Shakespeare's Wife

by Germaine Greer

  Though different notions of widows’ entitlements prevailed in different areas, the general practice was probably as it is outlined in Burn’s Ecclesiastical Law of 1763:

  widows have been tolerated to reserve to their own use, not only their apparel and a convenient bed, but a coffer with divers things therein necessary for their own persons; which things have usually been omitted out of the inventory of their deceased husband’s goods, unless peradventure the husband was so far indebted, as the rest of his goods would not suffice to discharge the same.8

  Much that was custom was not enshrined in law. Women did have property of their own that doesn’t appear in wills and inventories, which seldom mention jewellery of any sort, even wedding rings. Weeks before her husband died, Ann might have chosen what she wanted for her own use. What she chose, being already given, would not have appeared in the will. The estate according to the will includes no theatre shares, and no books or papers of any kind. As a distribution of everything Shakespeare died possessed of his will doesn’t make sense.

  The matter of the bed may have been accidentally overlooked, or perhaps the bed Ann had chosen could not easily be removed before Shakespeare’s death, perhaps because Shakespeare was himself lying in it, and so he had to make especial mention of it. If Ann had been seen to take or had been believed to have taken goods out of the estate after her husband’s death, she could have been sued by his executors. The absence of any mention of where Ann should live after she left New Place is not unusual, but often testators specify that a widow should be allowed free use of part of the estate, whether a gatehouse or a pair of rooms or an upper floor or a ‘back-side’, or that she be allowed to remain as tenant of leasehold property for the term of her life. Shakespeare’s silence on the point is not remarkable but it is not particularly creditable either. It is possible that Judith had been made to give up any interest in the copyhold cottage in Chapel Lane because it was reserved for the use of her mother during her life.

  Throughout this book I have argued that, as we can find no evidence of Shakespeare having supported his family, especially during the lost years, we must assume that Ann Shakespeare was financially independent and assessed for tax purposes as feme sole. If this is the (admittedly unusual) case she may not have been eligible for dower thirds. For commentators determined to interpret any and all evidence as proving that Shakespeare hated his wife, even this circumstance would be held against her. Even leaving her the bed is parlayed into a ruse to disinherit her, as if any such ruse would have been necessary.

  It is for legal historians to debate whether by specifying a single object the testator was in effect attempting to wipe out the widow’s customary one-third life-interest—that is to disinherit her. But what the eloquently hostile gesture seems to say emotionally is that Shakespeare had found his trust, his happiness, his capacity for intimacy, his best bed elsewhere.9

  Greenblatt is following in the tradition of Malone who splutters: ‘His wife had not wholly escaped his memory, he had forgot her, he had recollected her but so recollected her, as more strongly to mark how little he esteemed her; he had already (as is vulgarly expressed) cut her off, not indeed with a shilling, but with an old bed.’10

  Ann’s father in his will had made a strange stipulation about the bed he had caused to be made and set up at Hewlands:

  Item my will is that all the ceiling in my Halls house with two joined beds in my parlour shall continue and stand unremoved during the natural life or widowhood of Joan my wife and the natural life of Bartholomew my son and John my son and the longest lived of them.11

  What the motive can have been for insisting that his bed not be moved until the three lives had elapsed we do not know and can hardly guess. Mary Evelyn in her satiric poem Mundus Muliebris refers to the sturdy oaken bed that is meant to last ‘one whole century through’ as if it were typical of a certain kind of overbearing patriarch.12

  Even a humble bed, consisting of frame, straw mattress, rugs and blankets, was a valuable commodity worth £2 or so, about as much as a cow. If the frame was posted and canopied and the mattress was stuffed with pure goose down, the value could rise to £10 or more. In any house, the bed was the most costly item of furniture and sometimes so massive and heavy that it could hardly be regarded as movable property. The actual wooden structure, which was usually erected in situ, plus its carving and gilding, was expensive; when down mattresses were added to the expenditure on hangings, a big bed could be worth as much as a small house.

