Unraveling the Mystery of Shakespeare’s Wife

It’s often said that behind every great man stands a great woman. Not so for William Shakespeare's wife, widely believed to have been a woman named Anne Hathaway, likely eight years his senior. For centuries, she has been consigned to the shadows of her husband’s genius—cast at times as a shrew who trapped him in a hasty marriage, at others as an illiterate homemaker raising their children Hamnet, Judith and Susanna. In the most radical retellings, she emerges as the hidden genius behind the Bard’s works. 

For a fresh (and nuanced) lens on this elusive Elizabethan, HISTORY.com spoke with three prominent Shakespeare experts: Lena Cowen Orlin, professor emeritus of English at Georgetown University and author of The Private Life of William Shakespeare; Katherine Scheil, professor of English at the University of Minnesota and author of Imagining Shakespeare's Wife: The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway; and Matthew Steggle, professor of Early Modern English Literature at the University of Bristol. Together, they unpack how Anne’s story has been told—and retold—across centuries of speculation, scholarship and shifting cultural values. 

Katherine Scheil: Anne Shakespeare has been wildly exaggerated, outrageously degraded, enthusiastically embellished and completely ignored. Sometimes she is a loving, devoted wife who ran the Shakespeare household in Stratford. Elsewhere, she’s a disastrous mistake Shakespeare made in the heat of teenage lust, a woman he gladly left behind for a more glamorous life in London. Each “Anne” is constructed in response to the desire for a particular version of “Shakespeare” but may have little connection to the historical Anne Shakespeare.  

Lena Cowen Orlin: Good question! There seems little doubt that the given name of Shakespeare’s wife was “Anne,” but the marriage bond says she was a “Hathaway” and the marriage register says she was a “Whateley.” There are several reasons to prefer “Hathaway,” the main one being that the marriage bond was an original document signed by the two witnesses who testified there was no impediment to her marriage. The register was a page in a book compiled by a clerk who was organizing multiple pieces of information into a list of business conducted in the diocesan office. The clerk is more likely to have made a mistake. 

We don’t know for certain that the Anne whom Shakespeare married was Anne Hathaway.  But no one has ever found trace of an “Anne Whateley.”  

LCO: The Richard Hathaway we assume to have been father to Shakespeare’s wife is known to have had seven children, and none of them was named “Anne.” He did, however, refer to a daughter named “Agnes” in his will. Because we know that other “Agneses” were sometimes called “Anne,” biographers usually persuade themselves that Shakespeare’s wife “Anne Hathaway” was Agnes, daughter of Richard Hathaway of the village of Shottery in the parish of Stratford-upon-Avon.  

LCO: Because Susanna was born fewer than six months after her parents’ wedding, it is generally assumed Anne discovered she was pregnant in late November and the couple rushed to wed before Advent prohibitions kicked in. By canon law, weddings were not permitted during the holiday Advent season. 

But there was no need of a “shotgun wedding” in this period. As many as one-third of women were demonstrably pregnant before marriage. So long as they married before a child was born, couples faced no church discipline, civic censure or social stigma.

LCO: We do not know when Shakespeare’s wife was born. The grave marker says she was 67 when she died in 1623 [which would put her at 26 at the time of her wedding], but grave markers are extremely unreliable evidence. Many early modern individuals and their family members did not know their own birth dates. Grave inscriptions were often produced by illiterate artisans who might misread a number, invert a number, switch numbers, stencil a number backwards; they could be wrong by a decade. Also, the year of “Anne’s” birth cannot be confirmed in a parish register.  

Shakespeare’s baptism is preserved in the Stratford parish register, and we know he married at the unusually early age of 18. Most of his contemporaries wed at 27 or so, after they had completed their seven-year craft apprenticeships. Living in a market town, the son of an artisan, Shakespeare would himself have been expected to serve an apprenticeship. Some evidence suggests he was scheduled to train as a butcher. However, apprenticeship indentures specified that apprentices were prohibited from marrying. By wedding, Shakespeare violated this prohibition and nullified any apprenticeship that had been arranged for him. Again, this is my own deduction—that by marrying, Shakespeare eschewed the safe and predictable path of craft training and chose to gamble on a career in London as an actor and playwright.  

LCO: Their daughter Susanna was baptized on May 26, 1583. Their twins Hamnet and Judith were baptized on February 2, 1585. Hamnet died at the age of 11 and was buried on August 11, 1596.  

