4 – He married his wife when she was already pregnant, but that wasn’t really unusual at the time
“Men are April when they woo, December when they wed. Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives.” Rosalind in As You Like It
William Shakespeare’s personal life could be considered colorful at best. In the next three sections, we will discuss his wife, his kids and his rumored homosexuality, beginning first with Anne Hathaway. Shakespeare married Anne at Temple Grafton in November 1582. He was 18, she was 26 and pregnant. We can unpack several aspects of this to learn about the circumstances by which they came to marry and perhaps discover a little about the man himself and the wife that he would ultimately leave behind him when he sought fame and fortune in London.
That she was so much older than him at the time of their marriage implies that theirs might have been a love match: she was of much higher social standing, from a wealthier family – admittedly since John Shakespeare was in the process of being ruined – and, of course, older. Scholars have argued that William would have pursued Anne rather than the other way around and that, perhaps, the Hathaway family were less than pleased when the wedding was foisted upon them by her pregnancy. The alliance of the prosperous Hathaways with the failing Shakespeares certainly seems unlikely to have been made for the usual reasons behind family unions in Tudor England. That said, 26 was the average age for marriage among Tudor women, while 18 was below the usual age for men and William is likely to have had to seek permission from his father in order to wed.
The circumstances of the wedding itself also lead to the contention that it was not pre-planned. They were married in Temple Grafton, not Stratford, as might have been expected, and with good reason. The Church forbade marriages in Advent and in the immediate post-Christmas period, meaning that the couple had to marry in November to avoid Anne’s pregnancy being obvious by the time of their wedding. William and two witnesses had to go to the town of Worcester to procure a special marriage license that allowed them to marry in November, but, though both Anne and William were listed as being from Stratford, they chose to marry elsewhere.
Historians think that this might have been to avoid the shame of the marriage – which, as we know, was forced upon them – and because of the lack of standing that the Shakespeares now enjoyed in Stratford. There is also a theory that holds that, as the Reverend of the Church in Stratford was a staunch Protestant, holding the wedding elsewhere, particularly in Temple Grafton, where the vicar had once been a priest and was considered unreliably Protestant by authorities. Could he have agreed to marry the couple as Catholics?
The shame of Anne’s pregnancy was real, but it was far from unusual. According to historian Michael Wood, a third of Tudor women were pregnant at the time of their marriage, a fact that is backed up by the extensive church records that display just how much Elizabethan society, or at least, the religious establishment within in, was preoccupied with sex. The records of sermons from the time of Shakespeare’s wedding are filled with vitriol towards women for their sexual proclivities – though, very rarely against the men whom they must obviously have required to perform these depraved acts, of course – and it is clear from reading them that, in the perception of the authorities at least, premarital sex was a major issue.
Whether the marriage to Anne was happy or not has also vexed historians. There is little to back up the perception that has formed over the centuries that they did not get along, but it has persisted nonetheless. Shakespeare did live separately from his wife for the majority of their marriage, with Anne never leaving Stratford, though it is thought that William was a regular visitor back to his hometown and, when he gave up writing plays in his old age, it was to there that he retired. The famous quote from his will – that he left his wife his “second best bed” – is often quoted as showing his disdain for his wife, but in fact, Tudor social mores held that the best bed in the house was the one that was given up to visitors: in giving his wife his “second best bed”, he might well have been giving her the one that they actually shared.