Shakespeare's Twins and their Parentage

This is an outline of an essay in preparation on Shakespeare biography, the premise being that Hamnet Sadler was the real father of Hamnet and Judith, the twins born to Anne in 1585. The original idea was by Tim Curtis and Julia Taylor and Tim invited me to contribute, which I have been glad to do.

In Alan Bennet’s The History Boys, history is seen as ‘subjunctive’, concerned with ‘what might have been’. Shakespeare biography is similarly subjunctive, dependent on large amounts of supposition from a small amount of solid evidence.
Some of the creative work of biographers and other suppositions have been allowed to become ‘ersatz facts’, like the birthday being on 23rd April, in line with St. George’s Day and the date of Shakespeare’s death, but this is only a possibility, being based on a christening date of 26th. There are other claimed ‘sightings’ of Shakespeare at family events and a court case but sometimes these are based on assumptions that have not been sufficiently verified. Thus Shakespeare is famously someone who died on his birthday without necessarily being born on it.

While Shakespeare must be assumed to be in Stratford in August 1582 to help conceive his daughter Susanna who is born in May 1583, there can’t be so much certainty that he was there in May 1584 to help conceive the twins Hamnet and Judith, born to Anne in Jan 1585. While it is widely assumed, even by biographers as scrupulous as Schoenbaum, that Shakespeare was the father of the twins and that they were named after Hamnet and Judith Sadler who were close friends, this has been allowed to stand apparently unchallenged as one of the things we know whereas there is nothing to establish it as a fact.
The often suggested ‘sighting’ of Shakespeare back in Stratford for the funeral of Hamnet, the much beloved son, in August 1596 is less credible if one doubts the parentage as well as doubting the possibility that Shakespeare’s whereabouts could be traced on tour with his company and that he could get to Stratford in time for the funeral.

It is quite possible that Shakespeare wasn’t at the conception, birth or funeral of Hamnet because the twins might have been fathered by someone else and if Hamnet Sadler was responsible for them, then their names could have been a lasting reminder to Sadler from Shakespeare that these children were his responsibility.

Shakespeare’s departure from Stratford is sometimes guessed at on the basis of Greene’s Groatsworth of Witte (1592) in which he attacks a writer thought to be Shakespeare and mentions that he has been in London for seven years. If Greene is exactly right then Shakespeare’s departure from Stratford in 1585 looks a bit like a reaction to the birth of twins he knew were not his, he has apparent justification to leave his wife, two year old daughter and newly born twins in high dudgeon and go to London in search of a career in the theatre. It is equally possible that Greene didn’t know quite as much and that the first biographers, like Aubrey, who reported an early departure from Stratford were right all along and that Shakespeare had left well before May 1584 and thus was absolutely certain that his wife’s new children weren’t his.
It has been thought by many biographers that William and Anne might not have enjoyed a happy marriage and anecdotal evidence offers plenty of extra-marital possibilities. While very little is known about Anne in Stratford, commentators from James Joyce, or actually Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, to Rene Weis in a recent book suggest that Anne could have had relations with other men, one candidate being Shakespeare’s brother.
There are considerably more stories attaching to Shakespeare, including a Dark Lady, the Earl of Southampton or other ‘fair youth’, Jane Davenant, mother of William Davenant, and a theatrical story in which William the Conqueror comes before Richard III.

Shakespeare’s will, although a difficult document in many ways, clearly favours Susanna over Judith. And although Judith might not have died in time to be buried alongside the other family members in Holy Trinity Church, she is notable by her absence alongside Anne, Susanna, John Hall and Nash.
The evidence of the names suggesting the Sadlers were godparents isn’t quite so convincing if one wonders why the Shakespeares named their first daughter Susanna and not Judith since they are unlikely to have known that their next children would conveniently be boy and girl twins.

The title of the play Hamlet, the name of Sadler and the name of the sickly boy is a three-way coincidence that can be simplified down to an extant story that became the Ur-Hamlet in the late 1580’s having the same name as Sadler. The significance of it to Shakespeare need not be that he finishes his masterpiece five years after the death of his son, having in the mean time written As You Like It and some of his cheeriest work, but that it is a play about a young man with the wrong father.

There is a coherent biography that becomes apparent when re-drawing the material in the light of Sadler’s possible paternity of the twins. Shakespeare has either left Stratford before they are conceived or does so soon after their birth at the latest; the marriage isn’t happy and conjugal relations could have ceased between the two at a very early stage sometime after Susanna was conceived; although it is possible to see the great writer as a good man doing the right thing by marrying Anne in the first place, his worth as a writer is that he is human and not a saint- he follows his own instincts in going to London at the earliest opportunity; Anne (and Anne has been known to posterity as Anne Hathaway) and the children are never brought to London but Shakespeare builds up his estate in Stratford; his business is in London but he is never permanently settled there; after a long and successful career he spends more time at home, reconciled with Sadler (if in fact they ever fell out), and making provision for his family. However Susanna is much favoured in the will, being his own blood, while Judith’s unpromising marriage to Thomas Quiney makes him put caveats in the will to safeguard the bequest. Shakespeare has kept the marriage and family together for appearances sake but it was little more than that from the very beginning.