Anne Whateley | |
---|---|
Born | supposed to be 1561 Temple Grafton, Warwickshire, England |
Died | supposed to be 1600 (aged 39) Warwickshire, England |
Occupation | alleged nun, poet, muse |
Literary movement | English Renaissance |
Anne Whateley is the name given to a woman who is sometimes supposed to have been the intended wife of William Shakespeare before he married Anne Hathaway. Most scholars believe that Whateley never existed, and that her name in a document concerning Shakespeare's marriage is merely a clerical error. However, several writers on Shakespeare have taken the view that she was a real rival to Hathaway for Shakespeare's hand. She has also appeared in imaginative literature on Shakespeare and in Shakespeare authorship speculations. Shakespeare's biographer Russell A. Fraser describes her as "a ghost", "haunting the edges of Shakespeare's story". [2] She has also been called "the first of the Shakespearean Dark Ladies". [3]
Whateley's existence has been deduced from an entry in the Episcopal register at Worcester which states in Latin "Anno Domini 1582...Novembris...27 die eiusdem mensis. Item eodem die supradicto emanavit Licentia inter Wm Shaxpere et Annam Whateley de Temple Grafton." The entry states that a marriage licence has been issued to Shakespeare and Anne Whateley to marry in the village of Temple Grafton. The day afterwards, Fulk Sandells and John Richardson, friends of the Hathaway family from Stratford-upon-Avon, signed a surety of £40 as a financial guarantee for the wedding of "William Shagspere and Anne Hathwey". [4] [5]
The entry in the register was discovered in the late nineteenth century by Reverend T.P. Wadley. Various explanations were offered. Initially it was assumed that Whateley was an alternative surname for Anne Hathaway herself. Wadley believed that it was probably an alias, used by Hathaway in order to keep the date of the marriage secret to obscure the fact that she was already pregnant. Another suggestion was that Anne Hathaway might legitimately have used the name, either because her father Richard Hathaway was in fact her step-father, her mother having previously been married to a man called Whateley, or because Anne herself may have previously been married to a man named Whateley. [6] None of these suggestions gained support, since they contradicted other existing evidence.
The Whateley note is discussed in Sidney Lee's 1898 book A Life of William Shakespeare. Lee argues that the "William Shakespeare" who is engaged to Whateley is probably a different person from the playwright, as there were "numerous William Shakespeares, who abounded in the diocese of Worcester". [7] In 1905 Joseph William Gray in Shakespeare's Marriage gave a detailed argument for clerical error due to the existence of lawsuits involving Whateleys that were being written up by the same scribe. [6] [8] However, in 1909 Frank Harris in his book The Man Shakespeare ignored Gray's argument and dismissed Lee's suggestion that there were two William Shakespeares as wildly implausible. He insisted that these documents are evidence that Shakespeare was involved with two separate women. He intended to marry Anne Whateley, but, when this became known, he was immediately forced by Anne Hathaway's family to marry their relative, since he had already made her pregnant. Harris believed that Shakespeare despised his wife, and that his forced marriage was the spur to his creative work:
If Shakespeare had married Anne Whately he might never have gone to London or written a play. Shakespeare's hatred of his wife and his regret for having married her were alike foolish. Our brains are seldom the wisest part of us. It was well that he made love to Anne Hathaway; well, too, that he was forced to marry her; well, finally, that he should desert her. I am sorry he treated her badly and left her unsupplied with money; that was needlessly cruel; but it is just the kindliest men who have these extraordinary lapses; Shakespeare's loathing for his wife was measureless. [9]
Some biographers, notably Ivor Brown and Anthony Burgess, followed Harris' lead, portraying Whateley as Shakespeare's true love. Brown argued that she was the Dark Lady of the sonnets. In 1970 Burgess wrote,
