Anne Hathaway (wife of Shakespeare)

Based on Wikipedia: Anne Hathaway (wife of Shakespeare)

The Woman Behind Shakespeare's Second-Best Bed

When William Shakespeare died in 1616, he left his wife Anne one of history's most puzzling bequests: his "second-best bed with the furniture." Not the house. Not money. Not even the best bed. The second-best one.

For four centuries, scholars have been arguing about what this meant. Was it a deliberate snub from a husband who resented his marriage? A practical arrangement that made perfect sense at the time? Or something in between?

The truth is, we know almost nothing about Anne Hathaway Shakespeare. She left no letters, kept no diary, and appears in only a handful of legal documents. Into this void, generations of writers have poured their imaginations—sometimes portraying her as a scheming older woman who trapped a teenage genius, other times as a devoted wife abandoned by an ambitious husband. The real Anne remains elusive, a "wife-shaped void" onto which we project our own ideas about marriage, ambition, and love.

A Shotgun Wedding in Elizabethan England

Anne Hathaway was born in 1556 in Shottery, a village just west of Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England. Her family's farmhouse still stands today and draws tourists from around the world—though Anne herself would have found this fame bewildering.

Her father, Richard Hathaway, was a yeoman farmer, which meant he owned and worked his own land. This was a respectable position in Elizabethan society, solidly middle-class. When Richard died in 1581, he left Anne ten marks—about six pounds, thirteen shillings, and fourpence—to be paid on her wedding day. There's an interesting wrinkle in his will: he actually called her Agnes, not Anne. The two names were often used interchangeably in Tudor England, much like Bill and William today.

In November 1582, Anne married William Shakespeare. She was twenty-six. He was eighteen.

She was also already pregnant.

Their daughter Susanna arrived six months after the wedding. To modern eyes, this might seem scandalous. But here's where we need to understand how Elizabethan courtship actually worked.

A "handfast" was a formal betrothal, something like an engagement but with more binding legal weight. Once a couple was handfasted, sexual relations were often considered acceptable, and pregnancy frequently followed before the church wedding. Historian Germaine Greer, examining records from Stratford and nearby villages in the 1580s, found that a surprisingly large number of brides went to the altar already expecting. It wasn't ideal, but it wasn't unusual either.

What was unusual was Shakespeare's age. At eighteen, he was young for an Elizabethan groom—most men waited until they were more established before marrying. Anne, at twenty-six, was more typical. Women of that era commonly married in their twenties, especially if, like Anne, they'd been caring for younger siblings after a parent's death.

The "Anne Whateley" Mystery

Here's where the story gets strange.

The day before friends of the Hathaway family posted a financial guarantee for the marriage of "William Shagspere and Anne Hathwey," church records in Worcester show a marriage license issued to "William Shakespeare" and one "Anne Whateley" of Temple Grafton.

Two different Annes. Two different days. The same William.

In 1909, a writer named Frank Harris seized on this discrepancy. He argued that Shakespeare had been in love with Anne Whateley and planning to marry her, but when the Hathaway family discovered their Anne was pregnant, they forced him to abandon his true love and marry their daughter instead. Harris believed Shakespeare's "loathing for his wife was measureless" and that this forced marriage drove him to flee Stratford for a theatrical career in London.

It's a dramatic story. It's also almost certainly wrong.

Modern scholars like Stanley Wells point out that clerical errors were extraordinarily common in Elizabethan records. Names were spelled phonetically by barely literate scribes who often had to guess at what they'd heard. "Whateley" was probably just a mangled version of "Hathaway," nothing more.

But the damage was done. Harris's interpretation planted the idea that Shakespeare's marriage was unhappy, and this narrative has proven remarkably persistent.

Who Pursued Whom?

Germaine Greer offers a different reading entirely. If anything, she argues, Shakespeare pursued Anne, not the other way around.

Consider the circumstances. The Shakespeare family had recently fallen into financial trouble—William's father John had lost his position as alderman and was dodging creditors. Anne's family, by contrast, was in good standing both socially and financially. From a practical standpoint, Anne Hathaway was the better catch.

And there's this: the two families almost certainly knew each other. Stratford was a small town. The Hathaways and Shakespeares moved in the same circles. This wasn't a case of a naive young man being ensnared by strangers. It was probably just two people from respectable families who got together, got pregnant, and got married—the same sequence that happened in countless Elizabethan households.

