Shakespeare's Wife

by Germaine Greer

  With no money or land settled on her, Ann still had to make her own living. Susanna might have been able to queen it as a lady of leisure, living on her rents and her husband’s income, but Ann was a woman of the old school, who was not used to sitting with her hands folded in her lap. Her husband may have made himself a gentleman, but Ann seems to have had no pretensions to be a gentlewoman. Younger widows would take over a husband’s business and run it until the heir was old enough to take over. At first, after her husband’s death in 1591, Isabel Wotton continued in his trade as a weaver but in 1604 she secured a licence to sell ale. When her husband died in 1595, Cicely Bainton was pregnant. Six months later she was listed as a victualler in Wood Street: ‘Widow Bainton breweth two strikes of malt weekly having none other trade to live by. In house four persons’, namely Cicely and her three surviving children. Margaret ap Roberts, who was widowed in 1592, was brewing eight strikes of malt a week by 1595 when she was licensed to sell ale.41 Mary Green, widowed in 1603, survived by selling malt.42 Joan Bromley, widowed in 1606, ran her own alehouse for twenty years.43 We have surmised that Ann knew all about brewing that there was to know; perhaps she went on making malt and brewing, and perhaps she did it using the couch house and still rooms at New Place. It was possible to live at New Place without being a member of Susanna’s household, by renting a self-contained part of the house.

  Nowadays Shakespeare’s remains are assumed to lie in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church. Certainly there is a stone for all to see in front of the communion rail to the left of the altar. This is not the original stone, according to Halliwell-Phillipps; in the mid-eighteenth century the original stone was found to be rotten and was replaced.44 There was a belief among locals that Shakespeare had been buried ‘full seventeen foot deep, deep enough to secure him’.45 Schoenbaum comments, ‘this seems unlikely so close to where the Avon flows’.46 What is significant about this tradition is that if Shakespeare’s burial stone had always been where it is now, no one could have imagined for a moment that he had been buried seventeen feet down. Graves that were dug in the chancel were of necessity shallow. The flagged floor had first to be broken, earth taken out, the coffin interred, the earth replaced, and left to settle before the pavement could be reinstated.

  Interment inside the church was disruptive as well as expensive. Churches were used almost daily for prayers and special services and routine worship could not have been improved by the presence of workmen’s tools and open tombs. Uncovered graves inside the church were as common as ill-tended churchyards without, and too many families failed to finish the job or to pay all the necessary fees.47

  We may discount the truth of the tale that Shakespeare was buried seventeen feet down even outside in the churchyard, if only because it would have taken at least a week, with pit-props and a winch, to dig such an enormous hole. Mining was a growing industry in northern Warwickshire in 1616, but not in the environs of Stratford. What we cannot ignore is the doubt such an enormously deep grave casts on the certainty that Shakespeare was buried in the chancel in the first instance. Shakespeare’s will is odd in that he did not bequeath his body to Holy Trinity churchyard or anywhere else and he left no money for a tomb. Suppose that, as the wiser sort in Stratford realised that distinguished visitors were arriving to pay homage to Shakespeare, they decided that they had to provide a shrine. There would have been no point in digging up the churchyard, and no way of deciding which heap of rottenness was which. All that was needed was a stone in a convenient place in the chancel. However, in the last years of the seventeenth century there was the beginnings of a movement to re-inter Shakespeare with Chaucer, Spenser and Jonson in Westminster Abbey. The churchwardens would have been aware that any attempt to dig under the stone in Holy Trinity would have exposed their little stratagem. The churchwardens’ accounts for 1616 have not survived. All we can be sure of is that the stone was in position by 1693 when Dowdall saw it and transcribed:

  Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear

  To dig the dust enclosed here.

  Blest be the man that spares these stones,

  And cursed be he that moves my bones.

