And teach a calf to suck
And knows the manner how
To set a brooded duck3
Most of Hathaway’s neighbours would have fattened a pig or two each year on skim milk, root vegetables and the acorns and chestnuts of the woodlands and commons. If the jobs connected to her home farm were covered, a girl was as likely as a boy to be placed out to service on someone else’s farm. For all we know Ann never lived at the house in Shottery, for she could have been placed in service as a girl of six or seven. It is only in the halcyon imagination of bardolaters that Ann could have sat around for twenty-six years waiting for a boy to set her cap at.
One very heavy task that always fell to women was laundry. The bigger the family, the more babies to appear, the heavier the work. Washing was not done weekly, because the linen took too long to dry. It was mostly, though not only, in the summer that smocks and sheets, bed-and childbed-linen were washed and thrown over bushes and on to the grass to bleach in the sun. Farmer’s daughters were dressed in a fashion that displayed their industry and expertise. While women of higher rank, citizens’ and merchants’ wives, wore heavy gowns of dark coloured stuffs, the milkmaids dressed in white shifts, under skirts of red flannel or sheep’s russet, and stiff waistcoats of buckram or durance, scrubbed dazzling white, with a white neckerchief or scarf under a broad-brimmed straw hat.
Upon her back she wore
A fustian waistcoat white.
Her body and her stomacher
Were fastened very tight…
Her neckerchief of Holland sure…4
In Greene’s Vision, Tomkins the wheelwright falls in love with a ‘maid that every day went to sell cream in Cambridge’.
A bonny lass she was, very well tucked up in a russet petticoat, with a bare hem and no fringe, yet has she a red lace and a stomacher of tuft mockado and a partlet cast over with a pretty whip, and dressed she was in a kerchief of holland for her father was a farmer. Her girdle was green, and at that hung a large leather purse with fair threaden tassels, and a new pair of yellow gloves, tufted with red raw silk very richly…5
Milkmaids were stout and straight, strong enough to carry two bulky wooden pails suspended from a yoke across their shoulders, and sure-footed enough not to slop the precious milk out of the pails as they travelled over the uneven ground. Spilt milk was a disaster, and milkmaids wept piteously over it, afraid of being beaten.6 In the long days of summer, when all her morning chores were done, the farmer’s daughter could drive her cows and sheep to pasture, and lie with her gossips in the deep grass, watching her animals graze, singing songs and telling stories to pass the lazy time till the next milking.
Oh the wench went neatly,
Methought it did me good
To see her cheery cheeks
So dimpled o’er with blood,
Her waistcoat washèd white
As any lily-flower.
Would I had time to talk to her
The space of half an hour.7
Supposing Ann was living at Hewlands at the time of her father’s death, it was up to her stepmother whether she remained working there as an unpaid family-and farm-servant or left home to work elsewhere. As she and Shakespeare were not married in Stratford, and marriages generally took place in the parish where the bride was resident, it seems likely that at the time of her wedding Ann was not living in Shottery. Some commentators think that she had decamped to Temple Grafton. Perhaps she had found work in a Gardner household or with kin of her mother’s in another parish.
Most versions of what befell William go more or less like this: ‘Sometime that August, after wandering the mile or so west down the rural footpath to the tiny village of Shottery, the worldly eighteen-year-old committed an indiscretion that would profoundly affect the rest of his life. Was it a careless roll in the hay…?’8 As we have seen the Shakespeares and the Hathaways knew each other, so there is no need to suppose that one day, quite by chance, Shakespeare wandered too close to Shottery and got snared by ‘a homely wench’. Ann was no wench; even if she had been in service, she would have been employed at a higher rate than a mere wench. Landholders were of higher status than glove-makers, especially glove-makers who were broke and had lost their own land. How hard is it to believe that eighteen-year-old Shakespeare was so enamoured of a twenty-six-year-old that he wooed her and ultimately won her? As an elder sister Ann probably spent much of her time looking after her younger siblings. When she walked the Hewlands cows to Shottery common, the younger children would have come with her to play on the green under her watchful eye, as she and the other Shottery girls sang and dittied through their favourite ballads.
