Did You Know Anne Hathaway a Long Time Before You Married?

The Question

Did you know Anne Hathaway a long time before you two married?

Shakespeare Answers

Anne was eight when I was born. Her family lived a long mile from Stratford-on-Avon on a 90-acre farm in Shottery. When her mother died as the elder daughter it came to Anne to tend both house and farm. Anne’s disciplines flowered when she became the primary caretaker of our properties once I was situated in London.

We married in 1582, and Anne was pregnant with Susanna, our first-born child. Being only eighteen I had to obtain my father’s permission to marry.

To marry in a church, the building needed to be outside of Stratford-on-Avon. I applied to the Bishop of Worcester for a license to marry after a single reading of the banns. You have no record of the license, but there is a record of the required 40-pound bond. The bond requires two relations, guardians or friends of the couple, to act as sureties, binding themselves that certain conditions, normally four, have been, or would be, met. In June 1582 Richard Hathaway appointed his trusted friends and neighbours Fulk Sandells and John Richardson as supervisors of his will and they now served the family as our sureties.

The bond’s conditions were: firstly, no obstacle to the marriage; secondly, no legal process pending concerning it; thirdly that the groom should not proceed with the marriage without the consent of the bride’s friends or relations; and fourthly, that the groom should have the bishop harmless from any challenges to the marriage which might arise thereafter.

There were no challenges. We were married 34 years. We buried Hamnet, our only son at eleven years of age, in August 1596. In 1597 I purchased New Place. Anne was satisfied with the three-storied, timber-framed brick house, one of the largest dwellings in Stratford-on-Avon. It had ten fireplaces, and five gables. Anne took pride and pleasure in our gardens and orchard along the River Avon. Anne and I lived there 19 years before I died.

After a lengthy time, the original owner bought New Place back from our family, and the house was torn down and replaced. Today the Shakespeare Trust owns both the Anne Hathaway house and the New Place land with its gardens, designed based on my plays.