Shakespeare полностью

The first child of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway was probably conceived in the last two weeks of September, for at the end of November the young man or Anne Hathaway’s guardians hastened to Worcester in order to obtain a special marriage licence. Anne Hathaway had been left £6 13s 4d by her father, equivalent to a blacksmith’s or a butcher’s annual wage and enough for her dowry. The licence permitted marriage after a single publication of the banns, and did not specify any particular parish in which the ceremony must take place. The haste was necessary since the period of Advent was at hand, in which marriages were very largely restricted. Another period of prohibition began on 27 January and lasted until 7 April. It was possible, then, that their child might be born when its parents were not formally wedded. Anne’s interesting condition may have become evident, and neither she nor her guardians may have wished her child to be illegitimate.

So on 27 November 1582, William Shakespeare or Anne’s representatives rode to Worcester, and visited the consistory court at the western end of the south aisle of the cathedral there. The fee for this special licence, allowing for a marriage in haste or in privacy, varied from 5 to 7 shillings. Anne Hathaway’s home was given as Temple Grafton, but by some strange slip of the pen she was given the surname of Whateley. So the licence reads as “inter Willelmum Shaxpere et Annam whateley de Temple Grafton.” There has been some unnecessary speculation about an unknown young woman named Anne Whateley, but it is likely that the clerk had simply misheard or misread the name; there was a Whateley appearing at the court on the same day, so the official’s confusion is understandable. Since Shakespeare himself was under the age of twenty-one, he was obliged to swear that his father had given consent to the match. On the following day two of Anne Hathaway’s neighbours in Shottery, both farmers, Fulke Sandells and John Richardson, stood surety of £40 in the event of some “lawful impediment” being later discovered. It is not surprising that John Shakespeare did not sign this surety, since he was a known recusant intent upon concealing his wealth and property.

The banns were published on Friday 30 November, and the marriage took place on that or the following day. The most likely venue for the ceremony was Anne Hathaway’s parish church at Temple Grafton, some five miles west from Stratford. The absence of parish records makes it clear that it was not performed in Stratford, where the vicar was strongly attached to the reformed faith. Some scholars place it at Luddington, a village three miles from Temple Grafton where other relatives of Anne Hathaway lived. One old resident claimed to have seen the parish record of the marriage, but the curate’s housekeeper is supposed to have burnt that register subsequently on a cold day in order “to boil her kettle.”³ This does not, on the face of it, seem very likely. Others claim the site of the wedding to be St. Martin’s Church, in Worcester, where the pages of the parish register for the marriages of 1582 have been carefully cut out.

The church of Temple Grafton, however, was convenient in more ways than one. The priest here was a remnant of Mary’s Catholic reign, an old man who according to an official report was “unsound in religion” and who could “neither preach nor read well.” But he was well versed in the practice of hawking and could cure those birds “who were hurt or diseased: for which purpose many do usual repair to him.”⁴