Culture
Overlooked Letter Rewrites History of Shakespeare’s Bad Marriage
Any clue about William Shakespeare’s life usually excites scholars, but one piece of evidence had been neglected for decades. Now, a new analysis of that overlooked document seems to shatter a longstanding narrative about the Bard’s bad marriage.
Shakespeare was 18 in 1582 when he married Anne Hathaway, the daughter of a family friend in Stratford-upon-Avon who was in her mid-20s and pregnant. For centuries, it was thought that the writer left his wife and children behind for a literary life in London, seeking to avoid “the humiliation of domestic feuds,” as one influential 19th-century essayist put it.
This view of Shakespeare’s wife as a “distant encumbrance” suited scholars who thought “Shakespeare was far too interesting to be a married guy,” Matthew Steggle, a literature professor at the University of Bristol in England, said in an interview. The perception was bolstered by the fact that Shakespeare had left her his “second best bed” in his will.
But Mr. Steggle’s new research, published on Thursday in the journal Shakespeare, suggests that the writer was not detached from his marriage after all.
The hint lies in a fragment of a 17th-century letter addressing a “Mrs Shakspaire,” found in the binding of a book published in 1608. The letter’s existence was noted in 1978 by an amateur historian, but it got minimal attention, even after the book was unbound in 2016, revealing what appeared to be part of a reply from Shakespeare’s wife, Mr. Steggle said.
He was working on a Shakespeare biography when he learned of the 1978 find, and was surprised it wasn’t better known. Technological advances allowed him to track down people mentioned in the long-ago correspondence, along with other evidence indicating that it included the playwright’s wife, he said.
If the letter really was addressed to the Mrs. Shakespeare, rather than a lesser-known person with a similar name, “it is self-evidently remarkable,” Mr. Steggle said. It not only gives some previously unknown Shakespeare contacts, but also offers new clues about their relationship, and even suggests that Mrs. Shakespeare lived for a time in London with her husband.
If Hathaway did live in London, she was possibly back in Stratford by the time she received the letter, likely around 1607 — though not necessarily because her husband wanted independence, according to Mr. Steggle.
He proposes in his paper that “there is an obvious reason to avoid London in 1603-4, namely the very bad wave of plague.” In addition, the upcoming arrival of the Shakespeares’ first grandchild after their daughter Susanna’s 1607 marriage “would surely be a good time” for Hathaway to be based back in Stratford.
Mr. Steggle suggests that Mrs. Shakespeare’s movements should be reconsidered with an eye to her “possible absences from London rather than her perpetual absence.”
The note to Mrs. Shakespeare concerned money for a fatherless child named John, who was an apprentice, though not under the famous playwright, with the last name “Butte” or “Butts.” It called upon her to pay money that was most likely held in trust for him, a pledge that her husband may have undertaken, and it referred to a time when she “dwelt in trinitie lane,” which Mr. Steggle now believes refers to a location in London.
The book that held the letter was a 1608 text printed by Richard Field, a native of Stratford who was Shakespeare’s associate, neighbor and first printer, according to Mr. Steggle. Wastepaper was commonly used in bookbinding, and “given Field’s extensive known links to the Shakespeares,” the discovery of their family documents in a work he published indicates it was likely addressed to the famous Mrs. Shakespeare, Mr. Steggle said. Notably, the response, which appears to come from her, sounds “organized, businesslike and rather sarcastic,” he added.
As for John Butts, the child in the letter, his name did appear in a 1607 record of an institution that disciplined disobedient apprentices, among other records, and Mr. Steggle said his surname did arise in “Shakespeare’s extended personal network.”
“The stakes are high,” Mr. Steggle writes in his paper. “This letter, if it belongs to them, offers a glimpse of the Shakespeares together in London, both involved in social networks and business matters, and, on the occasion of this request, presenting a united front against importunate requests to help poor orphans.”
His findings lend some heft to feminist readings of Shakespeare’s life and a pop culture trend, as seen in the popular stage musical “& Juliet,” as well as the acclaimed novel “Hamnet,” of rethinking the marriage and Hathaway’s role in it.
In the musical, Hathaway comes to London from Stratford to attend a performance of “Romeo & Juliet” and annoys her husband by suggesting an alternate ending in which Juliet does not die. The novel depicts the couple’s complex relationship and their shared grief over the death of their son.
Like those reinterpretations, the four-century-old letter undermines long-held premises about the playwright’s life. For Shakespeare biographers “who favor the narrative of the ‘disastrous marriage’” — and even those who do not — the document “should be a horrible, difficult problem,” Mr. Steggle’s paper concludes.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
Take me to visit a dysfunctional family with oceanfront real estate
by Meg Mitchell Moore
Moore is a dependable ingredient in any summer reading soufflé. Her airy novels accomplish what they came to do: entertain and transport, without the pyrotechnics of, say, books that eschew quotation marks. In “Down With the Shipmans,” three sisters, laden with baggage, converge on their late mother’s beach cottage, only to learn that their father and his much younger wife are planning to sell the place.
The stakes are high, the drama is juicy and the views are sublime. Moore even provides two beach dogs — Leo (an unruly pit bull mix) and Cinnamon (“golden retriever, red bandanna, long pink tongue”) — to keep things lively. (Comes out June 2)
-
San Francisco, CA8 minutes agoWorld Cup dining guide near Levi’s Stadium and in San Francisco
-
Dallas, TX14 minutes agoNorth Texas doughnut shops named among best in U.S.
-
Miami, FL20 minutes agoMiami’s Jai Lucas Tackles Year Two With A New Roster and New Goal
-
Boston, MA26 minutes agoA look inside Joan Bennett Kennedy’s Back Bay condo, listed for $2.6m
-
Denver, CO32 minutes agoDenver Fashion Week Responds To Community Demand With Second Model Audition Date – 303 Magazine
-
Seattle, WA38 minutes agoThe Sale Of The Seattle Seahawks Gets A Big News Update
-
San Diego, CA44 minutes agoAlleged San Diego Gunman Had Violent Obsessions
-
Milwaukee, WI50 minutes agoMilwaukee With Kids weekend guide: Books, bugs and more
