A Shakespearean Ghost Story Part 2: Anne Hath a Way

Scylla & CharybdisStephen DedalusWomen of Ulysses

Oct 14

“In fact, it could be argued that versions of Anne Hathaway are always constructed in connection with Shakespeare, and that the ways she is depicted are designed to produce a particular 'Shakespeare' rather than an independent portrayal of Hathaway as an early modern woman…” - Katherine Scheil
“Anyone steeped in western literary culture must wonder why any woman of spirit would want to be a wife. At best a wife should be invisible, like the wives of nearly all the great authors schoolboys used to read at school…. The wives who are remembered are those who are vilified, like Socrates' Xanthippe and Aristotle's Phyllis. Until our own time, history focussed on man the achiever; the higher the achiever the more likely it was that the woman who slept in his bed would be judged unworthy of his company.” - Germaine Greer

This is part two of a two part series about searching for real-life “ghosts” by prying into Shakespeare's personal life. You can read part one here.

In “Scylla and Charybdis”, Ulysses’ ninth episode, Stephen Dedalus’ idiosyncratic theory of Hamlet leans heavily on the purported influence of William Shakespeare’s wife, Anne. The portrait painted by our young Artist is not a flattering one: Anne Shakespeare, née Hathaway, is characterized as “a boldfaced Stratford wench” who had “overborne in a cornfield” Will when he was a tender 18 and she a haggard and ancient 26. While our Will was away making his Art in London, Anne fucked her way through Stratford, cuckolding and humiliating our sensitive Genius. Distraught and disgusted with his personal “guilty queen” Gertrude, Will exacted his revenge against her in his plays and sonnets, unable to forgive her rotten betrayal. In the end, he even slighted her in his will, bequeathing his wife nothing but his second best bed.

There has been no shortage of analyses of Will and Anne’s marriage in the last four centuries, including two separate fiction stories in which Anne helps Will conceal a murder. The information available about the homelife of the Shakespeares is nonexistent, often gleaned from surviving legal documents like wills and records of death, birth, and baptism. For instance, there isn’t even an extant marriage certificate for Anne and Will. This information vacuum has left ample room for Shakespeare’s fans’ imaginations to run rampant. Anne has often been portrayed in both fiction and non-fiction accounts as Stephen has in “Scylla and Charybdis” - as a conniving and sex-hungry harpy hellbent on her husband’s destruction. In order to examine this claim, it is important to reiterate that there is no hard evidence for Stephen’s version of Anne. Unlike with 20th century authors like James Joyce, we don’t have access to the Shakespeares’ correspondence or diaries. We have only the plays and the sonnets. Anyone prying into the life of the Shakespeares too carelessly is possibly crafting nothing more than high-falutin’ fan fiction.

I suspect that the historic suspicion of Anne is due in large part to the biases held by the authors who have written about her (just as we have seen in our discussion of Hamnet Shakespeare). Because Anne seems undesirable to these commentators, she must have also been wretched to Will. The Shakespeares’ age gap has led to Anne being characterized as a rapacious cradle robber - Will was 18 and Anne was 26 when they wed. Why would the most brilliant writer who ever lived subject himself to such a crone?? Some basic math will tell us that Anne was pregnant with their daughter Susanna at the time of their wedding, so was Will the victim of a shotgun marriage, maybe orchestrated by a calculating Anne to lock down the best man in Stratford??? We can easily imagine the swarm of emotions the couple must have felt in this situation, but in order to consider this matter as objectively as we can, we must acknowledge that we simply don’t know how they felt. It’s as likely that they loved one another at the time of their marriage as hated one another. Given the pragmatic attitudes toward marriage in rural 16th century England, they may have simply felt duty-bound.

Stephen Dedalus certainly has a theory about Anne and Will’s courtship:

“That memory, Venus and Adonis, lay in the bedchamber of every light-of-love in London.… Do you think the writer of Antony and Cleopatra, a passionate pilgrim, had his eyes in the back of his head that he chose the ugliest doxy in all Warwickshire to lie withal? … He chose badly? He was chosen, it seems to me. If others have their will Ann hath a way. By cock, she was to blame. She put the comether on him, sweet and twentysix. The greyeyed goddess who bends over the boy Adonis, stooping to conquer, as prologue to the swelling act, is a boldfaced Stratford wench who tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger than herself.”