  When Shakespeare was buried, John Rogers was still adding to his income by charging high fees, probably ten shillings a time, for burials in the chancel. To keep the money coming, more room was made by digging up the bones already there and removing them to the charnel house. The money Rogers made was supposed to maintain the fabric of the church, but he apparently kept it for his own use, though the church roof was leaking badly. Various levies were raised but little money was collected. On 13 October 1616 the churchwardens were summoned to attend the Episcopal Court at Worcester. By April of the next year they claimed to have spent £27 16s 10d on repairs, but the roof still leaked and the stonework was still crumbling. Richard Hathaway had contributed four shillings to the fund, and John Hall only eight, even though as one of the lessees of the tithes he was legally obliged to invest some of the rental income in keeping the church in repair. Six months later the chancel was still unrestored and John Hall, William Combe and the other tithe-holders were presented. Still they dragged their feet. On 16 July the Corporation stepped in, and voted to ‘bestow some charges’ to keep the chancel dry. On 16 July 1621 George Quiney, who had been appointed curate the year before, and the churchwardens presented Lord Carew, the new lord of the manor, and Hall and Combe for failing to invest of their income from the tithes, and the bailiff and burgesses for not constraining them to do their duty. It was not until a year later that work was under way. If Ann was the woman I think she was, she can hardly have been impressed by her son-in-law’s feebleness at this juncture. His parsimony and inertia were bringing her family into disrepute. Once again it was the Quiney gang to the rescue. William Chandler donated a new canopy for the pulpit and the Corporation directed and paid for the restoration work.

  A Lieutenant Hammond, passing through Stratford in 1634, noticed Shakespeare’s ‘neat monument’ on the north wall of the chancel. 48 Dugdale scribbled in an almanac of 1653 that the artist was ‘one Gerard Johnson’.49 This too is problematic; the elder Gheerart Janssen died in 1611 and the younger is not known to have sculpted anything other than a marble basin that is now untraceable. Art historians do not credit him even with the tomb of John Combe. 50

  It occupied him in his workshop at Southwark near the Globe, where the Poet’s old friends could drop in to criticize it, and eventually was brought down to Stratford and put up in the restored Chancel for the admiration of his relatives and neighbours. 51

  Combe had set aside £60 in his will, to pay for his tomb, Shakespeare nothing. Shakespeare’s monument is more modest than Combe’s full-length effigy atop a sarcophagus, but somebody must have paid for it. In his commendatory poem for the First Folio, Leonard Digges refers to Shakespeare’s ‘Stratford monument’, which is taken to be this one. Ben Jonson, more teasingly, refers to Shakespeare ‘as a monument without a tomb’. Dugdale’s original sketch, which was engraved by Hollar for the Antiquities of Warwickshire, printed in 1656, is still in existence in the possession of his family. 52 The fact that the proportions are different from those of the monument now to be seen is what one would expect in a hurried sketch, but one important detail is not the kind of thing that is misrendered by an inexpert draughtsman: both the poet’s hands are shown resting on a fat woolsack. There is no quill in the right hand and no leaf of paper under the left. At some stage, perhaps when the monument was restored in the mid-eighteenth century, the woolsack was greatly reduced in size and made to support a hand with a pen in it, and another lying on a leaf of paper. The putto that can now be seen holding an inverted torch was then holding an hourglass and his other hand was not resting on a skull. Both putti would seem to have been completely renewed. In its present state the whole is an awkward assemblage, the putti too big for the cornice they sit on, and the surmounting crest overbalancing the whole. Perhaps the ‘neat monument’ Hammond saw in 1634 had yet to acquire its outsiz
e embellishments.

  Most Jacobeans who erected monuments to their dead kinsmen used the inscription to inform the world of their own identity. The inscription on the Shakespeare monument is anonymous: the Bard is referred to only by his surname,

  Judicio Pylum, Genio Socratem, Arte Maronem,

  Terra tegit, populus maeret, Olympus habet.

  Stay Passenger why goest thou by so fast?

  Read, if thou canst, whom envious death hath placed

  Within this monument: Shakespeare, with whom

  Quick Nature died, whose name doth deck this tomb

  Far more than cost, sith all that he hath writ

  Leaves living art but page to serve his wit.

