Anne Hathaway (wife of Shakespeare)

• 1. Introduction

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  Anne Shakespeare, better known as Anne Hathaway, received only one bequest in her husband's will: his "second-best bed with the furniture". She outlived the playwright William Shakespeare by seven years. Yet the surviving record of her life is almost empty. A few legal documents mention her, and one stray line appears in a shepherd's will. Writers have been filling that silence ever since. Was the bed an insult or a keepsake? Did a reluctant bridegroom get trapped into marriage, or was he the one who did the chasing? And what do centuries of retelling reveal about the people who imagined her?

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• 2. Shottery Farmhouse

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  Shottery sits just west of Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, and Anne is believed to have grown up there. She is assumed to have lived in the Hathaway family farmhouse, which is now a major tourist attraction for the village. Many people call it a cottage, but it is a spacious farmhouse with twelve rooms, several bedrooms and extensive gardens.

  In Shakespeare's day the property was known as Hewlands Farm, and more than 90 acres of land came with it. Its multiple chimneys spread winter heat evenly through the house, and the largest one served for cooking. Visible timber framing marks the building as vernacular Tudor architecture.

  Anne's brother Bartholomew came to own the farmhouse, and it passed down the Hathaway family until 1846. Financial problems then forced a sale. Today the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust owns and manages it as a museum open to visitors.

  Anne's father, Richard Hathaway, was a yeoman farmer who died in September 1581. His will left his daughter ten marks, or £6 13s 4d (six pounds, thirteen shillings and fourpence). She was to receive it "at the day of her marriage". The same document gives her first name as Agnes, so some scholars argue that she should be called Agnes Hathaway.

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• 3. A Hasty Wedding

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  In November 1582, most likely on the 28th, Anne married William Shakespeare. She was 26 and he was 18, and she was already pregnant. The baby arrived six months later. Samuel Schoenbaum and others assumed she was old for an Elizabethan bride. In fact, women of her time commonly married in their 20s. It was Shakespeare who was young for a groom.

  Some historians have read the age gap and the pregnancy as signs of a "shotgun wedding", forced on a reluctant Shakespeare by her family. No other evidence supports that inference. For a while, documents from the Episcopal Register at Worcester seemed to back it up. They record, in Latin, a wedding licence for "William Shakespeare" and one "Anne Whateley" of Temple Grafton.

  The following day, two Stratford friends of the Hathaway family, Fulk Sandells and John Richardson, signed a surety of £40. It guaranteed the wedding of "William Shagspere and Anne Hathwey". In 1909, Frank Harris argued in The Man Shakespeare that these papers show Shakespeare involved with two women. In his telling, the Hathaway family forced him to marry the pregnant one. Harris believed that "Shakespeare's loathing for his wife was measureless". Stanley Wells, writing in the Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, reports that most modern scholars call the name Whateley "almost certainly the result of clerical error".

  Germaine Greer, in Shakespeare's Wife, turns the forced-marriage story around. She argues that Shakespeare was the pursuer. Orphaned women like Anne often stayed home to look after younger siblings and married in their late twenties. Shakespeare's family had fallen into financial ruin, so he offered a bride few prospects. Anne came from a family in good standing, socially and financially, and would have counted as a catch.

  Greer also points to the surviving records of Stratford and nearby villages in the 1580s. A large number of brides were already pregnant at the altar, and autumn, not spring, was the most common season for weddings. A "handfast" and a pregnancy often came before the legal ceremony. She considers it nearly certain that the two families already knew one another.

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• 4. Family and Absence

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  Susanna was born in 1583, and the twins Hamnet and Judith followed in 1585. At some point between 1585 and 1587, Shakespeare moved to London. Hamnet died at the age of 11, during one of the bubonic plague outbreaks that struck often in those years. He was buried in Stratford-upon-Avon on the 11th of August 1596.

  A shepherd named Thomas Whittington, who had worked for Anne's father, died in 1601. His will holds the only recorded mention of Anne in her lifetime, apart from papers about her marriage and her children's births. He left 40 shillings to "the poor of Stratford" and noted that the money was "in the hand of Anne Shakespeare wife unto Master William Shakespeare". One reading is that Anne borrowed it while short of cash with her husband away. More likely it was "uncollected wages, or savings held in safekeeping", since the will also lists debts of the same amount owed by her brothers.