Stephen suspects Anne and Will’s relationship was the inspiration for Shakespeare’s poem “Venus and Adonis,” in which the titular “greyeyed goddess” forces herself on the young, beautiful, and chaste hunter Adonis. At the tragic conclusion of Venus’ attempted seduction, she declares that love shall henceforth be “fickle, false and full of fraud,” among other things. Could this is be the poetry of someone intensely disillusioned by their own unfortunate love life?

Maybe, maybe not.

“Venus and Adonis” does tell the story of a wild, lusty woman wearing down the youthful object of her affections, though Don Gifford and Robert Seidman’s Ulysses Annotated points out the power imbalance in the poem has more to do with Venus’ immortality rather than her age. Shakespeare wrote lots of love stories and sonnets in which a couple are madly in love and end up happily ever after. Why couldn’t the comedies have been inspired by Shakespeare’s youth as well?

We can’t blame Stephen for originating this unfair portrayal; hating the wives of famous men isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. Gifford and Seidman refer to a quote from the 1909 book The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life Story by Frank Harris (who is mentioned by name in “Scylla and Charybdis” and described by Lyster as “brilliant”):

“Young Shakespeare… was probably a little ashamed of being married to someone whom he could hardly introduce or avow.”

From this single sentence, we can see that Harris is heavily editorializing, and it seems, projecting his own insecurities onto the Shakespeares’ marriage. So, what do we actually-actually know about Anne and Will? The definitive biography of Anne is Germaine Greer’s 2007 biography, Shakespeare’s Wife in which Greer analyzes not only the facts of the couple’s life, but also places their marriage in the wider cultural context of rural 16th-century England. According to Greer, Anne was quite the catch at the time of the Shakespeares’ nuptials, while Will was anything but. Both came from prominent families in Stratford; Anne was a farmer’s daughter raised in the countryside while Will was a townie and the eldest son of a glover. At the time of their marriage, Will’s father had fallen on hard times after a series of disastrous business decisions, while Anne was sitting on a comfortable inheritance that would kick in once she had wed. It’s hard to imagine Anne beating Will into submission in this scenario, squandering her inheritance on a disgraced glover’s son just because. At the age of 18, Will, though well educated, had learned no trade and had no prospects. Greer imagines that Will must have been extremely charming and sweet with his words to gain Anne’s favor. Imagine being wooed by William Shakespeare, even in his awkward teen years.

And what of the notorious age gap? Greer posits that Will would have been the weirdo in their pairing as he would have been way too young to marry by the standards of the day. It was unusual for a younger man to wed an older woman, but not exactly scandalous. Despite what we assume about people in the past, the average age for a woman to marry in the late 1500’s was in her mid-twenties. Citing the work of historian Peter Laslett, Greer explains:

“Further research has come up with a mean age at marriage of twenty-six of -seven for early modern Englishwomen and twenty-eight for men. What was remarkable about Ann Hathaway’s wedding is not that at twenty-six she was so old, but that her husband was so young. As Laslett’s researchers found of their original thousand cases, ‘Only ten men married below the age of 20, two of them at 18, and the most common age was 24….”

On top of this, while there is evidence that their wedding came a little more hastily than what was customary due to Anne’s pregnancy, the couple didn’t exactly elope. The couple still needed the approval of family members in order to have a proper marriage ceremony, as well as pay a hefty fee to secure the proper documentation. They couldn’t exactly fly to Vegas and get married by Elvis in those days. Case in point, the Shakespeares’ younger daughter Judith was excommunicated because she and her husband failed to secure the proper dispensation to wed during Lent. Greer states:

“Ann did not need to argue her case to anyone; she was a spinster and at her own disposal, but only misogyny would assume on the available evidence that she was pushing for the marriage and Will was resisting.”