LCO: Like other women in Elizabethan England, Shakespeare’s wife had her own productive economic life. There are clues that Anne Shakespeare was more than a “mere” housewife. First, the fact that she borrowed money from Thomas Whittington, a shepherd, as indicated in his [1601] will, means she managed money. Second, the Shakespeare family was in the profitable business of producing malt, a necessary ingredient for beer and ale, as shown in two documents that survive in the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Although Shakespeare was named on both these records as legal head of household, malt-making was practiced exclusively by women—that is, by Shakespeare’s wife. Additional documents in the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust show that Shakespeare’s wife took in lodgers and offered civic hospitality, for example, by welcoming visiting preachers to town. All this suggests she contributed to the family wealth and enabled them to invest in large pieces of property.  

MS: This relates to the Hereford Cathedral letter! In the 17th century, some bookbinder was making a cover for a theological book, and to strengthen the binding he used strips from some discarded letter he had on hand, thus accidentally preserving two fragments of it. The letter is addressed to a “Good Mrs Shakspaire,” who had previously “dwelt” with her husband at Trinity Lane in London. These strips went completely unnoticed for centuries, and it has only recently become apparent that there are a number of reasons to think the “Shakspaires” might actually be William and Anne Shakespeare.  

Assuming that is correct, it provides a tiny snapshot of a relationship that’s much closer than has been seen before. Anne is involved in William’s social and financial networks in London; the writer for the letter is asking her for money, so it would seem she’s got some financial agency of her own. She has even been living with William in London because of that reference to her having dwelt in Trinity Lane.  

Because there are so few pieces of paper of any sort to do with Anne, even one record which puts her in London rather than in Stratford really changes the balance about what one knows about where she is actually recorded. 

LCO: Shakespeare’s bequest of a “second-best bed” does not suggest he meant to insult her. I have read thousands of wills from the period, where beds are dispassionately described as “best,” “second-best,” “third-best” and “worst,” the terms always used as mere descriptors to help distinguish one from another. For the Shakespeares, the likelihood is that the “best” bed, which was reserved for guests, would have been a household heirloom inherited by Susanna Hall. The “second-best” bed was more likely to have been the marital bed, which could have carried associations with memory, sentiment, comfort or familiarity for Shakespeare’s wife. 

Many wills of the period read like inventories, testators listing every pot they own. Shakespeare mentioned just four things: his wearing apparel, his sword, a “silver-gilt bowl” and the second-best bed. The [latter item] may have been where his son was born; it may have been where his son died. If Shakespeare made all these gifts thinking of Hamnet, his wife would have understood.   

Shakespeare’s bequest to Anne does not suggest she was otherwise disinherited. Prevailing dower law mandated that for the length of her life, Shakespeare’s wife controlled a one-third share of each of the properties Shakespeare had purchased during their marriage. The important lands and houses in which he invested would have returned substantial rents and other incomes to her. Anne Shakespeare was very well provided for in her widowhood. 

LCO: Shakespeare’s wife outlived him and was buried as “Mistress Shakspeare” on August 8, 1623, in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon. The honorific “Mistress” signified social standing. A brass plate affixed to her stone indicates: “Here lieth interred 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.” 

KS: An original Latin epitaph, probably written by her daughters Susanna and Judith, described her as a beloved mother and "so great a gift." The epitaph is the most reliable piece of evidence about her life and is a testimony to how Anne's family felt about her and wanted to remember her. 

MS: The plays offer this kaleidoscope of different possibilities—people who think their partner is fabulous; people who seem pretty indifferent to them; people who are so obsessed with them that they murder them; marriages which are failing and yet potentially fixable; all points in between. It’s all too easy to cherry-pick the ones you want to be autobiographical. You could reasonably say he is an author who writes, eloquently, about love and marriage of all sorts. 

KS: This is a temptation we should resist. One would have to survey all of the marriages in all of Shakespeare's works, and then somehow figure out which ones are inspired by his real life and which ones are imaginary. This, of course, is impossible to do.  

KS: We can never really answer the question about a "happy marriage." William and Anne didn't leave any personal papers—no diaries, journals, or letters—so we can never know about her presence in his life, or his presence in her life.  

If we look at the surviving evidence, though, it suggests Shakespeare was committed to his family life rather than trying to escape it. William and Anne had three children together, Shakespeare invested in Stratford throughout his life, buying the second largest house in Stratford for his family (New Place, with 10 fireplaces and 20 rooms), and he returned to Stratford at the end of his life. We also think he was what Stanley Wells has called the "first literary commuter." This is not the profile of someone who didn't want anything to do with his fam