The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Forty-Four In which there is a death, and a birth, and an earthquake

The death, first. The death was that of Shakespeare's sister Anne.

All the Annes in this book are important, and I suggest you mark them well with your red ink, sir - even those, like Lady Anne Rainsford (Michael Drayton's 'Idea') who play no real part in the story. Soon we shall be meeting Mr Shakespeare's future wife, Anne Hathaway. And a very elusive lady called Anne Whateley, who may never have existed except on a page in a book. Early and late, our poet's life was riddled with women called Anne. Sometimes I even wonder if the so-called Dark Lady of the sonnets could have been another one, although as you will see for yourselves when we come to that mystery so far there are no Annes among the suspects. As for Anne Shakespeare, Will's sister, she was important to him both in the matter and the manner of her death.

Little Anne Shakespeare was only a child when she died. Those who remembered her spoke of an angel-like creature. She was frail as she was fair, with golden hair so long that she could sit on it. Her surviving relatives referred to her always with a wistful mixture of awe and affection, as if talking about a beautiful spirit that had come briefly to visit them, and found this world intolerable, and gone back therefore to that realm of light which was its true home. For years after Anne's death they kept her tiny wicker chair in the corner of the kitchen by the stove. None of the other children would ever have presumed or dared to sit in it.

Anne Shakespeare died in the springtime of the year, as well as her own springtime. She was just seven years and six months old. Mrs Shakespeare, the bard's widow, used to say that Anne was eight, but she was not. With a creature so evanescent, it seems vital to get the one or two facts right, and I have consulted both the register of the parish church of Holy Trinity (for her birth) and the chamberlain's accounts Council Book A in Stratford (for her death).

Here is the entry for her baptism:

'28 September, 1571, christened Anna filia magistri Shakspere.'

And here is the entry for her burial:

April 4th, 1579, 8d paid for the bell & pall of Mr Shakspeare's dawter.'

So, you see, the poor soul never reached the age of eight.

But facts break down now, and we pass into a misty shire of pure superstition, for Mrs Shakespeare always used to repeat the versions of little Anne's death which she had heard from Mary Arden, her mother-in-law, old wives' tales that had for their moral burden the insistence that the child perished as a direct consequence of bringing hawthorn blossom across the threshold of the house on Henley Street.

There is a saying amongst country folk, many centuries old, that you must never bring the hawthorn into the house when you go gathering it to celebrate the coming of the spring, which they call going a-maying. If you cross the threshold with the may, it means a death. The hawthorn is the may, the blossom of life, but to fetch it into the house is to ask death in.

Mrs Shakespeare told me this herself, with every appearance of perfect sincerity, and I respected her. You hang hawthorn in the front porch, she said, and you hang it round the doorposts. You may even decorate your sills and windows with it, outside. But you never, never, never bring hawthorn across the threshold, and into the body of the house.

Anne Shakespeare did.

In her innocence that pretty child came running into the house on Henley Street with her arms full of blossoms, and she crowned herself Queen of the May with a fatal sprig of hawthorn.

She died a few days later, no one knew how. There was no fret or fever. She simply died.

Let us hope that Anne Shakespeare was buried deep in flowers. Larded with sweet flowers, madam, yes. With rosemary, pansies, and fennel. With columbines, daisies, and rue. Like Ophelia, she wore her rue with a difference. (And observe that there is no hawthorn in Ophelia's list of flowers.)

Anne's death doubtless provided John Shakespeare with another reason to be drunk and neglect his business, and I'm certain it left its mark on William too. He never directly referred to it, but then there was no reason why he should, not in my company. But the boy was not yet fifteen when his sister perished, and such things go in deep at any age.

I cannot think of Anne Shakespeare running innocently into the house in Henley Street with her little sprig of flowering hawthorn in her hand without the tears welling up in my eyes. I confess it, reader. To shed a few tears for the death of a girl you never knew is unquestionably the mark of some foul sentiment, but there it is. I have to live with such discomfortable things.

And here is a song for her, which song I found on a bit of yellow vellum, three centuries old, in the great public library founded at Oxford by Sir Thomas Bodley:

Of everykune tre -

Of everykune tre-

The hawthorne blowet suotes

Of everykune tre.

