Page 14 of Love, Will

“Did she forcibly tie you to the bed and make you take her?” I lowered my eyes, ashamed.

“Answer me!” she pushed.

“No, she didn’t,” I replied between trembling lips.

“Of course she didn’t!”

Mary Shakespeare turned her back to me and started walking towards the house.

“Mother, where are you going?” I stupidly asked.

She must have thought my question silly as well, since she continued to walk and only replied after a few seconds, almost at the door. “To tell your father, of course!”

After father was informed, there wasn’t much else to do than suffer through his rage, be physically punished and then accompany them both to Anne’s house to ask for her hand in marriage. Her cousins were at home that evening and were informed of the situation. Anne and I sat at the table, unable to speak or even look up, while my parents and her cousins discussed the wedding and what we needed to do. The only time someone dignified us with a question was when mother asked her harshly, “How long since you last bled, girl?”

“Tw.. two months.” Anne could barely speak.

“It will start showing by the end of the month then,” mother said to her cousins and continued to talk to them and make arrangements.

Since Anne was three months in the pregnancy, we needed to get married quickly and couldn’t follow the tradition of the reading of banns. The only date we could get married on was late November, before the Christmas fasting began, but to do that, we had to ask for approval from the bishop and Anne’s family paid forty pounds for his blessing, her entire dowry. Thus, on the 30th of November 1582, Anne Hathaway became Anne Shakespeare.

After the wedding, she moved to our house on Henley Street and this is how I stopped spending my nights in the attic with the apprentices and started spending them with my pregnant wife, in a room adjacent to mother and father’s. Even though we did not have a house of our own yet, my duty was to take care of my bride.

We were a newly formed family, so my role was to supply her with everything she needed. From bed sheets to pregnant gowns to laces and threads for her needlepoint. Father did not show content with the arrangements we made in the beginning, but he soon saw that I worked harder than before and Anne was pulling her weight around the house, so he welcomed us into the family as a couple. We would spend the evenings at the same table, father and I discussing or reading while the women did easy housework or sowing.

Winter and spring passed, and this became a custom that we would embrace every evening which we all seemed to enjoy. Until the 26th of May when Susanna was born. I was tutoring when it started but mother sent my brother Edmund with word to get me home and by the time I got there, I witnessed Anne screaming and saw all the women in the house fussing, so I understood the moment I would hold my child must be close.

And I was right, only an hour passed, and I was asked to hold a newborn girl who cried in my arms. That must have been one of the happiest moments of my life. I remember her smell and the tiny breaths she tried to take while clearing her lungs to make her presence in the world known. I can re-live the panic when I first held her. She was the most precious thing in the world and I, the luckiest man to give part of me to such a perfect bundle. I did not prepare any names, even though the older men, including father, advised me to. They said the moment you hold your first child, the world stops and you forget everything. I did not want to believe them, so I went with the first impulse. I looked into her small blue eyes and something made me say it, “Susanna”. As soon as I finished pronouncing the name, the maid took my precious treasure away, and the world started spinning again. Anne followed the custom and spent the days with the child until we baptized her and I could then return into the room we lived in.

It would not be wrong of me to say that those first few years I spent with Anne and the child were the happiest of our marriage. We renewed our passion for each other, walked hand in hand and smiled at one another in church and at night we burnt the sheets with hot fornication.

Anne looked happy. She glowed every day, and I kept my days busy and only spent a few hours with her in the evenings, so I only caught her in her good hours. From this renewed passion of ours, the twins were born, Judith and Hamnet. None of us expected two, it was a shock for all when I held a boy I had not had the chance to name yet when I heard mother shouting from upstairs, “Wait, there’s another one.”

Their birth made me exceedingly happy, butbrought a dark cloud over the marriage. Anne was no longer herself. She was too busy with the twins and Susanna and constantly grumbling about the lack of space and coin we were experiencing. At night we could not rest because of Hamnet’s cries and during the day she would sew with the children in the garden, trying to make delivery pouches like mother for the gloves we sold so we could gain some extra pennies on them.

After a few months of her continuous protesting and lamenting, I found a tutoring job in Warwick which allowed me to only come home on Sundays. I spent my evenings in a baron’s house, enjoying the constant supply of candles and unlimited access to their library. The coin was also very good, more than enough for Anne and the children and even extra to help father with business, but something inside me thought there may be more to life than reliving the same days over and over, with the only hope that when one went to bed, he would have the fortune to wake up yet another day and continue with the same routine.

My pupil was an avid fan of the theatre, so we went to see plays whenever big companies arrived in Warwick, and it was one of those moments when I realized I could follow them to London.

I decided that weekend to tell Anne about my plan, and when we walked home from church I started telling her about all the books I’d read in the baron’s house and how much inspiration for new stories I had, about the fact that I could still recite Greek tragedies by heart from the school days and finally, told her my plan.

“So it’s not enough that you are in Warwick, now you want to go even further away to London,” she snorted.

“I could earn more coin to finally buy our own house and I would visit often,” I told her, trying to grab her hand in mine.

She pulled away and looked at me, disgusted by the gesture, because I tried to touch her.

“Do whatever you want, I am used to raising my children alone anyway.” And with this she quickened her step and started walking ahead.

It was the only conversation Anne and I had on the subject. When I started to pack for my travel, father was completely against it, trying to convince me I had a family to look after and I couldn’t do it from London. He even tried to share his business and profits with me so I would change my mind, but I wanted none of it.

I was hurt. By Anne, by the fact that I let my dreams slip away and I felt determined to do something more with my life. I knew I could always come back to tutoring, but if I didn’t try my luck in London, I would regret it forever.

“And this, my Lord, is the story of my marriage,” I finally said. Three hours had passed since I started talking and the Earl kept quiet most of the time, only frowning or sighing. We had finished three bottles of wine and a whole plate of cheese by the time the clock rang eleven.

“So as you can tell, your Earlship, I am no expert in love and you are unfortunately seeking advice from a man who saw his wife twice in the past three years. Not that I had any intention of seeing her more often.”

“Thank you for your story, William.” I had asked him to call me by my name while we were talking earlier. “You may not think of it as a useful lesson to me, but I can assure you, it is.” The Earl nodded in thanks, so I followed his gesture.

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