The lark that tirra-lirra chants,
With hey! with hey! the thrush and the jay,
Are summer songs for me and my aunts
While we lie tumbling in the hay.9
If Ann wasn’t living in or near Stratford from September 1581 till after her marriage, the roll-in-the-hay hypothesis becomes more difficult to sustain. Still, a boy may walk many a long mile in search of somewhere to sow a wild oat. As for the suggestion that Ann was hanging around Stratford ‘consorting with the local youth’, if she had behaved in such a way in a God-fearing rural town like Stratford with a population of less than 2,000 she would have found herself up before the Vicar’s Court in less time than it takes to sow a wild oat.If any such baggage had attempted to embroil Alderman Shakespeare’s son, his friends on the Corporation would have run her out of town. A good deal of effort was expended by the Corporation in ridding the town of women of ill repute. When Richard Quiney was sworn in as Bailiff of Stratford in 1592, one of his first acts was to appoint a committee ‘to discover and notify the presence, with a view to their removal from the borough, of undesirable women’.10
The lament of the maiden for whom no husband has been found by parents or friends is a cliché of ballad literature, as for example in I can, I will no longer lie alone (1612–13).
’Tis my cruel friends have me o’erthrown…
What though my parents strive to procure
That I should a maiden still endure?
Do they what they will, I must have one.
I can nor will no longer lie alone.11
At twenty-six Ann Hathaway is thought to have been just such a caricature, desperate for a husband, any husband.
A blithe and bonny country lass…
Sat sighing on the tender grass
And weeping said, ‘Will none come woo me?’
A smicker boy, a lither swain…
That in his love was wanton fain
with smiling looks came straight unto her.
Whenas the wanton wench espied…
The means to make herself a bride,
she simpered smooth like bonny bell.
The swain that saw her squint-eyed kind…
His arms about her body twined,
and said ‘Fair lass, how fare ye? Well?’
The country-kit said, ‘Well, forsooth…
But that I have a longing tooth,
a longing tooth that makes me cry.’
‘Alas,’ said he, ‘What garrs thy grief?’…
‘A wound,’ quoth she, ‘without relief.
I fear a maid that I shall die.’
‘If that be all,’ the shepherd said…
‘I’ll make thee wive it, gentle maid,
and so recure thy malady.’
Hereon they kissed with many an oath…
And ’fore God Pan did plight their troth,
and so to the church apace they hie.12
In this ballad, ‘Coridon’s Song’, by Thomas Lodge, published in England’s Helicon (1600), responsibility for the clapped-up marriage is equally distributed between the needy maid and the opportunistic boy. Post-Victorian commentators are not so even-handed; the presumed mismatch between Ann and Will is seen as entirely down to Ann, who is taken to have been well past her sell-by date, because the received wisdom was that early modern Englishwomen married
in their early teens. When Peter Laslett published his ground-breaking work The World We Have Lost in 1965 it contained many surprises, not least of which was the age at which Elizabethans married: ‘We have examined every record we can find…and they all declare that, in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, marriage was rare at these early ages and not as common in the late teens as it is now.’13
What Laslett and the Cambridge Group found when they examined a thousand licences issued by the Diocese of Canterbury between 1619 and 1660 was that the commonest age of brides was twenty-two, and the average mean age even higher, twenty-four. Further research has come up with a mean age at marriage of twenty-six or-seven for early modern Englishwomen and twenty-eight for men.14 What was remarkable about Ann Hathaway’s wedding is not that at twenty-six she was so old, but that her husband was so young. As Laslett’s researchers found of their original thousand cases, ‘Only ten men married below the age of 20, two of them at 18, and the most common age was 24…’15
The mating of younger men with older women, though unusual, occasioned no outrage in the sixteenth century. Indeed, for apprentices, far from their families, kept on hard rations and often beaten, marrying the master’s widow was the kind of dream-wish that fuelled many ballads and popular romances.16 In Part II of Thomas Deloney’s The Gentle Craft we find an elaborated tale of the Widow Farmer’s love for William, the most menial of her servants. William has dared to woo his mistress quite aggressively and has been demoted to the scullery for his pains, a punishment which he bears in good part because he truly loves her. Widow Farmer invites her friends and suitors to dinner. All her other menservants are called to the table, only to be dismissed for their cockiness and insolence when they refuse the menial job of fetching the oysters. Up from the scullery with the oysters comes William in his greasy work clothes. Widow Farmer takes his grubby hand in hers, kisses him and presents him to the company as her chosen husband.
