Read Online Shakespeare's Wife by Germaine Greer - Free Book Online

William’s marriage was probably felt by Mary as a severe blow. She and her children were slipping in the world, as her sisters’ families prospered, some of them at her expense. In 1587 Edmund Lambert died, still in possession of Asbyes. John then embarked on legal action, not to recover the property from the heir, John Lambert, but for an additional £20 which he said had been promised him in return for delivery of unencumbered title. The unpleasantness would drag on almost to the end of his life; in 1597 the case was heard in Chancery, and again in 1599. Such legal action was costly, not only in money (for both sides) but also in ill feeling.
    Marriage was far from universal in Elizabethan England but, even so, the Shakespeares’ making no attempt to find a wife for any one of three boys, especially after their son and heir had made what might be regarded as an unsuitable match, is peculiar. Gilbert would have attained his majority in October 1587; unless his father really and truly had no money whatsoever Gilbert must have been a worthwhile marriage prospect for someone. If Mary had been on good terms with her sisters and their progeny, she would have had hundreds of possible candidates from whom to choose a likely girl for her boys. If on the other hand her sisters and their husbands regarded John Shakespeare as a jumped-up wastrel who had impoverished his wife and children, they would have been reluctant to match any of their daughters or nieces with any of his sons. Mary Shakespeare was to find wives for none of her sons; her daughter was left to find a husband for herself.
    Most of Shakespeare’s heroes and heroines are motherless. The few mothers who do appear in Shakespeare’s plays are anything but motherly, from the cannibal mother Tamora in Titus Andronicus to the neurotically affected mother of Juliet, the mother of Richard III who curses her womb and the Countess of Rossillion in All’s Well who simply dislikes her son. At best mothers are ineffectual, like Queen Elizabeth in Richard III , Lady Faulconbridge in King John and Lady Macduff, and at worst depraved, like Gertrude and Lady Macbeth.

 
    CHAPTER THREE
    of Ann Hathaway’s looks and demeanour, of age at marriage in the 1580s, the courtship of older women by younger men and whether Shakespeare’s wife could read
    We know from the stone over Ann Shakespeare’s grave that she was born eight years before her husband. What we shall never know is how or when she and Shakespeare met, though we do know that their parents had known each other since the 1550s. It is assumed that she was the mover in the courtship, simply because she was older.To Katherine Duncan-Jones,
    it seems more likely that her father’s death left the unmarried Agnes or Anne…without much parental care or control, and as a mature and spirited country girl she exploited her freedom to consort with the local youth. A combination of boredom with the sexual curiosity natural to his years led to Shakespeare’s dalliance with her, and to what was probably his first experience of sex.
    For some reason Duncan-Jones chooses to exaggerate Shakespeare’s immaturity: ‘In the early modern period puberty occurred, on average, four or five years later than it does today. Some boys of eighteen or nineteen were still able to sing treble.’ There is, of course, no reason to believe that Shakespeare’s vocal cords were undeveloped or that the boys she refers to were not singing falsetto. Will did impregnate Ann after all, and, according to Duncan-Jones, in very short order. ‘Ann was unlike many young women of her age not only in being unmarried, but also in being to some extent free and independent.’ 1
    Ann was also like many young women of her age in being unmarried. About 20 per cent of her female contemporaries woulddie without ever having been married, so spinsters of twenty-six were not at all rare. Unmarried women over the age