  Obiit An[no] Do[min]i 1616

  Aetatis 53 Die 23 Apr[ilis]

  Poets dwell on Parnassus rather than Olympus. The egregious error chimes ill with the detail of the inverted torch copied from Roman sarcophagi, which is typical of later neo-classicism. The other odd thing about Shakespeare’s likeness is that he is sporting the falling bands and shot white cuffs of a puritan. It is at least possible that the Shakespeare bust started life as something else.

  Monuments like Shakespeare’s are usually financed and the design specified by his survivors, who are keen to take the credit and claim the association. The strange silence of the Shakespeare monument on this point makes one doubt that it was John Hall, though he may have composed the inscription, which is inept enough. It could have been the silent woman of Stratford, the woman who was buried that year as plain ‘Mistress Shakespeare’. In the parish register she is not identified as a gentlewoman, or even as a widow. She is just herself.

  Ann was buried in the newly restored chancel beneath her husband’s monument. Her epitaph was probably written by John Hall, ventriloquising for Susanna:

  Ubera, tu mater, tu lac vitamque dedisti;

  Vae mihi, pro tanto munera saxo dabo?

  Quam mallem amoveat lapidem bonus angelus ore!

  Exeat, ut Christi corpus, imago tua!

  Sed nil vota valent; venias cito, Christe! resurget

  Clausa licet tumulo, mater et astra petet.

  Breasts, mother, milk and life thou gavest me;

  woe is me, for so great a boon must I give stones?

  How much rather would I that the good angel remove this slab from the grave mouth,

  and thine image come forth as did the body of Christ!

  But prayers avail nothing—come quickly, Christ,

  that though shut in the tomb my mother may rise again and seek the stars.

  Hall can hardly have known what Ann’s early life was like, when she nursed her first baby with her boy husband by her side, and they read in their Bible the injunction so dear to the uxorious puritans: ‘Let thy fountain be blessed and rejoice in the wife of thy youth. Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant roe; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times, and delight in her love continually’ (Proverbs, v: 17–18).

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  in which the intrepid author makes the absurd suggestion that Ann Shakespeare could have been involved in the First Folio project, that she might have contributed not only papers but also money to indemnify the publishers against loss and enable them to sell a book that was very expensive to produce at a price that young gentlemen could pay

  A few weeks before Shakespeare died, on Shrove Tuesday 1616, a mob of apprentices converged on the Cockpit, Christopher Beeston’s newly built indoor playhouse in Drury Lane,

  wounded divers of the players, broke open their trunks, and what apparel, books or other things they found, they burnt and cut in pieces…got on top of the house and untiled it…and would have laid that house…even to the ground…In this skirmish one apprentice was slain, being shot through the head with a pistol, and many other of their fellows were sore hurt, and such of them as are taken his Majesty hath commanded shall be executed for example’s sake.1

  As is only to be expected in official accounts, this rioting is presented as meaningless and unmotivated. Were the apprentices attacking Beeston’s new theatre because it was private and expensive or simply because it was a theatre? Were they frustrated playgoers or indignant puritans? Christopher Beeston was a known whoremaster; in 1602 a woman condemned to Bridewell for bearing an illegitimate child accused Beeston of raping her and said that he boasted of having ‘lain with a hundred wenches’. Though Beeston denied the charges he and ‘his confederate players’ were deemed guilty of unseemly and lawless behaviour. 2 When the Globe burnt down in 1613, the balladeers showed scant compassion, admonishing the players:

  Be warnèd, you stage strutters all,

  Lest you again be catched,

  And such a burning do befall

  As to them whose house was thatched.