An illustration of Shakespeare's family life, c. 1890, George Edward Perine

Anne hasn’t only been used as a symbol of feminine iniquity over the centuries; she has also been elevated as a symbol of a morally righteous, domesticated Shakespeare. Katherine Scheil writes in her article “The Second Best Bed and the Legacy of Anne Hathaway” that Anne’s association with the “secondbest bed” supports both sides of a dual identity for Anne, as a bed is both a domestic and sexual object. We’ve already covered Shakespeare-worship (or bardolatry) and the potency of Shakespeare as imperial propaganda in previous post. One way in which these phenomena manifested in the 19th century was through tourism. Anne’s childhood home was purchased by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and opened to visitors in the 1890’s. At that time, it was used to craft an image of domestic Shakespearean bliss straight out of a Plumtree’s Potted Meat ad. Never mind that Will never lived there himself, or that Anne didn’t live there after she was married, or that Will spent much of his adult life living separately from his wife. If Will became a “sober and domestic Bard” as Scheil puts it, then Anne could project the Victorian ideals of domesticity and femininity. The current (October 2024) Shakespeare Birthplace Trust website emphasizes romance rather than domesticity, describing Anne Hathaway’s Cottage as a place where visitors can “relive Shakespeare’s love story.”

Turning back to Ulysses, the dichotomy of morality and corruption grafted onto Anne is baked into the DNA of “Scylla and Charybdis,” reinforced by the symbols of London and Stratford in the schemata for the episode. Stratford represents a prelapsarian innocence in the mythos of William Shakespeare’s youth, whereas London represents the temptation and debauchery of the big city. Of course, tasting the forbidden fruits of London allowed Will to become the most celebrated writer in history of the English language, but in doing so he had to abandon the moral purity afforded by an idyllic rural existence. Some incident must have occurred in this English Eden to push Will out of the Garden, so to speak. The implication is that it must have been something Anne did. Returning to our Venus and Adonis analogy, it is implied she committed some kind of sexual crime (Original Sin) against Will, robbing him of his innocence in the process and shattering their domestic bliss. The “why” of this depends on who’s imagining it. In many portrayals, Anne is jealous of Will’s devotion to his career over herself and seeks to sabotage or distract him in some way or other, putting the Greatest Plays of All Time into jeopardy with her fickle, womanly wiles. I suppose we’re meant to be awed as Will overcomes her cunning to heroically write Henry V or whatever. Stephen is not exempt from this misogynistic portrayal of Anne. Though she is beautiful like Venus, she woos Will with unfeminine power and aggression. Refer once more to this passage:

“Do you think the writer of Antony and Cleopatra, a passionate pilgrim, had his eyes in the back of his head that he chose the ugliest doxy in all Warwickshire to lie withal? … He chose badly? He was chosen, it seems to me. If others have their will Ann hath a way. By cock, she was to blame. She put the comether on him, sweet and twentysix.”

Suffice it to say, Stephen is fairly far off the mark here. This a Deaseyan or Crawfordian level of bad analysis. But as with Deasy and Crawford, there is something to be gleaned from Stephen’s inaccuracies. We should keep in mind that unlike those two old men, when pressed, Stephen admits he doesn’t believe his Shakespeare theory. Stephen’s theory, and Ulysses as a whole, is not meant as a strictly non-fictional history lesson. We can learn very little about Shakespeare from listening to Stephen, true, but we can learn a lot about Ulysses, which is the book we’ve chosen to read at the end of the day.

James Michels, in his article “Scylla and Charybdis”: Revenge in James Joyce’s “Ulysses”, thinks our dear egdelord Stephen is intentionally scandalizing the Library men with his overly sexualized interpretation of Shakespeare’s life and work. Æ squirms at the mere idea of looking at Shakespeare’s biography, so Stephen lays on the smut with a trowel and “smothers them in images of sexuality” and “Elizabethan rut” as they are “chaste mystics, all presumably artists.” John Eglinton had a much older wife himself, and Æ had a distant relationship with his wife. Best and Eglinton’s personal idiosyncrasies had people in their own era questioning both men’s sexualities.

Stephen may feel that he cannot directly attack these prominent men, but he can at least snipe at them with a virtuoso-like passive aggression. He has a fairly deep antipathy for these men, feeling frustrated that they’ve largely excluded him from their literary social circle (but have the gall to invite Mulligan to George Moore’s house that very night!) and that they have totally failed to appreciate him as a burgeoning artist while at the same time elevating other subpar work. Stephen has also begun to turn his mind towards leaving Ireland altogether and thus is willing to burn his bridges with these literary hotshots. . His choice not to return to the Martello Tower with Mulligan and his fixation on his time in Paris communicate this sea change, even if Stephen doesn’t consciously speak it aloud.

