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Introduction
The tale of how bad-boy William Shakespeare was chased out of Warwickshire for his scurrilous verses only to find immortality on the London stage is enduringly popular, though modern scholars are sceptical at best. The following account comes from Shakespeare scholar and Poet Laureate Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718).
UPON his leaving school, he seems to have given entirely into that way of living which his father proposed to him;* and in order to settle in the world after a family manner, he thought fit to marry while he was yet very young.* His wife was the daughter of one Hathaway, said to have been a substantial yeoman in the neighbourhood of Stratford.
In this kind of settlement he continued for some time, till an extravagance that he was guilty of forced him both out of his country, and that way of living which he had taken up; and though it seemed at first to be a blemish upon his good manners, and a misfortune to him, yet it afterwards happily proved the occasion of exerting one of the greatest geniuses that ever was known in dramatic poetry.
William is held to have studied at King’s New School in Stratford, a free Grammar School founded in 1553. William’s father John was a prosperous glover (glove-manufacturer).
William was eighteen, and Anne Hathaway was twenty-six; the marriage licence was issued on November 27th, 1582, and the first of the couple’s three children, Susannah, was born six months afterwards, which was neither unusual nor scandalous at the time. Anne’s father Richard was a yeoman farmer; his chocolate-box thatched farmhouse in Shottery near Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire is now a tourist attraction. There was until recently a fashion for portraying their relationship as dysfunctional, largely because of William’s famous Will leaving Anne his ‘second-best bed’, but he seems to have returned from London every year to spend time with Anne, and after retiring from the stage in 1613 he lived with her until his death three years later. Susannah was a likely recipient of his ‘best bed’.
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