  In 1557, William Bracey of Snitterfield left his second-best bed to his son and heir with three pair of sheets. In 1573 William Palmer of Leamington left his wife all her wearing apparel and his ‘second best bed for herself furnished and other meaner featherbed furnished for her maid’—and at the same time doubled the income she would receive from their original marriage settlement ‘in consideration that she is a gentlewoman and drawing towards years and that I would have her to live as one that were and had been my wife’. Thomas Greene’s father, Thomas Greene of Warwick, in his will of 22 July 1590 left his ‘second feather bed furnished’ to Thomas Greene.13 The bequest of a bed was often a sign of particular affection: Francis Russell, Earl of Bedford, when he died in 1585, left his youngest daughter his ‘best bed of cloth of gold and silver’.14 By the will of Stratford Alderman Robert Perrott, drawn up on 8 March 1589, his wife is given a yearly allowance, and ‘the bed which she brought unto me with all furniture thereto belonging’.15 Walter Ralegh advised his son ‘if she love again, let her not enjoy her second love in the same bed wherein she loved thee’.16 One yeoman of the Sussex Downs, in his will of 1616, gave his wife Agnes Mockford the best feather bed in the ‘great chamber’ with all its ‘appurtenances’ or furnishings, but only on condition that she deliver to his son a signed and sealed ‘deed of release in the law of all her dower’, excluding £3 per annum. This was Agnes’s only specific bequest from her husband, apart from the residual goods she received as executrix, and on first reading it appears to cheat her out of valuable land in exchange for a bed which might be of only sentimental value. However, the will went on to specify that if she refused to give up her dower lands she would then forfeit her right to the featherbed. Hardly a ferocious sanction, but it immediately suggests that the land and the bed were of comparable value.17 When Alice Thornton was widowed in 1668 her brother-in-law told her ‘That it was the law…the widow was to have her widow-bed first out of all her husband’s goods…’18

  Wills do not account for all the transfers of property that occur at the time of the testator’s death. Often property is transferred by deeds, which are not registered and will not appear in probate records either.19 Land was often transferred in the owner’s lifetime by deed or court roll or directed to be sold off to pay debts. Shakespeare’s will mentioned no books but he must surely have had books and have disposed of them by personal bequest. If they included papers of his own, they would have been of a different order of value to any of the trifling bits of plate and mourning rings and what-have-you that were distributed around friends and family. No one has ever suggested that he may have given them into Ann’s keeping, but such a suggestion is no more unlikely than any other.

  The key to Shakespeare’s lop-sided will, if we could only find it, must be the settlement that was negotiated at the time of the marriage of John Hall and Susanna Shakespeare. If I am right, and both parties were made sole legatees of their parents, Shakespeare was not free to split his estate or devise any of it to Judith or, indeed, to Ann. Before deciding that he thereby disinherited his wife, we ought to consider the possibility that the marriage was actually promoted by Ann and accepted by Shakespeare as a fait accompli. Either Ann or William could have constructed the settlement in this fashion because Judith was understood to be contracted in some way to Thomas Quiney. Contrariwise the terms of Susanna’s wedding settlement could have left Judith without a portion, and have brought negotiations with Bess Quiney to a halt. Solemnisation could have been defer
red indefinitely in order to force the Shakespeares’ hand, or Judith may have been too proud to enter a marriage entirely unprovided for and totally dependent upon her husband’s family.

  Scholars who have considered the matter have assumed that Shakespeare conveyed the title of the Blackfriars gatehouse to trustees in order to prevent his wife’s getting her hands on it. It is at least as likely, and to my mind more likely, that the trusteeship was instituted in order to prevent the gatehouse being swallowed up in the marriage settlement and becoming part of the Hall inheritance, in which case the King’s Men could have lost the use of it. Hall lost no time in conveying his interest in it to different trustees, including the mysterious Matthew Morris, who had been his father’s assistant and was now making a name for himself in Stratford.