Then did she set her black man by her white side and, calling the rest of her servants (in the sight of her friends) she made them do reverence unto him, whom they for his drudgery scorned so much before. So, the breakfast ended, she willed them all next morning to bear him company to the church, against which time William was so daintily tricked up, that all those which beheld him confessed he was a most comely, trim and proper man, and after they were married, they lived long together in joy and prosperous estate.17
In another of Deloney’s novellas, Jack of Newbury, Jack begins life as John, servant to a wealthy widow who is being courted by three men of substance. She tells John that she loves another, who is none of the three, and he advises her: ‘For your body’s health, your heart’s joy and your ears’ delight, delay not the time, but entertain him with a kiss, make his bed next yours and chop up the match in the morning.’18 The widow, piqued, responds that if he had announced to her that he wanted to marry, she would not be so indifferent. He gives the answer that Will might have given if Ann had directly or indirectly proposed to him:
It is not wisdom for a young man that can scantly keep himself to take a wife; therefore I hold it the best way to lead a single life, for I have heard say that many sorrows follow marriage, especially where want remains, and beside, it is a hard matter to find a constant woman, for as young maids are fickle, so are old women jealous.19
Winter comes and with it a hard frost; the widow sups with John and gives him sack to drink; then she puts him to bed in his master’s feather bed, slips in beside him and stays all night. In the morning she bids him fetch a link and light her way to the chapel, where she is to meet a bridegroom. As he stands with her in the winter-dark chapel John realises that the expected bridegroom is none other than himself. The widow gently reminds him: ‘Stand not strangely, but remember that you did promise me on your faith not to hinder me when I came to the church to be married, but rather to set it forward: therefore set your link aside and give me your hand’.20 After some only-to-be-expected vicissitudes, ‘they lived long together in most godly, loving and kind sort, till in the end she died, leaving her husband wondrous wealthy’. Sir Sidney Lee might be shocked by the widow’s forward behaviour but Shakespeare and his contemporaries were by no means so hidebound. The extraordinary career of theatrical impresario Philip Henslowe was made possible only by his marrying in 1577 the widow of the Earl of Montague’s bailiff, whose servant he had been.21
In The Two Gentlemen of Verona we do not know how old Silvia is, or how young Valentine might be, but we do know that Silvia, besides being Valentine’s social superior, is maturer and wiser than he, whether she is chronologically older or not. As even his servant Speed can figure out, Sylvia teaches Valentine how to woo her.
My master sues to her, and she hath taught her suitor,
He being her pupil, to become her tutor…
Herself hath taught her love himself to write unto her lover.
(II. i. 129–30, 158)
Rosalind too, in As You Like It, undertakes to teach the boy Orlando how to love her.
In Twelfth Night, the ‘youth’ Cesario is sent to woo ‘a virtuous maid, the daughter of a count that died some twelvemonth since’. Orsino assumes that because Cesario is a boy he will succeed in his suit where his own has failed.
She will attend it better in thy youth
Than in a nuncio’s of more grave aspect…
For they shall yet belie thy happy years
That say thou art a man. Dian’s lip
Is not more smooth and rubious. Thy small pipe
Is as the maiden’s organ, shrill and sound…(I. iv. 27–8, 30–3)
When Cesario makes a disturbance at her gate Olivia asks her majordomo: ‘Of what personage and years is he?’ (I. v. 150). And Malvolio makes answer:
Not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy. As a squash is before ’tis a peascod, or a codling when ’tis almost an apple. ’Tis with him in standing-water, between boy and man. He is very well-favoured, and he speaks very shrewishly. One would think his mother’s milk were scarce out of him. (151–6)
The supposed boy achieves access where no man could, but there is nothing bashful in his suit. He describes what he would do to win Olivia from her obduracy.