  John Aubrey reported that Shakespeare returned to Stratford for a period every year, and Anne is assumed to have been based there. Some have inferred that he came to dislike her. No documentation or correspondence supports the claim. In 2025 a new suggestion appeared. A letter addressed to a "Mrs Shakspaire" of "Trinity Lane" surfaced in the binding of a book printed by Richard Field. If it was meant for Anne, she may have lived with her husband in London at some point. Analysts first doubted that it pointed clearly to her, but later work concluded that it probably does.

  In 1607, Susanna married the local doctor John Hall. Their daughter Elizabeth, Anne's granddaughter, was born the following year. When Shakespeare retired from the theatre in 1613, he chose to live in Stratford with his wife rather than in London.

  In February 1616, Judith married Thomas Quiney, a vintner and tavern owner from a good family. She was 31 and he was 27. Shakespeare may have disapproved, because Quiney had got another girl pregnant. Quiney had also failed to obtain the special licence required for a wedding during Lent. As a result, Judith and Thomas were excommunicated on the 12th of March.

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• 5. The Second-Best Bed

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  On the 25th of March 1616, slightly less than a month before Shakespeare died, a series of additions was made to his will. As first drafted, the document did not mention Anne at all. The additions gave her the "second best bed with the furniture". That same day he also changed Judith's share, leaving Quiney out and giving her £300 in her own name. Most of his property went to Susanna and her husband.

  Many readers have taken the bed as a slight, as if Anne were only the second-best person in his private life. Several explanations have been offered. One claims the law entitled a widow to a third of her husband's estate whatever the will said, though that is disputed. Another speculates that her children were expected to support her. Germaine Greer suggests that the arrangements trace back to agreements made when Susanna married Dr Hall. Hall had business ventures with Shakespeare, and the couple were named executors. After Shakespeare's death, they inherited the bulk of the estate and moved into New Place. Greer notes that this would also explain the will's seemingly ungenerous treatment of Judith.

  The National Archives offers another angle. Beds and other furniture were often a wife's only bequest, and customarily the children received the best items. Beds in prosperous households were expensive, sometimes worth as much as a small house. Elizabethan custom also reserved the best bed for guests. If so, Anne's bed may have been the marital bed, and it would not have been meant as an insult. She may also have been financially secure in her own right.

  Stephen Greenblatt, in Will in the World, offers a darker reading. He imagines a dying Shakespeare who "tried to forget his wife and then remembered her with the second-best bed". Shakespeare's gravestone in the chancel of Stratford Church carries a curse in four lines. "Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare, To digg the dust encloased heare." Then: "Bleste be ye man y't spares thes stones, And curst be he y't moves my bones." Greenblatt suggests that Shakespeare feared his bones being thrown into the nearby charnel house. He feared even more that the grave would one day be opened to admit Anne.

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• 6. The Grave Beside His

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  A tradition recorded in 1693 held that Anne "greatly desired" to be buried with her husband. In fact she was laid in a separate grave next to his, in the Church of the Holy Trinity at Stratford-upon-Avon. Her stone reads, "Here lyeth the body of Anne wife of William Shakespeare". It goes on to say that she "departed this life the 6th day of August 1623". It adds that she was "of the age of 67 years".

  A Latin inscription follows, and its English translation is tender. "Breasts, O mother, milk and life thou didst give." The writer cries "Woe is me" and asks "how great a boon shall I give stones?" He would rather pray that "the good angel should move the stone" so that her image might come forth. Scholars believe the inscription was written by John Hall on behalf of his wife Susanna, Anne's daughter. It ends with a plea: "Come quickly, Christ, that my mother, though shut within this tomb may rise again and reach the stars."

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• 7. Puns and Poems

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  Sonnet 145 is one of Shakespeare's poems that may refer to Anne. Its words "hate away" may be a pun on "Hathaway". Stephen Booth suggested that the next words, "And saved my life", could be another pun, on "Anne saved my life". The sonnet stands apart from all the others in the length of its lines. Its fairly simple language and syntax have led some to suggest that it was written much earlier than the more mature sonnets.

  The poem turns on a spoken "I hate" that the beloved softens into something kinder. Its closing couplet reads, "'I hate' from hate away she threw, And saved my life, saying 'not you.'"

  Another poem about Anne has sometimes been ascribed to Shakespeare, but its language and style are not typical of his verse. It is widely attributed to Charles Dibdin, who lived from 1748 to 1814. It may have been written for the Stratford-upon-Avon Shakespeare Festival of 1769. It declares that "Angels must love Anne Hathaway". Its refrain closes on "To be heaven's self Anne hath a way", leaning on the same pun as the sonnet.

