So many details of William Shakespeare’s life remain elusive that it’s hardly surprising his wife is even more obscure.
But it is a matter of record that the woman born Anne Hathaway died 400 years ago this weekend, on August 6th, 1623. And the other thing we know, of course, is that the consolations of her later days had included the couple’s second-best bed, notoriously bequeathed by her husband.
This and the fact that the bequest was an afterthought, inserted late into a will that originally hadn’t mentioned her at all, have led many to believe that Shakespeare was unhappily married.
She had been already pregnant when they walked up the aisle and was aged 26 at the time, to his 19, lending circumstantial evidence to the related theory that this was shotgun marriage between a cradle snatcher and an ingenu.
A Head of its time – Frank McNally on the bicentenary of Howth Road and more about wakes
Alive and kicking – Frank McNally on the continued survival of the great Irish wake
Ogham thoughts – Frank McNally on a new artwork, an old alphabet, and the longest word in Irish
Presidential bearing – Brian Maye on Erskine Childers
The alternative hypothesis is that, being a big-farmer’s daughter, she was a better catch at the time than Shakespeare, and that as a young man in a hurry, he was the one who did the chasing.
Pregnant marriages were common then, the happy-marriage camp argues, and although hers may have nudged he fiancé towards the altar, there is no reason to think he hadn’t plan to marry her anyway.
As for the other end of their life together, and the apparent insult of the will, it is said that the best beds in bourgeois Elizabethan homes were often reserved for guests rather than everyday (or night) use.
Furthermore, beds then could be very substantial pieces of furniture, not much less valuable than houses. Bequeathing the second-best was not necessarily an insult.
Loved or not, Mrs Shakespeare might be even more of a blank slate now were it not for a memorable maiden name, which lent itself to poetry (good and bad), and to novelists with a weakness for puns, including James Joyce.
Shakespeare himself seems to have played on it – lovingly – in Sonnet 145. The poem is narrated by a pathetic lover who at first inspires only hate from the target of his affections, before she relents in the closing couplet: “‘I hate’ from hate away she threw/And saved my life, saying not you.”
Romantics claim that even the “And” there was chosen because it sounded like “Anne”. Cynics might counter that the sonnet is in a markedly different style to most of his poetry and may have been written when he was very young.
Another romantic poem sometimes credited to Shakespeare but probably the work of Charles Dibdin (1748–1814), exploited the name’s grammatical potential: “She hath a way so to control,/To rapture the imprisoned soul,/And sweetest heaven on earth display,/That to be heaven Anne hath a way.”
Then there was Joyce who, wrestling with the Shakespearian bed and other issues in Ulysses, deploys the same pun in support of the reluctant marriage theory. “He chose badly?” [asks Stephen Dedalus at one point] “He was chosen, it seems to me. If others have their will Ann hath a way.”
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On the subject of Rhode and other misleading anglicisations of Irish placenames (Diary, Wednesday), Afra Cronin writes asking me to settle an argument from a trip to Gallipoli earlier this year, where she visited the graves of the many Irish soldiers who died in a disastrous operation of the first World War.
One of her tour group suggested that the misspelling of a certain Fermanagh town in the “Inniskilling Fusiliers” originated not as any accident of print or translation but “a ploy to frighten the Turks”. Had I any thoughts on this, she wondered?
Well, Afra, Enniskillen has been the subject of so many different spellings over the centuries – at least 20 – that the ones implying homicide may just have been a result of the law of averages. Either way, according to the placename database Logainm, the town was called “Enniskilling” on a map as long ago as 1614.
But in the original Irish, it was Inis Ceathleann, the island of a person of that name, who in one version was a Fomorian queen and wife of Balor (of the evil eye). And among Ceathleann’s mythological misdeeds was to dispatch a hero of the Tuatha de Danann, Dagda Mór, with a poisoned projectile. So maybe in this case, the misspelling anglicisers had a point.
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In Salthill during the week, I stopped to admire an impressive maritime memorial to the ships that brought thousands of Irish people to new lives in America during and after the Famine. It includes a carved stone, quoting Psalm 107: “Those who go down to the sea in ships” and paying tribute to the captains and crews who carried so many emigrants “To Saftey”.
So impressive was the rest of it, I wondered briefly if Saftey was a migrant clearing station, like Ellis Island, that I somehow hadn’t heard of before. Then the truth dawned. It was just a typo, but of the kind that – alas for stonemasons – cannot be erased.