded glimpses of Shakespeare – at his baptism, his wedding, and the two births of his children. There is also a passing reference to him in a lawsuit of 1588 filed by his father in a property dispute, but that has nothing to say about where he was at that time or what he was doing.
Shakespeare’s early life is really little more than a series of occasional sightings. So when we note that he was now about to embark on what are popularly known as his lost years, they are very lost indeed.
* It was an unlikely courtship. The Queen was old enough to be his mother – she was nearly forty, he just eighteen – and the Duke moreover was short and famously ugly (his champions suggested hopefully that he could be made to look better if he grew a beard). It was only the Duke’s death in 1584 that finally put an end to the possibility of marriage.
Chapter Three The Lost Years, 1585–1592
FEW PLACES IN history can have been more deadly and desirable at the same time as London in the sixteenth century. Conditions that made life challenging elsewhere were particularly rife in London, where newly arrived sailors and other travellers continually refreshed the city’s stock of infectious maladies.
Plague, virtually always present somewhere in the city, flared murderously