Greer also notes that autumn was actually the most popular season for weddings. A November marriage wasn't rushed or suspicious. It was perfectly normal.

Three Children, Then Tragedy

Anne gave birth to Susanna in 1583 and to twins—Hamnet and Judith—in 1585. The twins were named after Hamnet and Judith Sadler, close friends of the family, following a common naming convention of the era.

Hamnet died in 1596 at eleven years old.

The cause was almost certainly bubonic plague, which swept through England in recurring waves throughout the sixteenth century. One outbreak could kill a quarter of a town's population. There was no treatment, no understanding of how the disease spread. Children were especially vulnerable.

Shakespeare was in London when his son died. We don't know if he made it back to Stratford in time to see Hamnet before the end, or whether he arrived only for the burial on August 11th.

Some scholars see echoes of this grief in Shakespeare's later plays—particularly in King John, written around this time, which contains a devastating speech by a mother mourning her child. Others caution against reading too much autobiography into the plays. We simply don't know how Shakespeare processed his son's death, or how it affected his marriage.

The Long Separation

For most of their marriage, William lived in London while Anne stayed in Stratford. He was building his theatrical career—writing plays, acting, investing in theater companies. She was raising their daughters and, presumably, managing the household.

Was this abandonment? Neglect? Or simply the practical arrangement that many families made when work required one spouse to be elsewhere?

According to John Aubrey, a seventeenth-century biographer who collected gossip about famous people, Shakespeare returned to Stratford once a year. Other evidence suggests he may have visited more often. He certainly maintained financial ties to his hometown, eventually buying New Place, one of the largest houses in Stratford.

An intriguing discovery in 2025 suggests Anne may have spent time in London after all. A letter addressed to "Mrs Shakspaire" at "Trinity Lane" surfaced in the binding of an old book. Scholars initially were uncertain whether this referred to Anne, but later analysis suggests it probably did. If so, the long separation may not have been quite as complete as we've assumed.

What's certain is that when Shakespeare retired from the theater in 1613, he chose to return to Stratford. He could have stayed in London, surrounded by the theatrical world he'd helped create. Instead, he went home to live with Anne.

The Mystery of the Second-Best Bed

Now we return to that bed.

When Shakespeare drafted his will, he left the bulk of his estate to his daughter Susanna and her husband, the doctor John Hall. His younger daughter Judith received a cash inheritance but was notably excluded from the main property—possibly because her new husband, Thomas Quiney, had recently gotten another woman pregnant and been excommunicated for marrying during Lent without a proper license.

Anne wasn't mentioned at all in the original will. It was only through additions made on March 25, 1616, less than a month before Shakespeare died, that she received anything—and what she received was that second-best bed "with the furniture" (meaning the hangings and linens that went with it).

To modern ears, this sounds insulting. But the context is more complicated.

First, under English common law, a widow was entitled to one-third of her husband's estate regardless of what his will said. Some scholars argue Anne's inheritance was therefore guaranteed even without being mentioned. Others dispute this interpretation of the law.

Second, the "best bed" in an Elizabethan household was typically reserved for guests. The second-best bed was often the marital bed—the one the couple actually slept in. If this is what Shakespeare left Anne, the bequest might have been sentimental rather than dismissive.

Third, beds were extraordinarily valuable in Tudor England. A good bed could cost as much as a small house. This wasn't like leaving someone an old mattress.

And fourth, the arrangements for Anne's care may have already been settled when Susanna married. Germaine Greer suggests that Anne was always intended to continue living at New Place, supported by her daughter and son-in-law. The will simply formalized what everyone already understood.

Or maybe Shakespeare really did resent her.

Stephen Greenblatt, in his biography Will in the World, offers a darker interpretation. He imagines Shakespeare on his deathbed, first forgetting to mention his wife entirely, then remembering her only with this ambiguous bequest. Greenblatt even speculates that Shakespeare's famous epitaph—"Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare, To digg the dust encloased heare: Bleste be ye man y't spares thes stones, And curst be he y't moves my bones"—was written partly out of fear that Anne would someday be buried with him.

We'll never know. The bed, like almost everything else about this marriage, remains a mystery.