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• 8. The Wife-Shaped Void

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  Emma Severn's 1845 novel Anne Hathaway, or, Shakespeare in Love pictured an idealised romance and a happy marriage in an idyllic rural Stratford. Fiction about Anne took off in the 19th century, as Shakespeare became a figure in national and popular culture. William Black's 1884 novel Judith Shakespeare shows her as a conventional, dutiful wife and a worried parent with a wayward daughter.

  By the early 20th century the picture had darkened. Frank Harris's books on Shakespeare's love life had appeared, and people had learned that Anne was pregnant at the wedding. Writers imagined her as a sexually incontinent cradle-snatcher or a calculating shrew. Katherine Scheil calls her a "wife-shaped void". She says modern writers use her as "a canvas for expressing contemporary woman's struggles".

  In James Joyce's Ulysses, the character Stephen Dedalus imagines an adulterous Anne and treats the second-best bed as her punishment. He also puns, "He chose badly? He was chosen, it seems to me. If others have their will Ann hath a way." Hubert Osborne's The Shakespeare Play, from around 1911, shows her as shrewish. Its sequel, The Good Men Do (1917), stages a meeting between the newly widowed Anne and her supposed old rival "Anne Whateley". There she is spiteful.

  William Gibson's play A Cry of Players (1968) portrayed the young couple on Broadway at Lincoln Center, with Frank Langella and Anne Bancroft. Edward Bond's Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death (1973) and the 1978 TV series Will Shakespeare also showed a frosty relationship. The film Shakespeare in Love presents a cold, loveless marriage that Shakespeare must escape to find love in London. Harry Turtledove's alternate-history novel Ruled Britannia (2002) has him win a divorce. The film A Waste of Shame (2005) also shows a loveless pairing.

  Carol Ann Duffy's collection The World's Wife includes a sonnet titled "Anne Hathaway". It takes the bed to be the marriage bed and a memento of love. The speaker recalls "romance and drama" there, unlike the "prose" of the guests' best bed. It ends, "as he held me upon that next best bed". Robert Nye's novel Mrs Shakespeare: the Complete Works poses as Anne's own memoir. BBC radio dramatised it in 1998, with Maggie Steed as Anne. Connie Willis's short story "Winter's Tale" also reads the bed bequest as romantic.

  In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, in the section "The Tempest", Anne and Shakespeare share a tumultuous but affectionate bond. Gaiman suggests she deliberately became pregnant to force the marriage, yet neither seems to regret it. American actress-writer Yvonne Hudson began her solo show Mrs Shakespeare, Will's first and last love in 1989. She takes the positive view of the bed: "it may have been only here that I possessed William." Vern Thiessen's 2005 one-woman play Shakespeare's Will follows Anne on the day of her husband's funeral. Avril Rowland's Mrs Shakespeare (2005) makes her a multi-tasking "superwoman" who runs the home and works with her husband as promoter and performer. Arliss Ryan's 2010 novel The Secret Confessions of Anne Shakespeare presents her as the true author of many plays, a claim first made in 1938.

  On screen, Liza Tarbuck plays Anne in the BBC Two comedy Upstart Crow as a dowdy, uneducated woman much older than Shakespeare, though the marriage is fairly amicable. Judi Dench plays her in the 2018 film All Is True. Martha Howe-Douglas plays her in the comedy film Bill.

  Maggie O'Farrell's 2020 novel Hamnet centres on the boy's death and renames Anne as Agnes Shakespeare. It won the Women's Prize for Fiction that same year. Jessie Buckley plays Agnes in Chloé Zhao's 2025 film adaptation, and her performance earned the Golden Globe and the Academy Award for Best Actress. In 2023 Broken Sleep Books released Anne-thology, a poetry anthology edited by Paul Edmondson, Aaron Kent, Chris Laoutaris and Katherine Scheil. It includes work by Carol Ann Duffy, U. G. Világos, Roger Pringle, John Agard and Imtiaz Dharker. It was named a Guardian Book of the Year and a Daily Telegraph book of the year for 2023.

  The musical & Juliet opened in the West End on the 20th of November 2019, with Cassidy Janson as Anne. It gives her a feminist twist, as a strong-willed, smart woman who managed her daily struggles alone while her husband was absent. Betsy Wolfe played her when the show opened on Broadway on the 17th of November 2022, and Amy Lehpamer played her in Australia. In Hamburg in 2024, Willemijn Verkaik and Sabrina Weckerlin took the German role. The show moves to Stuttgart in autumn 2026, and the actress who will play Anne there has not yet been announced.

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