Another reason that Stephen/Joyce bombards us readers with all this distorted and unfactual Shakespeare biography is that he isn’t communicating to us about Shakespeare at all, but rather about the Blooms. It’s paramount that our Joycean Shakespare be metempsychotically and hypostatically linked to our Joycean Odysseus, Leopold Bloom. To support this pattern of correspondence, Shakespeare must have a lost heir and an unfaithful wife. In fact, Stephen’s Shakespeare theory can only be totally nonsensical to anyone who doesn’t know the intimate details of the Blooms’ marital troubles - which is everyone present in the Library including Stephen.

But not to us, dear reader!

To gain clarity here we must look to Shakespeare’s sonnets. First of all, Stephen’s pun, “If others have their will Ann hath a way,” has its origin in Sonnet 135, which reads:

“Whoever hath her wish,
thou hast thy Will.”

The sonnets open a more direct Joycean link between Shakespeare and The Odyssey, as described by scholar Dieter Fuchs in the book Joyce/Shakespeare (a good read, though lacking the literary slashfic advertised by the title). Fuchs’ interpretation centers on the unsolved mystery of the identity of the Dark Lady of the sonnets, an unnamed woman who is the object of the attention of two competing men, the Fair Youth and probably Shakespeare. Folks have been speculating for hundreds of years who the Dark Lady might have been, and you’ll be excited to learn that there is a Joycean angle. In Sonnet 130, the Dark Lady is described as having hair like “black wires” and “eyes [that] are nothing like the sun.” But who might she be? From Stephen:

“...his dainty birdsnies, lady Penelope Rich, a clean quality woman is suited for a player, and the punks of the bankside, a penny a time.”

This line comes at the end of a wacky tale of William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage’s partner-swapping hijinks, and it pulls Penelope Rich into the text of Ulysses for a second time. Rich was a famous Elizabethan adultress and a candidate for the identity of the Dark Lady (though not the most popular). Penelope Rich was “ravenhaired” and had eyes “darkly bright as love’s own star.” Introducing a dark-featured Penelope into the narrative allows Molly Bloom to become our Joycean Dark Lady. In the same paragraph above, Stephen also invokes the legendary beauty of “poor Penelope” of Homer, that particular epithet contrasting the virtuous, Strafordian Penelope with the horny, Londonian Penelope. Stephen also notes:

“Twenty years [Shakespeare] dallied there between conjugial love and its chaste delights and scortatory love and its foul pleasures.”

Note that Shakespeare, in Stephen’s telling, dallied for twenty years away from Stratfordian “conjugial” love, just as Odysseus dallied for twenty years on Calypso’s island away from his Ithacan “conjugial” love. Odysseus’ virtuous Penelope waited for him, fending off suitors left and right, while Shakespeare’s Anne-Penelope-Molly made him a cuckold according to Stephen, making this Shakespeare more like Leopold Bloom and less like Odysseus.

Over in the sonnets, a handsome and cocksure Fair Youth is eventually seduced by the Dark Lady, betraying Shakespeare. Anne-Penelope-Molly also takes up with a “Fair Youth” of sorts in the form of Blazes Boylan. Though the power balance between Molly and Boylan is inverted with Fair Youth-Boylan as seducer, and Bloom and Boylan’s non-relationship lacks the homoeroticism of the Fair Youth sonnets, that’s okay. Ulysses’ Homeric-Shakespearean parallels are often sideways versions of their originals, eroded and subverted through the ceaseless cycles of metempsychosis. It’s through this metaphysical process that so many correspondence images can be coiled up within Ulysses’ characters.

This returns us to the issue of the secondbest bed, which real-life Shakespeare did indeed bequeath to his wife Anne in his 1616 will:

“He was a rich country gentleman, Stephen said, with a coat of arms and landed estate at Stratford and a house in Ireland yard, a capitalist shareholder, a bill promoter, a tithefarmer. Why did he not leave her his best bed if he wished her to snore away the rest of her nights in peace?”

The implication in Stephen’s telling is that this was done as a slight against a long-despised spouse and abuser, though the real-life reasoning may have been far more complex. Shakespeare’s older daughter Susanna, who was also the executor of Will’s will, got the lion’s share of the inheritance, while Anne and their younger daughter Judith got far less. Greer and the National Archive of the United Kingdom state that it’s likely that Anne, as Will’s widow, was entitled to a substantial inheritance outside what was directly stated in his will. It was customary at the time to leave a larger inheritance to one’s children than one’s surviving spouse. It was also customary to reserve a home’s best bed for guests, so it’s possible the secondbest bed was indeed the Shakespeares’ marriage bed. Such furniture was quite valuable by the standards of the period, so there is no reason to think that Will’s final bequests to Anne were meant as a snub.