  If we assume that Ann had the widow’s coffer to go along with her widow-bed, her future begins to look rather more interesting, worthier of Shakespeare’s oldest, truest love.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  of burials, and monuments, widows’ mites and widows’ work, and the quiet death of the quiet woman of Stratford

  When her husband died Ann was sixty, and free for the first time in a third of a century. Both her daughters were married, for better or worse, and the husband of one of them had been left her house. Tension in Stratford was running high, as the Corporation continued the battle to exert its right against the enclosing gentry. On Trinity Sunday, as he came away from a meeting with Thomas Greene at St Mary’s House, Alderman Chandler was handed a threatening letter from William Combe;1 in September Combe abused his power as high sheriff to impound the commoners’ cattle.2 Greene kept faithful note of all such hostilities, even as he was preparing to leave Stratford for ever. According to Fripp, ‘Combe troubled him to the end of his Stewardship; but it was the loss of his great kinsman evidently, that decided him to sell his house and interest in the tithes and remove to Bristol.’3

  What is evident to Fripp is not necessarily evident to others examining the same material. Greene had had very little of his great kinsman’s company at any time. He had come to the end of the possibilities for advancement afforded by Stratford. As the agent of the Corporation he had accumulated powerful enemies and he was probably losing sympathy with the Corporation’s brand of puritanism which, under persecution from the ecclesiastical commissioners, was becoming rigid to the point of truculence. During the Bard’s many and long absences Greene had certainly protected Ann and her daughters to the best of his ability, so he had ample reason to be disgusted with the passing over of his children, twelve-year-old Ann and eight-year-old William, in his great kinsman’s will, even if he was unsurprised at the omission of himself and his wife. He might have deplored the Bard’s treatment of Ann and Judith too. A career opening in Bristol offered him an opportunity to escape the drudgery and disappointment that seemed to be all Stratford had to offer. In losing him Stratford lost an able champion, and the most trustworthy chronicler of its struggle, but the Corporation gained St Mary’s House and at a cut price. In the late spring of 1616 Greene wrote to the Corporation:

  I have received your letters of the 15 of this May, and do see, if we agree, I must lose a hundred marks of the true value of my things I sell, to the place which has more reason, if I may speak it without offence, to give me recompense to a greater value for my golden days and spirits spent in Stratford’s service.4

  Abashed, the Corporation upped its offer, but not by much, and Greene had no option but to accept. Among the aldermen who provided money to enable the purchase was Ann’s nephew, Richard Hathaway, who lent £20.5 The money for the second tranche of the payment was collected at New Place, where Greene came for the purpose on 3 February 1618. By that time his family was gone from Stratford; at the Hall of 8 October 1617 it had been decreed ‘that Mrs Bailiff and Mrs Alderwoman shall be removed to the seat [in Holy Trinity Church] where Mrs Greene did sit’.6

  Most commentators assume that during her widowhood Ann lived at New Place as a dependant of her son-in-law John Hall. If she had she would not have felt herself free in the least; if I am right, and she was used to being self-sufficient, she would have resented having to go cap in hand to John Hall for clothes, food, light and heat. She could hardly have worked for her son-in-law as some kind of menial or even as his housekeeper. Her daughter was thirty-three years old and had been mistress of her own house for nine years; she was hardly likely to have entered New Place as anything but the chatelaine. As there is no record of where the Halls lived before they took over New Place, they may always have lived in an apartment there, and the fact of ownership as conferred by Shakespeare’s will may have made very little practical difference. Or they could have set aside the cottage in Chapel Lane for Ann’s use or she could have taken over whatever lease they were relinquishing in order to transfer to New Place, or none of the above. As a widow Ann actually had more options than she had ever had in her life before.

  Social historians have disagreed about the likelihood of widowed mothers eking out their days nodding by a daughter’s or a daughter-in-law’s fireside. Laslett was very clear on the point, saying that barely 5 per cent of households contained more than two generations. Spufford interpreted this as meaning that almost all surviving grandparents were accommodated with their children, as only 6 per cent of people survived to be grandparents. Later research has tended to support Laslett:

  The living situation of 211 widows is discernible from their own probate accounts or inventories and wills…only 16 per cent lived in someone else’s house, usually that of a married daughter or son. The majority of widows whose estates reached the probate court (84 per cent) headed their own households…In parish lists of inhabitants in the early modern period…74 per cent of all widows either headed households or were solitary (in their own house) and only 25 per cent lived in someone else’s household.7