Buried Side by Side

Anne outlived William by seven years, dying on August 6, 1623, at sixty-seven. A tradition recorded in 1693 says she "greatly desired" to be buried with her husband. Instead, she was interred in a separate grave next to his in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Stratford.

Her inscription reads: "Here lyeth the body of Anne wife of William Shakespeare who departed this life the 6th day of August 1623 being of the age of 67 years."

Below this, a Latin epitaph—probably written by her son-in-law John Hall on behalf of Susanna—translates to a touching maternal tribute: "Breasts, O mother, milk and life thou didst give. Woe is me—for how great a boon shall I give stones? How much rather would I pray that the good angel should move the stone so that, like Christ's body, thine image might come forth!"

To her daughter, at least, Anne was beloved.

A Hidden Love Poem?

There's one more piece of evidence about Shakespeare's feelings for his wife, though it's highly speculative.

Sonnet 145 is odd. It's written in shorter lines than the other sonnets, with simpler language and syntax that suggests an early composition. The poem ends with these lines:

'I hate' from hate away she threw,
And saved my life, saying 'not you.'

"Hate away" sounds remarkably like "Hathaway." And if you're already looking for puns, "And saved my life" could be "Anne saved my life."

Is this a love poem from a young Shakespeare to his future wife? Some scholars think so. Others dismiss it as coincidence. The pun was first noticed by Andrew Gurr in 1971, nearly four hundred years after the poem was written. If Shakespeare intended it, he hid it well.

The Wife-Shaped Void

What we're left with, ultimately, is absence.

Anne Hathaway Shakespeare lived for sixty-seven years. She was married to the greatest writer in the English language for thirty-four of them. She bore three children and buried one. She managed a household and navigated the complicated social world of Elizabethan Stratford. She lived through plague, political upheaval, and extraordinary social change.

And yet she left almost no trace. The only document mentioning her during her lifetime—besides her marriage and her children's births—is a reference in the will of her father's old shepherd, Thomas Whittington, who died in 1601 and left forty shillings to the poor of Stratford, noting that this money was currently "in the hand of Anne Shakespeare." Even this is ambiguous—was it a loan, or wages she was holding, or savings in safekeeping?

Into this silence, writers have poured their imaginations.

In the nineteenth century, when Shakespeare became a figure of national veneration, Anne was romanticized—a devoted wife in an idyllic rural marriage. In the twentieth century, after Frank Harris's theories took hold and after scholars noted her premarital pregnancy, the image darkened. She became a calculating older woman who had trapped a teenage genius. More recent fiction has portrayed her in more varied ways—as a victim of abandonment, as a woman of unexpected independence, as someone struggling against the constraints of her era.

James Joyce, in Ulysses, has his character Stephen Dedalus offer perhaps the cleverest summary: "He chose badly? He was chosen, it seems to me. If others have their will Ann hath a way."

Historian Katherine Scheil describes Anne as a "wife-shaped void" that modern writers use "as a canvas for expressing contemporary woman's struggles—over independence, single motherhood, sexual freedom, unfaithful husbands, woman's education and power-relations between husband and wife."

The real Anne Hathaway—whatever she was like, whatever she thought about her absent husband and her quiet life in Stratford—remains hidden behind four centuries of projection and speculation.

What the Silence Tells Us

Perhaps the most honest thing we can say is this: silence isn't evidence.

We don't have angry letters because we don't have any letters at all. We don't have records of arguments because we don't have records of daily life. The "second-best bed" might have been an insult or it might have been the most intimate gesture a dying man could make. We simply don't know.

What we do know is that Shakespeare, who could have lived anywhere, chose to retire to Stratford. He bought the biggest house in town and moved back to live with his wife. When he died, he was buried in his hometown church, and when Anne died seven years later, she was buried beside him.

Maybe they loved each other. Maybe they tolerated each other. Maybe, like most marriages, it was complicated—a mix of affection and frustration, shared history and separate lives, moments of connection and long stretches of distance.

We want Anne Hathaway to tell us something about Shakespeare—to illuminate the man behind the plays. But she remains stubbornly herself: a woman who lived her life, raised her children, kept her house, and left almost nothing behind except a grave beside her husband's and four centuries of unanswered questions.

The second-best bed has been dismantled and lost to history. But the mystery endures.