The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Fifty-Two In which Anne Hathaway

Here is Anne Hathaway walking down Henley Street. She goes down one side, she comes up the other. She is wearing a white gown with a crimson sash of velvet, a hat of plaited straw, long, fine silk gloves to her elbows, new sandals on her feet. It is when she is crossing the road outside the butcher's shop that she has suddenly to stop and step aside to let a cart go by.

When Anne tries to move again, it seems that she cannot. She stands stock-still in the middle of Henley Street. She is a handsome woman, twenty-six years old, well-versed in country matters, with a decent little dowry, but so far none of her suitors has asked for her hand in marriage. This might be because of her tongue, which is known to be sharp and shrewd. Besides, it is said that her hand can be had without benefit of clergy. Like Perdita, a queen of curds and cream, she is willing to use it to milk her importunate swains when their needs grow too much. Unlike Perdita, Anne Hathaway now appears to be transfixed in Henley Street.

Her flat wooden sandals seem stuck fast, in fact, in a deep heap of dung. It is summer, and the dung is thick and warm.

Miss Hathaway's father, a farmer, died last year. Her home is at Hewlands Farm, Shottery, about a mile away. There she lives, the eldest daughter, with a stepmother she detests, and her senior brother Bartholomew who is married and who brought in his wife to help him run the farm. Anne's four younger brothers also live at Hewlands, all aged between four and thirteen, on purpose (she often surmises) to make her life less than the joy it might otherwise be.

Miss H, in short, is in quest of a husband. At the moment, however, you might think she has a more pressing problem that requires to be solved.

Anne Hathaway seeks to ease up her right foot within her sandal where it is embedded in the dung, keeping her instep pressed against the thong of whitleather.

The sandal does not budge in its sticky bed.

Anne Hathaway shifts her weight and tries to ease up her left foot, this time pressing with her ankle against the thong at the back of the sandal.

Still no go, apparently.

The maiden now stuck in the midden is fond of these sandals. They cost her two shillings and sixpence at Evesham Fair.

Here she stands, in distress, as it seems, in the middle of the road. And the more that she struggles to pull her sandals free without removing her feet from them, the deeper those sandals are sinking in the soft, sticky dung. Flies start to buzz about her. The day is very hot.

Quite a predicament, reader, I think you'll agree.

Presumably Anne Hathaway cannot just slip out of her sandals and walk barefoot in the street. Her feet would get dirty, or they might perhaps be cut. A farmer's daughter in quest of a husband has in any case at all times to behave like a lady in public, and ladies do not go barefoot on the Queen's highway.

Should she then remove her gloves and remove her sandals and then replace her sandals on her feet?

She could, sir, yes. But a lady does not remove her gloves out of doors, no, quite so, madam.

Should she then retain her gloves and still remove her sandals and then replace her sandals on her feet?

I think not, madam, no. For if she does that then her gloves will get covered with dung, yes, indubitably, sir, and they are fine gloves, silk gloves, also purchased at Evesham Fair.

With gloves on or off, gloves retained or gloves sacrificed, we might also suppose that Anne Hathaway's predicament is compounded by knowledge that whichever course of action she should decide upon, assuming she cannot simply lift feet complete with sandals out of the dung, then she will have to stoop and bend over in Henley Street in order to accomplish it. Again, here is something a lady would prefer not to do, if she can possibly avoid it.

So, Anne Hathaway stands, Anne Hathaway is standing there, all of a dither. She flaps her hands about in the long silk gloves. She emits little mewing cries, as the flies go buzz about her, in what she trusts no doubt is a distressed manner. In fact she sounds more like a buzzard that hovers high above its prey.

What is Anne Hathaway doing? She is looking for a husband. Why should she look in a dunghill? Because it is there.

Do we know that she has not planned this? We do not. John Shakespeare's sterquinarium, if not exactly a trysting-place, is something of a landmark in the district. And where the dung is there the flies are found. Anne knows all such proverbs.

Besides, she has known William Shakespeare since both of them were children. But that eight-year difference in their ages has not enchanted her in his eyes, or so she suspects. She has seemed to him, perhaps, too much of a bossy-boots. So it could be with some cunning that she has devised the present accident.

Here is Anne Hathaway, standing right outside the house where William Shakespeare lives, apparently vulnerable and undecided in the street, fixed in a nasty predicament which might be blamed in part upon his father, and in a posture that calls out for firm, over-riding male action on the part of the son.

She is seeking to seem inadequate, frail, and clinging. She has placed herself in a position where he must sweep her off her feet.

Now a small crowd has gathered to watch her. Children laugh, and the town idiot pelts her with cherry stones.

Anne Hathaway's big blue eyes fill up very fetchingly with tears.

So along comes William Shakespeare on his white horse. It's a shuffling nag, actually, spavined, old, and with a touch of stringhalt, but it serves well enough for a young man of eighteen with no fortune.

William Shakespeare draws rein. He tries to spin his horse, but the creature's not having that. Mr Shakespeare dismounts with a leap, after standing bolt-upright in his stirrups. He tethers his steed to a tree, though there's probably no need since the creature falls asleep as soon as it stops.

William Shakespeare approaches Anne Hathaway where she stands in distress.

William Shakespeare plucks off his bonnet and bows as he comes to the lady.

With a courteous 'By your leave', William Shakespeare gallantly lifts Anne Hathaway up and out of her stuck sandals.

He carries her in his strong arms to the pavement just outside his father's shop.

Then he sets her down very gently in a patch of grassy shadow. Anne wriggles her pretty little toes in the grass as she stands there barefoot. Shakespeare's eyes observe the gesture. Anne gives him a smile of thanks. He bows again, low.

Then young Mr Shakespeare strides back to the middle of Henley Street, holding up his left hand modestly to acknowledge the applause of the spectators, and he tugs Miss Hathaway's wooden sandals out of the dung.