It is reasonable to believe that Will wished to marry a girl named Anne Whateley. The name is common enough in the Midlands and is even attached to a four-star hotel in Horse Fair, Banbury. Her father may have been a friend of John Shakespeare's, he may have sold kidskin cheap, there are various reasons why the Shakespeares and the Whateleys, or their nubile children, might become friendly. Sent on skin-buying errands to Temple Grafton, Will could have fallen for a comely daughter, sweet as May and shy as a fawn. He was eighteen and highly susceptible. Knowing something about girls, he would know that this was the real thing. Something, perhaps, quite different from what he felt about Mistress Hathaway of Shottery. But why, attempting to marry Anne Whateley, had he put himself in the position of having to marry the other Anne? I suggest that, to use the crude but convenient properties of the old women's-magazine morality-stories, he was exercised by love for the one and lust for the other. [4] [10]
According to Stanley Wells in the Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, most modern scholars take the same view as Gray, that the name Whateley was "almost certainly the result of clerical error". [11] It may have arisen because the clerk was also recording information about a tithe appeal by a vicar, which included a reference to a person named Whateley. [12] Though there was a Whateley family in the area, no independent evidence has ever been found of the existence of an Anne Whateley in Temple Grafton or anywhere else nearby. As for Lee's claim that there were "numerous" other William Shakespeares in the diocese, later researchers have found no surviving records of any other William Shakespeares of marriageable age in the diocese of Worcester. [8]
After Harris's initial argument a number of imaginative claims were made about Anne Whateley, most dramatically that she was the true author of Shakespeare's works. This argument- which has been concluded to be entirely without satisfactory evidence- was made by William Ross in his book The Story of Anne Whateley and William Shaxpere (1939), [13] in which he asserted that Whateley was a nun who was Shakespeare's "lover and consort in their spiritual union". Ross claims she was born in 1561, the daughter of the well-known seafarer Anthony Jenkinson, and that she was living a secluded life among the nuns of the Order of St. Clare when she met Shakespeare. According to Ross's story, they fell in love, and Anne was about to leave the order to marry him when Hathaway revealed her pregnancy. In Ross's view, Whateley wrote the sonnets as gifts to Shakespeare, and he states that her authorship can be deduced from them, in that they describe the history of her spiritual relationship with him. Ross considers that Hathaway is the Dark Lady of the sonnets, while Shakespeare himself is the Fair Youth, and that their intimate friendship continued after his marriage to Hathaway; its deepening spirituality is explored in the later sonnets. Eventually the friendship was broken up by Hathaway's jealousy, and Shakespeare left for London. She wrote A Lover's Complaint , which was appended to the sonnets, to express Anne Hathaway's point of view. No evidence was provided by Ross for these conclusions save that they resulted from his own interpretation of the texts.
Ross claimed that Whateley wished to dedicate the sonnets to Shakespeare, but wrote the dedication to Mr W.H. instead of "W.S", so that the identity of her lost love should remain mysterious; "W.H" was preferred because it was the initials of both her own surname and Hathaway's, implying that Shakespeare was, in a sense, both their husbands: Mr W and Mr H. According to Ross, "the initials therefore represent all three, and no better selection was possible". [14] Ross alleged that she gave him the full collection when he left for London- which explains the dedication to the "well-wishing adventurer in setting forth"- and that she later wrote The Phoenix and the Turtle to commemorate their spiritual union.
Ross emphasises that his discovery removes all suggestion of homoeroticism from the sonnets, and thus "the taint of perversion, so odious to all lovers of Shakespeare, has been dissipated". He has very little to say about the plays, but states that Whateley probably wrote Shakespeare's plays to help him make a living. Nevertheless, he describes the playwriting as a "collaboration", though Shakespeare's role was probably "passive". Ross portrays Shakespeare himself as a talented writer, a worthy assistant to Whateley's "genius". After Anne's death he wrote "The Twenty-First and Last Book of the Ocean, to Cynthia", hitherto attributed to Walter Raleigh.
