194 XIX. WHERE HE WAS MARRIED. SOME time between July and September, 1582, Shakespeare returned to Stratford. Doubtless his absence had permitted a friendly arrangement to be made with his master for the remission of his unexpired apprenticeship, freeing him from a calling he disliked, and it might be hoped that he would now have nothing to fear from the resentment of Sir Thomas Lucy. The family affairs evidently brightened about this time; for John Shakespeare presented himself twice at the meetings of the town council, which he had not attended for nearly four years, and, though hitherto passed over without comment, this sudden resumption of his public duties coincides so remarkably with the return of his son, and his temporary settlement at Stratford, that we cannot but connect it with some change of fortune, which opened to him new prospects. Certainly he could not be so near Stratford as Worcester without wishing to return; for he cherished an almost romantic attachment for his native town through the whole of his life, and an event had just happened which made it the centre of his thoughts. At the beginning of July he must have heard of the death of Richard Hathaway, which removed an obstacle to his early marriage with Anne, and even imposed it upon him as a point of honour, for it would appear that her determination not to reject his suitpossibly their avowed betrothal-had deeply incensed her father, as his will not only leaves her without a provision, but does not mention her name. She thus became dependent on her family, which placed her in a situation as painful as humiliating, and one from which a lover would be impatient to free her. His wild ramble, and its hard, stern lessons, had made a salutary impression on Shakespeare. Veiled from us as they are, we yet see that they had done something to steady, if not to elevate him, to bring out his self-respect, and make him both ashamed of the past and hopeful of the future. In those days strolling-players were considered mere rogues and vagabonds, and, indeed, were literally so described in the statutes, so that his assumption of such a calling was felt as a reproach by his friends, particularly as he appeared in the character of Clown. He frankly acknowledges that he had given them ground for complaint : "Alas, 't is true, I have gone here and there, And made myself a MOTLEY to the view." But, evidently pleading with Anne Hathaway, he goes on to affirm that his derelictions had had the effect of settling his character. Most true, he had wounded his self-esteem, abused his gifts, aggravated his old offences by yielding to seductions of a different kind-which implies that his association with strollers was thought as great a stigma as his previous connection with poachers; and, to crown all, he had "looked on truth askance and strangely." But he solemnly avers that these excesses had brought about a beneficial, instead of an injurious result-" these blenches gave my heart another youth;" while, as regarded Anne herself, his worst trespass had only proved that she was his "best of love." All was now over; he would impose no further trial on her affection and patience; but remain hers for ever : "Then give me welcome, next my heaven the best, 1 Sonnet cx. Fanciful though they are, and seldom to be taken in a literal sense, his sonnets testify that he was ever too ready to blame himself. They unfold to us, sometimes in myths, sometimes in the clearest manner, the secret depths of the kindest, noblest, and truest of hearts. In this instance he kneels at the confessional; and renouncing his errors, and giving a solemn pledge of amendment, claims from his mistress absolution. He urges, indeed, a plea which makes this secure; for he can aver that all his follies and transgressions have never shaken his love for herself. The newspapers lately told us of a Clown in a pantomime triumphantly playing his part, and, at the fall of the curtain, reeling behind the scenes to die. While he had kept the audience in a roar, he was writhing in his last agonies; their acclamations rang in his ear while the death-rattle was in his throat, and he laid down life like a bauble, with the paint on his face and the fool's frippery on his back. Just the contrary result was developed in Shakespeare. This shroud, as it was to him, covered the generation of new vitality-gave his heart another youth. He came out of it, as the worm out of the chrysalis, a different being, and was now conscious of new instincts and a new life. We have said that his flight from Stratford occurred in the spring : "From you have I been absent in the spring." Let us now recapitulate the facts, and we shall see that they bring out a passage of his life. The Lucy note reports that the satiric ballad obliged him to quit Stratford-" at least, for a time," which implies that he was absent but a short period: Aubrey says that he left when he was "about 1 Sonnet xcviii. eighteen "—that is, when he was not quite that age, but close upon it, which would be the end of March; here the sonnet tells us that he was absent in the spring, and another sonnet will presently mention April; the Blackfriars playhouse closed at the end of May, when, as we have seen by a third sonnet, he goes "here and there" as a "motley," which explains what was meant by Green, when he called him an "antic" or clown; and we know positively that he was residing at Stratford in September. Four of the sonnets seem to apply so closely to his separation from Anne Hathaway that we may wonder they have not been so interpreted before. He dates his departure, as we have just said, from "proud-pied April, intimates that he remained away all the summer, and returned about the middle of the "teeming autumn." Here we are brought to the very time when he was certainly in Stratford. The harvest in Warwickshire-"the rich increase" is all gathered in by the commencement of September, and this is the epoch obviously marked in the 97th sonnet. In the 100th sonnet he calls upon his Muse to "return" and, evidently recurring to what has been said about the disparity of their ages, warns his mistress that he will examine whether time has really impaired her beauty, "Rise, restive Muse, my love's sweet face survey, If Time have any wrinkles graven there." No light threat to a maiden of twenty-five, after a separation of four months, passed by her in anxiety and sorrow, but so expressed as rather to take the form of a graceful compliment. Neither biography nor fiction gives us anything comparable to this honest, uncompromising attachment, so ideal 1 Sonnets xcvii to c. "And yet this time removed was summer's time."-Sonnet xcvii. yet so abiding, so romantic yet so real. It exhibits the English heartiness of Shakespeare in its whole breadth. He did not, like Petrarch, cherish a sentimental passion for another man's wife; nor, like Tasso, fall in love with a princess; nor did he shroud the object of his vows in mystery like Ariosto. He loved openly, in his own station, and with no feelings that he could not express. This love was from the beginning his first impression, contracted in his childhood; and, perhaps, cradled in little Anne's arm when he was a prattling infant. Though "handsome and wellshaped," though endowed with every attraction of person and mind, he did not look to marriage as a means of improving his fortune. In love, as in everything else, he thought little of himself; and returning, as it were, from banishment, was proud to win a portionless maiden. The marriage was not traced till 1833, when a bond authorizing the ceremony was discovered by Sir Thomas Philips in the archives of the diocese of Worcester. Previously there was some doubt as to Anne Hathaway, of Shottery, having really been the wife of Shakespeare; for, though reported from the earliest time, the alleged union was apparently refuted by an entry in the parochial register of Stratford, showing that nearly five years before the supposed date of his nuptials-namely, on the 17th January, 1579, Anne Hathaway, of Shottery, married William Wilson, an alderman of Stratford. But the marriage bond from Worcester established the old fact. We are now aware, indeed, that as there were three John Shakespeares living at one time in Stratford, so there were three contemporary Anne Hathaways, and these Warwickshire Graces were all resident in Shottery.1 They were Anne Hathaway, who married William Wilson; Anne Hathaway, entered in the Stratford register as "daughter to Thomas Hathaway ;" and the Anne of our history. |