  Forbear your whoring, breeding biles,

  And lay up that expense for tiles. 3

  The year of Shakespeare’s death was also the year of the issue of Ben Jonson’s grandiose folio, entitled The Works of Benjamin Jonson, for which as his own editor, in a bid to acquire gravitas, Jonson created literary versions of selected playtexts and added to the mix non-dramatic verse. In England writing for the theatre had never been a profession, let alone a respectable profession; the playwrights of the 1590s and 1600s strike one as rather like the writers of TV soaps in our own time, under pressure to produce endless variations on a limited number of themes, structuring dialogue to accommodate a fixed cast of players, meanwhile keeping bums on seats and sponsors and producers happy. Most playtexts were ephemeral. Thomas Heywood, to name just one contemporary playwright, claimed that over his sixty-year career he was author or principal part-author of 220 plays, most of which have not survived. By putting together improved versions of selected plays and a quantity of non-dramatic verse, all printed in a consistent style and prefaced by an extraordinary number of commendatory verses, Jonson’s intention was to establish himself as a literary figure rather than an entertainer. The Works of Benjamin Jonson was a succès only d’estime; copies sold slowly and may actually have left him and his publishers out of pocket. 4

  Three months after Ann Shakespeare died, her husband’s collected plays were published in a handsome folio. Scholars have never given any consideration to the possibility that the Bard’s wife might have been involved in the Folio project. They prefer to believe that she was illiterate, had nothing whatever to do with Shakespeare’s creative work and no interest in it whatsoever. The idea that she might be entitled to some of the credit for the preservation of her husband’s work is apparently too ridiculous to contemplate, which is why we shall now contemplate it.

  The suggestion that Shakespeare took advantage of peace and quiet at New Place to work on his plays is actually less preposterous than the commonly held belief that he never went near the place until he had given up writing them. Theatres were not allowed to open in the penitential season of Lent, which lasted from Septuagesima Sunday until Easter Sunday, quite long enough to justify the week lost in travelling to and from Stratford.

  If Shakespeare did work at New Place, there must have been papers somewhere in the rambling house. Paper, being costly, was not disposed of lightly. Paper with writing on one side was good for writing on the other; paper that was entirely overwritten was good for wrapping anything from spices to gunpowder. The fact that no papers and no books were mentioned in Shakespeare’s will doesn’t mean that there weren’t any to be found. Even if we had the inventory made at the time of his death, we might not find his books and papers listed. No dog has ever been listed in an Elizabethan inventory but that doesn’t mean that Elizabethans didn’t own dogs. If there was ever any significant accumulation of documents at New Place, it must have been assembled during Shakespeare’s life, when Ann was chatelaine. It may have been Ann who tidied the sheaves of paper and put them away for safe-keeping, and perhaps, if and when she left New Place, she took them away in her widow’s coffer.

  The possibilities are many. Shakespeare may have done what other au
thors have done before him, forbidden his wife and her maids from entering, let alone tidying, his study, but the prohibition can hardly have held when he was not in residence. If no one had ever cleaned the room, mice and other vermin would have made short work of his papers. Shakespeare may have had his own faithful servant, who kept his wife and her industrious maids well away from his personal effects. One possible candidate for this role is the mysterious John Robinson who was present in Stratford to witness Shakespeare’s will in March 1616. The name Robinson is not common in Stratford; none of the few Robinsons who can be found in the archives seems to fit the bill. In London, twenty years before Shakespeare’s death, in November 1596, a John Robinson was one of the thirty-one signatories who protested against Burbage’s opening of a public theatre in the Blackfriars together with Shakespeare’s old colleague Richard Field. 5 In 1613 a John Robinson was installed as the tenant of the gatehouse in Blackfriars and he was still the tenant when Shakespeare’s will was made. If these John Robinsons and the witness of Shakespeare’s will are all the same person, it is not inconceivable that he was Shakespeare’s manservant. Boys initially trained for the theatre who didn’t make the cut were usually retained by the company to work in other capacities. To have been the tenant of the gatehouse John Robinson must have had some connection with the company; he may, for example, have been Shakespeare’s dresser. He may have been related to the actor Richard Robinson who married Richard Burbage’s widow. 6 There would have been nothing unusual in Shakespeare’s keeping a personal servant, and it may have been he rather than Ann Shakespeare who cared for Shakespeare in the last months of his life.