Ross argues that the sonnets reveal that Whateley also knew Edmund Spenser and helped him to write The Shepherd's Calendar . She was also the sole author of The Faerie Queene and Amoretti . In the 1580s she met and helped Michael Drayton and Philip Sidney, probably inspiring the sonnet revival of the period. The poem Hero and Leander , usually attributed to Christopher Marlowe, describes her relationship with Shakespeare. She also wrote Marlowe's plays. After her death in 1600 her unpublished works were published in the book Poetical Rhapsody, attributed to "A.W." [14]
Ross's speculations were developed by his friend W.J. Fraser Hutcheson in his book Shakespeare's Other Anne (1950). [15] He follows Ross's claim that Whateley's father was Jenkinson, adding that Whateley's real name was Elizabeth Anne Beck and that her mother was an Anne Beck who died in childbirth. She used the name Whateley because of the household in which she grew up. Falling in love with Shakespeare, she was broken-hearted when he married Hathaway. She fled to Italy, where she acquired the knowledge that would later be used in Shakespeare's Italian plays. Many of her works were published under the name "Ignotus". [13] [15] Hutcheson also claims to have identified a portrait of Whateley, the work of Sofonisba Anguissola, the several copies of which attest to the esteem in which she was held. Hutcheson suggests that Whateley is portrayed as Rosalind and other female characters in Shakespeare's plays. While insisting that she inspired the plays, he does not explicitly assert that she wrote them.
Neither Ross nor Hutcheson provide documentary evidence to support their theories. [16] Ross relies on his readings of the poems while Hutcheson finds coded messages in texts and images. The portrait he identifies as Whateley is generally believed to depict the courtier and poet Girolamo Casio. [1] It is attributed to Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, rather than Anguissola, and its likely depiction of Casio was accepted long before he wrote the book. [17] Kit Mayers, in his biography of Jenkinson, analysed all the available information and claims from Harris onward and concluded "the fascinating and elaborate story of Jenkinson and his supposed illegitimate daughter does not stand up. The whole concoction is a fiction; there is absolutely no convincing evidence that Jenkinson had any secret romance." [18]
Proponents of other alternative authorship theories have also used Frank Harris' version of the Anne Whateley story, typically to portray Shakespeare as a duplicitous scapegrace, traits which are supposed to disqualify him as an author of great poetry. [19] Robert Frazer, who believed that The Earl of Derby wrote the canon, argued that Shakespeare actually married Whateley, not Hathaway. [20]
Whateley has also appeared in imaginative literature about Shakespeare, typically portrayed as Shakespeare's true love, in contrast to a less appealing Anne Hathaway. Anne appears in Hubert Osborne's play The Good Men Do (1917), which dramatises a meeting between the newly widowed Anne Hathaway and Anne Whateley. Hathaway is depicted as viciously shrewish and spiteful, in contrast to her noble-minded former rival. Both women portray Shakespeare's life as an actor and playwright as morally degrading, Whateley insisting that he would have been saved from this shameful profession had he married her. [21] Ivor Brown also published a play, William's Other Anne (1947) in which Shakespeare returns from London to meet Anne Whateley eight years after their broken engagement, just as Anne is about to marry a priggish schoolmaster. Shakespeare and Anne are reconciled, and Shakespeare saves his father from bankruptcy at the hands of Anne's vengeful mother. [22] The play was broadcast on BBC television in 1953 starring Irene Worth as Anne and John Gregson as Shakespeare. [23]
Whateley is mentioned in Late Mister Shakespeare (1998) by Robert Nye, a novel in which an elderly actor who knew Shakespeare in his youth reconstructs the poet's life. He speculates about whether or not she actually existed. She also appears in Graeme Johnstone's novel The Playmakers (2005), in which she is portrayed as an innocent girl with a "sweet nature", "perfect figure, perfect teeth...perfectly shaped nose, clear blue eyes and creamy skin". [24] She is devastated by the discovery that her beloved William has made Hathaway pregnant. She and William are soulmates who plan to work together to improve William's father's leather-making business. Anne hangs herself with a leather rope after the manipulative Hathaway forces Shakespeare to abandon her. The image of his lost love haunts Shakespeare throughout his life. He leaves for London to become a front man for Christopher Marlowe's playwriting. He eventually finds a new love who is the mirror image of Whateley.