  Ann might have chosen to live with her younger daughter. Susanna’s breeding days were apparently over, but Judith was facing her first confinement at the ripe age of thirty-one. In July 1616 she and her husband moved from his small tavern to the Cage, in a prime position on the corner of Bridge Street and the High Street, where he set up his wineshop.8 Susanna took over a well-run house, with established gardens and a trained workforce. Six months pregnant, Judith must have been glad of experienced help in organising the new establishment and training the staff. She bore her first child in November. Despite her father’s coldness towards him, when Thomas Quiney took his newborn to the church on 23 November, the name that had been agreed upon was ‘Shakespeare’. Ann’s delight in her grandson was soon cut short; little Shakespeare was buried less than six months later, on 8 May 1617. Though Shakespeare could not have been weaned by then, Judith was already pregnant when he died, for her next baby, Richard, was baptised on 9 February, a bare nine months later. We should probably infer that little Shakespeare was put out to nurse, and we can imagine what Ann thought of this. But her daughter had gone up in the world. What Ann had done out of necessity was not fitting for a woman whose husband was described (wrongly) in the parish registers as ‘Thomas Quiney gent’.

  For those who could afford it, the rationale for putting children out to nurse was persuasive; first milk was universally condemned as bad for the child, and the newborn was usually fed instead on substitutes while the mother suffered for as much as a month before being allowed to breast-feed. It made sense to give the baby into the care of a woman with an established milk supply. It seems that Richard, Judith’s second-born, was nursed by his mother, possibly because Judith, having lost her first-born, heeded her mother’s advice and allowed herself to be reassured as to the quality of her milk. Richard’s little brother Thomas was christened on 23 January 1620, two weeks short of the two-year interval that is usual among births to women of the people in Stratford. Ann must have been delighted to watch these two babies grow up to be healthy boys.

  Unfortunate though the circumstances of Judith’s marriage had been, the marriage seems to ha
ve been a real one. Thomas may have been unreliable and impractical, but he might also have been fun. While Susanna busied herself in her huge house with her one daughter, living the life of a gentlewoman, Judith and Thomas seem to have lived at the Cage like lovers. As the babies came along the Cage must have been as lively as New Place was dull. And there was work to do. If Ann was, as I think, a skilled maltster and brewer, she would have made sure that the Cage sold good ale. As long as she lived it was possible to believe that Thomas Quiney had it in him to do well. The deaths of his brothers, one of whom married an heiress, must have improved his prospects, especially as his other brother Richard was building an impressive fortune of his own. In 1617 Thomas was named burgess, and later constable; in 1621 and 1622 he served as chamberlain, but he was no accountant. When he presented his accounts for 1622–3, he prefaced them with an inaccurate quotation from Saint-Gelais, an unwarranted piece of swank that made him no friends, especially as the accounts were then rejected as defective. Chamberlain was as far as he got. After Ann’s death his standing and his business slid downhill. In 1631 he was presented in the Vicar’s Court for swearing and fined a shilling, and for ‘suffering townsmen to tipple in his house’ which cost him 1s 6d. After his mother’s death, he tried to dispose of the lease of the Cage. Eventually he was obliged to live on an allowance from his wealthy brother.

  Ann may have been needed at Hewlands too. On 11 February 1617 Isabel Hathaway died, leaving Bartholomew and their seventeen-year-old son Edmund alone at Hewlands Farm. Their first-born, Richard, had been apprenticed to a baker; after completing his indentures he married Priscilla Kyrdall. As a master baker, based at the Crown in Bridge Street which he leased from the Corporation, he had risen in the world, though he incurred at least once the usual fine of twelve pence for sabbath-breaking. We have no record of his attending school, but as he acted as one of the Overseers of the Poor in 1609, when thirteen-year-old Margaret Getley was covenanted to Anne Curtis to ‘learn the trade of knitting and other housewifery’, he must have been literate.11 If I am right about the way Ann supported herself and her children, she would have been especially useful to her nephew when it came to finding the skilled craftswomen who could be trusted to take on small children as apprentices and to train them properly.12 Pvichard had been elected a capital burgess in 1614. At Easter 1616 he was confirmed as churchwarden and officiated at the funerals of William Hart and Shakespeare.