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

well tucked up in a russet petticoat, with a bare hem and no fringe, yet has she a red lace and a stomacher of tuftmockado and a partlet cast over with a pretty whip, and dressed she was in a kerchief of holland for her father was a farmer. Her girdle was green, and at that hung a large leather purse with fair threaden tassels, and a new pair of yellow gloves, tufted with red raw silk very richly… 5
    Milkmaids were stout and straight, strong enough to carry two bulky wooden pails suspended from a yoke across their shoulders, and sure-footed enough not to slop the precious milk out of the pails as they travelled over the uneven ground. Spilt milk was a disaster, and milkmaids wept piteously over it, afraid of being beaten. 6 In the long days of summer, when all her morning chores were done, the farmer’s daughter could drive her cows and sheep to pasture, and lie with her gossips in the deep grass, watching her animals graze, singing songs and telling stories to pass the lazy time till the next milking.
    Â 
    Oh the wench went neatly,
    Methought it did me good
    To see her cheery cheeks
    So dimpled o’er with blood,
    Her waistcoat washèd white
    As any lily-flower.
    Would I had time to talk to her
    The space of half an hour. 7
    Â 
    Supposing Ann was living at Hewlands at the time of her father’s death, it was up to her stepmother whether she remained working there as an unpaid family-and farm-servant or left home to work elsewhere. As she and Shakespeare were not married in Stratford, and marriages generally took place in the parish where the bride was resident, it seems likely that at the time of her wedding Ann was not living in Shottery. Some commentators think that she had decamped to Temple Grafton. Perhaps she had found work in a Gardner household or with kin of her mother’s in another parish.
    Most versions of what befell William go more or less like this: ‘Sometime that August, after wandering the mile or so west down therural footpath to the tiny village of Shottery, the worldly eighteen-year-old committed an indiscretion that would profoundly affect the rest of his life. Was it a careless roll in the hay…?’ 8 As we have seen the Shakespeares and the Hathaways knew each other, so there is no need to suppose that one day, quite by chance, Shakespeare wandered too close to Shottery and got snared by ‘a homely wench’. Ann was no wench; even if she had been in service, she would have been employed at a higher rate than a mere wench. Landholders were of higher status than glove-makers, especially glove-makers who were broke and had lost their own land. How hard is it to believe that eighteen-year-old Shakespeare was so enamoured of a twenty-six-year-old that he wooed her and ultimately won her? As an elder sister Ann probably spent much of her time looking after her younger siblings. When she walked the Hewlands cows to Shottery common, the younger children would have come with her to play on the green under her watchful eye, as she and the other Shottery girls sang and dittied through their favourite ballads.
    Â 
    The lark that tirra-lirra chants,
    With hey! with hey! the thrush and the jay,
    Are summer songs for me and my aunts
    While we lie tumbling in the hay. 9
    Â 
    If Ann wasn’t living in or near Stratford from September 1581 till after her marriage, the roll-in-the-hay hypothesis becomes more difficult to sustain. Still, a boy may walk many a long mile in search of somewhere to sow a wild oat. As for the suggestion that Ann was hanging around Stratford ‘consorting with the local youth’, if she had behaved in such a way in a God-fearing rural town like Stratford with a population of less than 2,000 she would have found herself up before the Vicar’s Court in less time than it takes to sow a wild oat.If any such baggage had attempted to embroil Alderman Shakespeare’s son, his friends on the Corporation would have run her out of town. A good