Laurie Lawlor's novel The Two Loves of Will Shakespeare (2006) depicts a teenage Shakespeare who seduces willing girls with his wit and charm. He is asked by his friend Richard Field to help him woo the beautiful and devout Anne Whateley, but falls in love with her himself. He tries to reform his ways to become worthy of her, but cannot resist his sexual urges, getting Hathaway pregnant. [25]
In Karen Harper's novel Mistress Shakespeare (2008) Anne Whateley is the central character. She is once more portrayed as Shakespeare's true love. She narrates the story of her life as the dusky-skinned daughter of a Stratford businessman and an Italian acrobat. She and Shakespeare are married in a "handfast" ceremony which is known only to them. In London she carries on a secret parallel marriage with him while Hathaway and her children stay in Stratford. She inspires many of his works and shares his feelings, triumphs and fears. [26]
The Merry Wives of Windsor or Sir John Falstaff and the Merry Wives of Windsor is a comedy by William Shakespeare first published in 1602, though believed to have been written in or before 1597. The Windsor of the play's title is a reference to the town of Windsor, also the location of Windsor Castle in Berkshire, England. Though nominally set in the reign of Henry IV or early in the reign of Henry V, the play makes no pretence to exist outside contemporary Elizabethan-era English middle-class life. It features the character Sir John Falstaff, the fat knight who had previously been featured in Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2. It has been adapted for the opera at least ten times. The play is one of Shakespeare's lesser-regarded works among literary critics. Tradition has it that The Merry Wives of Windsor was written at the request of Queen Elizabeth I. After watching Henry IV Part I, she asked Shakespeare to write a play depicting Falstaff in love.
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) wrote sonnets on a variety of themes. When discussing or referring to Shakespeare's sonnets, it is almost always a reference to the 154 sonnets that were first published all together in a quarto in 1609. However, there are six additional sonnets that Shakespeare wrote and included in the plays Romeo and Juliet, Henry V and Love's Labour's Lost. There is also a partial sonnet found in the play Edward III.
Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, was the only son of Henry Wriothesley, 2nd Earl of Southampton, and Mary Browne, daughter of Anthony Browne, 1st Viscount Montagu. Shakespeare's two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, were dedicated to Southampton, who is frequently identified as the Fair Youth of Shakespeare's Sonnets.
Anne Shakespeare was the wife of William Shakespeare, an English poet, playwright and actor. They were married in 1582, when Hathaway was 26 years old and Shakespeare was 18. She outlived her husband by seven years. Very little is known about her life beyond a few references in legal documents. Her personality and relationship to Shakespeare have been the subject of much speculation by many historians and writers.
All Is True is a 2018 British fictional historical film directed by Kenneth Branagh and written by Ben Elton. It stars Branagh as playwright William Shakespeare. The film takes its title from an alternative name for Shakespeare's play Henry VIII.
Juliet Capulet is the female protagonist in William Shakespeare's romantic tragedy Romeo and Juliet. A 13-year-old girl, Juliet is the only daughter of the patriarch of the House of Capulet. She falls in love with the male protagonist Romeo, a member of the House of Montague, with which the Capulets have a blood feud. The story has a long history that precedes Shakespeare himself.
Mary Fitton was an Elizabethan gentlewoman who became a maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth. She is noted for her scandalous affairs with William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, Vice-Admiral Sir Richard Leveson, and others. She is considered by some to be the "Dark Lady" of Shakespeare's sonnets.
William Shakespeare was an actor, playwright, poet, and theatre entrepreneur in London during the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras. He was baptised on 26 April 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England, in the Holy Trinity Church. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children. He died in his home town of Stratford on 23 April 1616, aged 52.