Make me a willow cabin at your gate,
And call upon my soul within the house.
Write loyal cantons of contemnèd love,
And sing them loud even in the dead of night.
Halloo your name to the reverberate hills,
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out, ‘Olivia’! (I. v. 257–63)
Though Olivia doesn’t marry her original boy lover, who is a girl in disguise, she does marry her twin Sebastian who can be no older than she. There is no good reason to suppose that William wooed Ann after Cesario’s fashion; the most we can conclude from the evidence of Twelfth Night is that the idea of a youth seducing a woman in mourning didn’t paralyse him with horror or drown him in bitter reflection.
Scholars desirous of separating Shakespeare from his pesky wife have taken for granted that all her life she could neither read nor write. They want her, need her to have had no inkling of the magnitude of her husband’s achievement.
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 that he wrote, that anything he sent her from London had to be read by a neighbour and 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.22
Greenblatt can see no one to help Ann keep in touch with her husband beyond an Elizabethan version of a courier service. He imagines that any letter of Shakespeare’s would have to have been read by a ‘neighbour’. If Shakespeare wrote at all, he would have written as Richard Quiney did, to a kinsman or a close friend, who had the duty of reading the letter to his wife and of penning her response. Abraham Sturley used to sign
himself off to Quiney as writing ‘at your own table in your own house’, with Elizabeth Quiney beside him, virtually dictating what he was to write.23 At least one of Shakespeare’s brothers was fully literate and should have kept Shakespeare informed of the health of his parents. Ann’s brother could read and write, as could her elder daughter Susanna.24 Ann did not have to depend on the kindness of strangers or on professional messengers, who did not exist. Early modern letters were not private, but designed to be read aloud, in company. Truly intimate matters were deemed unsuitable for a letter.
Certainly it is possible, even entirely possible, that Ann could not read. It is also possible, given the absolute absence of evidence to the contrary, that she was blind. She may have been illiterate when Shakespeare met her, and he may have spent the long hours with her as she watched her cows grazing on the common, teaching her to read. In his plays he is very well aware of the erotic dimension of the teaching situation, whether it’s Henry teaching Katharine English, or Rosalind teaching Orlando how to make love.
Ann’s staunchly protestant family would have had her taught to read if only so that she could read her Bible every day. Without a growing passion for reading the Reformation could never have happened. Catholics thought the way to salvation lay through ritual and prayer; protestants put their faith in a book. By the 1580s people who couldn’t read were sensible of a spiritual as well as a social disadvantage. In the winter, when there was little or no work for children in the fields, even the humblest farming villages would set up a dame school, where a woman who could read would teach children who couldn’t. The Bible Ann read was probably the Geneva Bible, small in format, low in cost and aggressively marketed up and down the country.25
In early modern England most of the people who could read were unable to write. Until the study of literacy began in earnest in the 1960s it was generally assumed that only men who had attended a grammar school were able to read or write, and that everyone else bar a few privately educated ladies could do neither. Then to her surprise Margaret Spufford began to come across evidence of pedlars selling ‘little books’ up and down the country. She also found the observations of a Jesuit in gaol in Wisbech in the 1580s and 1590s who looked on horrified as large groups of puritans read aloud from their Geneva Bibles: ‘Each of them had his own Bible, and sedulously turned the pages and looked up the text cited by the preachers, discussing the passages among themselves to see whether they had quoted them to the point, and accurately, and in harmony with their tenets.’26 Thomas Daynes, Vicar of Flixton in Suffolk, was disgusted to see that his parishioners brought their copies of the Book of Common Prayer to church with them, and instead of listening to his puritan harangues went on ‘looking in their books’.27
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