Fuchs demonstrates that the emphasis on the secondbest bed in Ulysses acts as another Homeric-Shakespearean connection. When Odysseus returns to Ithaca after his twenty-year absence, Penelope uses their bed to prove his identity. Their marital bed was carved by Odysseus himself out of an olive tree still rooted in the earth. Penelope cleverly asks a servant to move this bed out for their guest, and Odysseus says he is shocked to learn that she had changed their bed, convincing Penelope of his identity since only Odysseus would know such an intimate detail. Their immovable bed, as Fuchs describes it, “the best marriage bed ever made,” stands as a powerful symbol for Penelope’s fidelity.

Odysseus and Penelope’s bed contrasts strongly with both the Shakespeares’ bed and the Blooms’ bed. The Shakespeares’ bed stands as a symbol of a fractured union rather than unending loyalty, and the Blooms’ bed is anything but immovable or original. From “Calypso”:

“He heard then a warm heavy sigh, softer, as she turned over and the loose brass quoits of the bedstead jingled. Must get those settled really.”

In addition to the jingly-jangly nature of the Blooms’ secondhand bed, Bloom gets a nasty bump on the head in “Ithaca” because Dark Lady-Molly and Fair Youth-Boylan had rearranged the furniture in the Bloom’s home to accommodate their singing practice in complete opposition to Odysseus and Penelope’s steadfast bed.

If Leopold Bloom is the metempsychotic reincarnation of Shakespeare, then where does that leave Stephen? Well, he is also the metempsychotic reincarnation of Shakespeare, of course. This is possible through hypostasis. In religious terms, hypostasis refers to the union of Father and Son, sans Holy Spirit. Throughout Ulysses, Bloom and Stephen reveal a mysterious hypostatic union of their own, which ultimately grants Stephen a suitable father figure and Bloom the son he longs for. This union is strengthened through their shared metempsychotic bond with Shakespeare, much in the same way they share a metempsychotic bond with James Joyce. As with Joyce, Stephen and Bloom represent a bifurcated Shakespeare. While Bloom has inherited a version of Shakespeare’s troubled marriage, Stephen inherits the soul of an exiled artist. A literary hypostasis for the ages! This is more or less what makes Stephen’s Shakespeare theory “work” while at the same time being incoherent to anyone not equipped with this information (which, again, includes Stephen Dedalus). It allows Shakespeare to be both father and son at the same time in the form of Ghost and Hamlet, Bloom and Stephen. It also allows James Joyce to be metempsychotically descended from Shakespeare, via his fictional characters. Thus, I’ve proved through algebra that James Joyce is actually Shakespeare.

Aligning Shakespeare with Stephen’s own life trajectory also allows Stephen to imagine a future in which he is also a great artist. In Stephen’s telling of Shakespeare’s life, the great Bard is dispossessed of his home in Stratford (Dublin in this analogy) and must seek exile in the dangerous wilds of London (Paris in this analogy). He must suffer the isolation of exile and overcome his enemies in order to fulfill his creative destiny. Thus, Stephen’s self conception requires Shakespeare to have drawn on his own life experience for artistic inspiration as Stephen/Joyce has done. Like Stephen/Joyce, he must be incapable of letting go of the offenses done to him, as his bottomless memory must play a major role in his creative process. This allows Stephen/Joyce to rise to a level of greatness equal to Shakespeare, a greatness denied him by Eglinton in opening paragraphs of “Scylla and “Charybdis”:

“—Our young Irish bards, John Eglinton censured, have yet to create a figure which the world will set beside Saxon Shakespeare’s Hamlet …”

The most amazing part of all of this is not that Joyce thought this or even wrote it into his baldly semi-autobiographical novel, but that he actually pulled it off!

A Shakespearean Ghost Story Part 2: Anne Hath a Way

Further Reading:

Decoding Dedalus: Entelechy, Form of Forms

A Shakespearean Ghoststory Part 1: Hamnet Shakespeare