A Life of William Shakespeare with portraits and facsimiles. Sir Sidney Lee
of the public by the Birthplace trustees in 1892.
The bond against impediments.
No record of the solemnisation of Shakespeare’s marriage survives. Although the parish of Stratford included Shottery, and thus both bride and bridegroom were parishioners, the Stratford parish register is silent on the subject. A local tradition, which seems to have come into being during the present century, assigns the ceremony to the neighbouring hamlet or chapelry of Luddington, of which neither the chapel nor parish registers now exist. But one important piece of documentary evidence directly bearing on the poet’s matrimonial venture is accessible. In the registry of the bishop of the diocese (Worcester) a deed is extant wherein Fulk Sandells and John Richardson, ‘husbandmen of Stratford,’ bound themselves in the bishop’s consistory court, on November 28, 1582, in a surety of £40, to free the bishop of all liability should a lawful impediment—‘by reason of any precontract’ [i.e. with a third party] or consanguinity—be subsequently disclosed to imperil the validity of the marriage, then in contemplation, of William Shakespeare with Anne Hathaway. On the assumption that no such impediment was known to exist, and provided that Anne obtained the consent of her ‘friends,’ the marriage might proceed ‘with once asking of the bannes of matrimony betwene them.’
Bonds of similar purport, although differing in significant details, are extant in all diocesan registries of the sixteenth century. They were obtainable on the payment of a fee to the bishop’s commissary, and had the effect of expediting the marriage ceremony while protecting the clergy from the consequences of any possible breach of canonical law. But they were not common, and it was rare for persons in the comparatively humble position in life of Anne Hathaway and young Shakespeare to adopt such cumbrous formalities when there was always available the simpler, less expensive, and more leisurely method of marriage by ‘thrice asking of the banns.’ Moreover, the wording of the bond which was drawn before Shakespeare’s marriage differs in important respects from that adopted in all other known examples. [21] In the latter it is invariably provided that the marriage shall not take place without the consent of the parents or governors of both bride and bridegroom. In the case of the marriage of an ‘infant’ bridegroom the formal consent of his parents was absolutely essential to strictly regular procedure, although clergymen might be found who were ready to shut their eyes to the facts of the situation and to run the risk of solemnising the marriage of an ‘infant’ without inquiry as to the parents’ consent. The clergyman who united Shakespeare in wedlock to Anne Hathaway was obviously of this easy temper. Despite the circumstance that Shakespeare’s bride was of full age and he himself was by nearly three years a minor, the Shakespeare bond stipulated merely for the consent of the bride’s ‘friends,’ and ignored the bridegroom’s parents altogether. Nor was this the only irregularity in the document. In other pre-matrimonial covenants of the kind the name either of the bridegroom himself or of the bridegroom’s father figures as one of the two sureties, and is mentioned first of the two. Had the usual form been followed, Shakespeare’s father would have been the chief party to the transaction in behalf of his ‘infant’ son. But in the Shakespeare bond the sole sureties, Sandells and Richardson, were farmers of Shottery, the bride’s native place. Sandells was a ‘supervisor’ of the will of the bride’s father, who there describes him as ‘my trustie friende and neighbour.’
Birth of a daughter.
The prominence of the Shottery husbandmen in the negotiations preceding Shakespeare’s marriage suggests the true position of affairs. Sandells and Richardson, representing the lady’s family, doubtless secured the deed on their own initiative, so that Shakespeare might have small opportunity of evading a step which his intimacy with their friend’s daughter had rendered essential to her reputation. The wedding probably took place, without the consent of the bridegroom’s parents—it may be without their knowledge—soon after the signing of the deed. Within six months—in May 1583—a daughter was born to the poet, and was baptised in the name of Susanna at Stratford parish church on the 26th.
Formal betrothal probably dispensed with.
Shakespeare’s apologists have endeavoured to show that the public betrothal or formal ‘troth-plight’ which was at the time a common prelude to a wedding carried with it all the privileges of marriage. But neither Shakespeare’s detailed description of a betrothal [23] nor of the solemn verbal contract that ordinarily preceded marriage lends the contention much support. Moreover, the whole circumstances of the case render it highly improbable that Shakespeare and his bride submitted to the formal preliminaries of a betrothal. In that ceremony the parents of both contracting parties invariably played foremost parts, but the wording of the bond precludes the assumption that the bridegroom’s parents were actors in any scene of the hurriedly planned drama of his marriage.
A difficulty has been imported into the narration of the poet’s matrimonial affairs by the assumption of his identity with one ‘William Shakespeare,’ to whom, according to an entry in the Bishop of Worcester’s register, a license was issued on November 27, 1582 (the day before the signing of the Hathaway bond), authorising his marriage with Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton. The theory that the maiden name of Shakespeare’s wife was Whateley is quite untenable, and it is unsafe to assume that the bishop’s clerk, when making a note of the grant of the license in his register, erred so extensively as to write Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton’ for ‘Anne Hathaway of Shottery.’ The husband of Anne Whateley cannot reasonably be identified with the poet. He was doubtless another of the numerous William Shakespeares who abounded in the diocese of Worcester. Had a license for the poet’s marriage been secured on November 27, [24] it is unlikely that the Shottery husbandmen would have entered next day into a bond ‘against impediments,’ the execution of which might well have been demanded as a preliminary to the grant of a license but was wholly supererogatory after the grant was made.
III—THE FAREWELL TO STRATFORD
Anne Hathaway’s greater burden of years and the likelihood that the poet was forced into marrying her by her friends were not circumstances of happy augury. Although it is dangerous to read into Shakespeare’s dramatic utterances allusions to his personal experience, the emphasis with which he insists that a woman should take in marriage ‘an elder than herself,’ [25a] and that prenuptial intimacy is productive of ‘barren hate, sour-eyed disdain, and discord,’ suggest a personal interpretation. [25b] To both these unpromising features was added, in the poet’s case, the absence of a means of livelihood, and his course of life in the years that immediately followed implies that he bore his domestic ties with impatience. Early in 1585 twins were born to him, a son (Hamnet) and a daughter (Judith); both were baptised on February 2. All the evidence points to the conclusion, which the fact that he had no more children confirms, that in the later months of the year (1585) he left Stratford, and that, although he was never wholly estranged from his family, he saw little of wife or children for eleven years. Between the winter of 1585 and the autumn of 1596—an interval which synchronises with his first literary triumphs—there is only one shadowy mention of his name in Stratford records. In April 1587 there died Edmund Lambert, who held Asbies under the mortgage of 1578, and a few months later Shakespeare’s name, as owner of a contingent interest, was joined to that of his father and mother in a formal assent given to an abortive proposal to confer on Edmund’s son and heir, John Lambert, an absolute title to the estate on condition of his cancelling the mortgage and paying £20. But the deed does not