Digging up the stones and moving the bones of Shakespeare
Maggie O’Farrell’s recently published novel Hamnet, about William Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway and their family, is named after their son, who died aged 11. O’Farrell has attempted to rescue Anne’s reputation from centuries of malicious comment, most of it from male writers. Anne has always got a bad press for marrying Shakespeare when he was only 18, while she was 26 and three months pregnant. Shakespeare has been given all the glory. She, in historic lore, has become a conniving, unattractive wench.
And since Shakespeare spent much of his working life in London, it’s been assumed that he just wanted to get away from her. Evidence? In his will, he left her his ‘second-best bed.’ An insult? Could it have been a little family injoke? Having made enough money in London to buy several houses and a lot of land in Stratford, he returned to live there permanently three years before his death. And on the purely personal level, what must it have been like for Anne to bury her young son, possibly killed by the plague?
The book had to be a novel of course because it takes the combination of research and imagination to fill in the enormous gaps in knowledge about their lives. There are no juicy scandals or stray documents lying around.
In the great comic novel England Their England, the hero comes across a learned article by an A new novel explores the life of the bard’s wife
American professor written ‘in the best vein of scholarship,’ revealing that Shakespeare’s father ‘once sold a bale of hay to a man named Browne and hadn’t been paid for it’. That little joke sums up the desperation some academics feel to dig up something new about Shakespeare’s life.
The known facts show a practical and industrious character, who had three children with his wife before going to London where he was a very successful playwright, actor and theatre manager from about 1590 to 1610. He managed to write, among other things, 37 plays and 154 sonnets, and occasionally got involved as a witness in some court cases, while narrowly avoiding death from the dreaded plague. Although you wonder if he must have had a bit of help getting it all down on paper using just a quill and ink.
There have always been sceptics who, considering his lack of higher education, doubt if he could have written the plays himself. The top candidates are the Earl of Oxford, the statesman/philosopher Francis Bacon, or indeed anybody with a better CV than that jumped up Jack of all trades from Stratford-Upon-Avon, which is how one disgruntled contemporary of Shakespeare described him.
There was talk that the inscription on his tomb, in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford, written by himself, hinted at some buried secret.
‘Blest be the man that spares these stones
And cursed be he that moves my bones.’
A few years ago permission was given to lift the stones and move the bones to see if there was any mystery to be solved. They found nothing new, but his skull was missing, possibly stolen by grave robbers hundreds of years ago.
There’s recently been a great deal of digging into the plays, especially by Joseph Pearce and Clare Asquith, to unearth possible hints about Shakespeare’s religious and political beliefs hidden in the texts.
For students who didn’t care about his politics and were clueless about the plays, AC Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy was once the bible of first reference.
A little ditty from 1926 comments on all that verbal excavation. It imagines Shakespeare’s ghost coming back to do an English exam. ‘The English paper for the year Had several questions on King Lear,
Which Shakespeare answered very badly
Because he hadn’t read his Bradley.’
Bradley was inclined to extend the lives of the characters in the plays beyond the written text, asking questions such as‘ Where was Hamlet at the time of his father’s murder?’ But in her novel, O’Farrell has dug up one jewel. Anne Hathaway was actually Agnes, not Anne. Now that’s the kind of little gem any fact-starved American professor would drool over.
‘They found nothing new, but his skull was missing, possibly stolen by grave robbers’