William Shakespeare's sexuality has been the subject of frequent debates. It is known from public records that he married Anne Hathaway and had three children with her; scholars have examined their relationship through documents, and particularly through the bequests to her in his will. Some historians have speculated Shakespeare had affairs with other women, based on contemporaries' written anecdotes of such affairs and sometimes on the "Dark Lady" figure in his sonnets. Some scholars have argued he was bisexual, based on analysis of the sonnets; many, including Sonnet 18, are love poems addressed to a man, and contain puns relating to homosexuality. Whereas, other scholars criticized this view stating that these passages are referring to intense platonic friendship, rather than sexual love. Another explanation is that the poems are not autobiographical but fiction, another of Shakespeare's "dramatic characterization[s]", so that the narrator of the sonnets should not be presumed to be Shakespeare himself.
Susanna Hall was the oldest child of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway and the older sister of twins Judith and Hamnet Shakespeare. Susanna married John Hall, a local physician, in 1607. They had one daughter, Elizabeth, in 1608. Elizabeth married Thomas Nash, son of Anthony Nash on 22 April 1626 at Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon.
Sonnet 145 is one of Shakespeare's sonnets. It forms part of the Dark Lady sequence of sonnets and is the only one written not in iambic pentameter, but instead tetrameter. It is also the Shakespeare sonnet which uses the fewest letters. It is written as a description of the feelings of a man who is so in love with a woman that hearing her say that "she hates" something immediately creates a fear that she is referring to him. But then when she notices how much pain she has caused her lover by saying that she may potentially hate him, she changes the way that she says it to assure him that she hates but does not hate him.
Sonnet 13 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a procreation sonnet within the Fair Youth sequence.
Judith Quiney, née Shakespeare, was the younger daughter of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway and the fraternal twin of their only son Hamnet Shakespeare. She married Thomas Quiney, a vintner of Stratford-upon-Avon. The circumstances of the marriage, including Quiney's misconduct, may have prompted the rewriting of Shakespeare's will. Thomas was struck out, while Judith's inheritance was attached with provisions to safeguard it from her husband. The bulk of Shakespeare's estate was left, in an elaborate fee tail, to his elder daughter Susanna and her male heirs.
Anthony Jenkinson was born at Market Harborough, Leicestershire. He was one of the first Englishmen to explore Muscovy and present-day Russia. Jenkinson was a traveller and explorer on behalf of the Muscovy Company and the English crown. He also met Ivan the Terrible several times during his trips to Moscow and Russia. He detailed the accounts of his travel through several written works over his life.
Elizabeth Wriothesley, Countess of Southampton was one of the chief ladies-in-waiting to Elizabeth I of England in the later years of her reign.
The Prince Tudor theory is a variant of the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship, which asserts that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, was the true author of the works published under the name of William Shakespeare. The Prince Tudor variant holds that Oxford and Queen Elizabeth I were lovers and had a child who was raised as Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. The theory followed earlier arguments that Francis Bacon was a son of the queen. A later version of the theory, known as "Prince Tudor II" states that Oxford was himself a son of the queen, and thus the father of his own half-brother.
Joan Shakespeare was the sister of William Shakespeare. She is the only member of the family whose known descendants continue down to the present day.
A Waste of Shame is a 90-minute television drama on the circumstances surrounding William Shakespeare's composition of his sonnets. It takes its title from the first line of Sonnet 129. It was first broadcast on BBC Four on 22 November 2005 as part of the supporting programming for the BBC's ShakespeaRe-Told season, but was only loosely connected to the rest of the series.
"Anne Hathaway" is a poem by Carol Ann Duffy about Anne Hathaway, the wife of William Shakespeare.
The Dark Lady is a woman described in Shakespeare's sonnets, and so called because the poems make it clear that she has black wiry hair, and dark, "dun"-coloured skin. The description of the Dark Lady distinguishes itself from the Fair Youth sequence by being overtly sexual. Among these, Sonnet 151 has been characterised as "bawdy" and is used to illustrate the difference between the spiritual love for the Fair Youth and the sexual love for the Dark Lady. The distinction is commonly made in the introduction to modern editions of the sonnets. As with the Fair Youth sequence, there have been many attempts to identify her with a real historical individual. A widely held scholarly opinion, however, is that the "dark lady" is nothing more than a construct of Shakespeare's imagination and art, and any attempt to identify her with a real person is "pointless".