My lemmon she shal be -

My lemmon she shal be-

The fairest of erth kinne

My lemmon she shal be.

EVERYKUNE is every kind, with the mark over the e to show us how they said it; BLOWET SUOTES is bloweth sweetest; LEMMON is leman or lover.

Nice poem.

A year after Anne's death, there was a birth in the family. I quote again from the parish register, the entry I found:

'3 May, 1580, christened, Edmund sonne to Mr John Shakespeare.'

Was there an odour of hawthorn about the new baby's cradle? Had John and Mary tried in their grief to call poor lost Anne back? This last offspring of their union, Edmund, was certainly a late child, an afterthought, six years younger than his nearest sibling, and some sixteen years younger than William, their eldest.

Here, if I give you a table of the Shakespeare children, you will discern the pattern:

Born 1564, William 1566, Gilbert 1569, Joan ('greasy', married Hart the hatter) 1571, Anne 1574, Richard 1580, Edmund

All lived to maturity, except the unfortunate Anne, though Edmund was only twenty-eight when he died, of brandy-wine, a player, but not one of the King's Men.

We may well suppose that William, as the eldest, was required to help to care for the smaller children. Discounting the indignity felt by an adolescent pressed into such a role, perhaps this might be considered positively as his earliest training for his work as a dramatist, in that it gave him some of his insight into the warring elements not just of family life but of human nature as a whole.

But look again at my table.

And remember that William, a disappointed scholar, brimming with poetry, either with or without the brief taste of the wide world provided by his adventures as a fireworks salesman, was now back at home in a household where there was first the sudden death of a child full of promise, and then a new baby, another mouth to feed, an infant rival, with him having to work at a trade which by no stretch of the imagination can he have found congenial, while his father (who was a butcher) preferred to work at nothing much but the indulgence of his paternal belly by the satisfaction of his infernal thirst.

Anne's death and Edmund's birth, in the circumstances, would have been enough, I think, to make young William restless.

But then, to cap it all, there was an earthquake.

It was only a small earthquake, as befits England, as we know, but all the same the good earth moved and trembled. On the evening of Easter Wednesday, 1580, in that very month when his brother Edmund was hatched, the solid Warwickshire countryside threatened to dissolve beneath the feet of William Shakespeare.

Such things do more in the mind of a poet than they do to the world as a whole.

Of that earthquake's physical effects in Stratford-upon-Avon there is report only of chimneystacks twisted anti-clockwise, and the like. There was one fatality - a stone fell from one of the arches in the south transept of Holy Trinity Church, killing a field-mouse.

But who can say what that small earthquake did to Shakespeare?

Consider, reader.

We know, from Romeo and Juliet, that he never forgot it. We know, indeed, as I pointed out in my seventh chapter, that like the Nurse in that play, he even measured the years from the date of it. So the earthquake was plainly of some importance in his life. How could it not be? An intimation - however slight or minor - that the world might end, that the world will end, that the fabric of the earth can crack and perish, could hardly fail to make a lasting impression on anyone who suffers it. It is one thing to think (as young poets do) of identifying yourself with the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. It is quite another to feel the spear of your own being shaken by it.

There is a little wind before an earthquake.

Everyone knows that, even Pickleherring who was never in one.

There is always a little wind before an earthquake. (God knows why.)

The late Mr Shakespeare spoke more than once to me about that wind. But of the earthquake itself, the 'quake' of which he felt beneath his own feet, he said little and that little belittling, even disparaging.

He said he had been sitting by a dove-house in his mother's garden, and that the earthquake was no more than the shaking of the dove-house as the doves prepare to fly. In its homeliness, as in its precision, the image tells us much of the shock of the tremor. In all this, of course, his experience matches that which he gives to Juliet's nurse.

What else happened?

A mirror cracked from top to bottom in the hatter's shop of young William Hart, just starting to make his way in Mere Street; some copies of Lyly's Grammar were spilt from a shelf in the King's New School; six bricks fell down the chimney and into the men's dormitory at the poorhouse.

A small earthquake, but sufficient.

Sufficient, that is, to make William Shakespeare shake the familiar dust of Stratford from his shoes once the earth stopped shaking under them.