Anne Hathaway and the Second Best Bed

Phil Adams, Anne Hathaway and the Second Best Bed, Havant Literary Festival, September 28

However many times one goes over the material, there still turns out to be more possibilities, more detail and more to it than one thought. As was often stressed by Phil Adams, what we ‘know’ about Shakespeare biography doesn’t amount to very much but there always seems to be further points to be made on the subject. Adams is robustly sceptical, a recommender of Schoenbaum’s rigorously forensic books, and takes nothing, or very little for granted. He is also entertaining, well-informed, less deceived and delivers an engaging summary of the Shakespeare-Hathaway marriage with gusto.
While basing his account, like Schoenbaum, on documentary evidence, he also, like Germaine Greer, elucidates it with contemporary facts and figures. For example, the £40 put up as security by Sandells and Richardson, the Hathaway’s friends or associates, before the wedding is ‘more money than they’ll ever see in their lives’; getting married when expecting a baby was no big deal, 30% of brides were pregnant on their wedding day and the 'right of dower' that might have meant that Ann automatically inherited a large percentage of Shakespeare’s estate only applied in London and York except Shakespeare made arrangements to exclude the Blackfriars Gatehouse -in London-that he had bought from such a legacy.
Adams is more thorough than all the popular biographers of Shakespeare in denying himself a bit of fanciful invention. Greer allows herself to imagine Will teaching Ann to read; Bate, Ackroyd and other recent contributors are all tempted to fill in the huge gaps between documentary facts with their own guesses and Anthony Burgess embraced every rumour, legend and myth in a wonderful if dubious fairy tale. To Adams it is ‘common sense’ to think Hamnet and Judith Sadler were Hamnet and Judith Shakespeare's godparents and he draws a brief sketch of the young Shakespeare unable to leave Stratford (being a minor) without his father’s permission until April 1585 and being ‘worked to death’ in the sweatshop of his father’s struggling business. So, you can see how easy it is for even the most circumspect and diligent of commentators to start making things up.
He doesn’t discount Aubrey’s assertion that Shakespeare went home ‘once a year’ to Stratford from London, on fairly tenuous grounds (and one has to start assuming things eventually) but he is very convincing on the point that Shakespeare couldn’t have been at Hamnet’s funeral in 1596. He stresses the sumptuousness of New Place, how the Queen stayed there in 1643 in preference to all other available accommodation, a detail which fits nicely with the ‘second best bed’ question because not only the Queen but other dignitaries arriving as guests would also have had the use of the best bed and suite and so Shakespeare’s bequest of their marital bed might have had romantic associations for them both.
Light is also shone into the shadowy character of Thomas Quiney who married Judith when Shakespeare was drawing up his will. Quiney’s excommunication could have been due to marrying Judith, who was somewhat older than average marrying age, only to avoid marrying the unfortunate Margaret Wheeler, who died giving birth to Quiney’s offspring on the day Shakespeare signed his will.
Without taking sides in the debate on the marriage, Adams points out that Shakespeare still returns to Stratford after his long and lucrative career in London and before summing up the for and against cases for the good marriage or the bad, he puts it a vote of the audience, which goes 10-7 to the ‘bad’ marriage with numerous ‘don’t knows’. The ‘bad’ marriage motion overstates the case by suggesting that Shakespeare hated Ann but I vote for it because I suspect it wasn’t a successful, complete and wholly faithful marriage.
So, in the questions afterwards, I ask if the numerous stories of Shakespeare’s extra-marital relationships, his long absences from Stratford and there being no record of Ann travelling to London don’t suggest that Ann might have had her own affairs in Stratford and that the marriage wasn’t based on great fidelity. The Dark Lady was explained as a traditional device in a sonnet sequence; William Davenant was ever likely to want to claim to be The Bard’s son and Ann was a good Puritan girl (in Phil Adams’ opinion, which he openly accepts is no more valuable than anybody else’s) and you tend to think that he sides just fractionally with the view that this marriage was a true one, based on love, and one that lasted throughout their lives.
But it was a hugely enjoyable hour and a bit, thoroughly well researched, profoundly well argued and a lively presentation. Not long before my 50th birthday I was probably the youngest among the gathering, which is always a bonus. The debate will go on, enhanced by the enthusiasm and intelligence of Phil Adams who is just the sort of non-partisan, common sense champion that the subject needs.