Even the town idiot cheers.

In fact, he cheers loudest.

Now this, as I have already intimated, was not of course the first meeting of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway. But it was certainly the first time William lifted Anne up and carried her in his arms.

By Christmas of that year the pair were married. The licence was applied for at the end of November. It was a special licence, since there was now some haste. Their first child, their daughter Susanna, was born the following May.

I must have been conceived about the same time as Susanna Shakespeare. I doubt, however, if the circumstances were anything like the same. My father made love to my mother in a confession-box.

We may suppose, I trust, that Mr Shakespeare gave his Miss Hathaway a green gown. That is to say, the lovers slipped out from a dance into the night, and by the time they returned to the dance the back of Anne's dancing dress was stained with tell-tale green grass. I like these rural euphemisms. The world would be a more brutal and a less poetic place without them. You can find a use of this 'green-gown' phrase, in the explicit sense of 'giving a girl a green-gown', somewhere in the works of the poet and parson Robert Herrick, but I'm not able to recall the poem by name. Herrick, I think, is one of the few decent and authentic modern poets. Mr Shakespeare might have liked him, had he lived long enough to read him.

I have in my possession one stanza of a very early poem which Mr Shakespeare wrote about Anne Hathaway. That poem was remembered for me, in conversation, by his sister, Mrs Joan Hart. The stanza runs like this:

Thou knowest, my heart, Anne Hathaway!

She hath a way,

Anne Hathaway,

To make thee smart, Anne Hathaway!

Mr Shakespeare's sister was in her older years when she recited this for me from memory, but we can assume that her powers of recollection were undiminished. If the tone of the poem is indicative of mixed feelings then the cause will be made clear enough in later chapters. While I have some reason to believe that Mr Shakespeare loved his wife, I also have every reason to suspect that he sometimes regretted his marriage, seeing it as not so much a love-match as a wedlock forced upon him because he had got Anne with child. Possibly there were moments when he felt that Anne had 'caught' him, and the story which he told me about her misadventure with her sandals in Henley Street was emblematic of his feeling this. Certainly there is nothing of the conventional love-song about the verses remembered by Mrs Hart, and plenty of suspicion concerning Anne's charming 'way' evident in his punning on her surname.

Mrs Hart told me that there were further stanzas in which her brother addressed his own mind and eyes and other parts accordingly. Alas, these (she said) were gone beyond recall. Judging from the manner in which the quoted stanza works by internal rhyme to make Shakespeare's heart to smart, we can well suppose that Anne had a way to make his mind either blind or kind, and his eyes perhaps wise. The way she had to please his other parts might be readily inferred, but we cannot deduce by rhyme what that condition was in which she left them. The refrain would have been the same, in any case.

Mrs Hart also said that her brother told her that Anne Hathaway had fleas in her drawers. I confess I do not know what this means. A country saying, perhaps, like that 'green gowns'? There were no fleas present in the pair of Mrs Shakespeare's drawers which I once had the pleasure of inspecting, as you will in due course hear.

Shakespeare did not marry his Anne in Stratford. The ceremony took place in one of the neighbouring villages, but which one I don't know. Despite strenuous searches, I have been unable to turn up the record. Mrs Shakespeare made clear to me more than once that she did not want to speak about the matter. His sister replied, in answer to a direct question of mine, that it was not Temple Grafton - the significance of which will be made apparent in my next chapter, where Anne Whateley will be considered as rival bride.

In this box I have kept one other piece of verse which is something of a mystery. I shall insert it here although there is no reason for supposing that it really belongs here. Indeed, it may not belong at all in my Life of William Shakespeare.

I include it because I feel it to be of some interest, all the same. I found the verses tucked between the pages of a prayer book in Trinity Church. (It was in the middle of the marriage service, perhaps that's what struck me.) The scrap of thin white paper had been neatly folded and refolded into a tiny square. The handwriting is not Mr Shakespeare's, but I do not know whose it is. Some say that there was a second butcher's boy in Stratford, at the same time as Shakespeare, who also made poetical speeches over the slaughtered calves. Perhaps this little piece of versification is his work. That other butcher's boy died young, so I heard tell, but they are fools who claim that if he had gone on, and run away to London, then he would have turned out to be another William Shakespeare, or even greater.

Shakespeare's sister, when I showed her these verses, insisted that she knew nothing about them. However, when I pressed gently, she did confirm that the subject of the lines would almost certainly have been that Emma Careless already noticed in this book as being the lively wife of John Heicroft, the vicar, the object of some unwelcome attention on the part of Shakespeare's father, and the recorder of the speech-ways of the schoolmaster Jenkins.

Here are the verses:

Careless by name, and Careless by nature,

Careless of fame, and Careless of feature;

Careless of love, and Careless of hate,

Careless if crooked, and Careless if straight;

Careless at table, and Careless in bed,

Careless if maiden, and Careless if wed -

Were you Careful for once to return me my love

I'd care not that Careless to others you'd prove;

I then should be Careless how Careless you were,

And the more Careless you, still the less I should care.

I suppose it is just possible that the lines are by the first butcher's boy, but I doubt it. Emma Careless, incidentally, was a native of Stratford, who married the Reverend Heicroft two years after his arrival in succession to Bretchgirdle. Five children were born to the Heicrofts while they were in Stratford, though three of them died in their cradles, whether due to Emma's carelessness or to some other cause I know not. Heicroft is recorded as having preached special sermons for Lent in 1583 and it was on Trinity Sunday of that year - a red-letter day in the calendar of Trinity Church - that he baptised Shakespeare's daughter, Susanna. A year later he moved with Emma to the richer living of Rowington, some ten miles away as the upstart crow might fly.