Free Shakespeare's Wife by Germaine Greer

deal of effort was expended by the Corporation in ridding the town of women of ill repute. When Richard Quiney was sworn in as Bailiff of Stratford in 1592, one of his first acts was to appoint a committee ‘to discover and notify thepresence, with a view to their removal from the borough, of undesirable women’. 10
    The lament of the maiden for whom no husband has been found by parents or friends is a cliché of ballad literature, as for example in I can, I will no longer lie alone (1612–13).
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    â€™Tis my cruel friends have me o’erthrown…
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    What though my parents strive to procure
    That I should a maiden still endure?
    Do they what they will, I must have one.
    I can nor will no longer lie alone. 11
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    At twenty-six Ann Hathaway is thought to have been just such a caricature, desperate for a husband, any husband.
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    A blithe and bonny country lass…
    Sat sighing on the tender grass
    And weeping said, ‘Will none come woo me?’
    A smicker boy, a lither swain…
    That in his love was wanton fain
    with smiling looks came straight unto her.
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    Whenas the wanton wench espied…
    The means to make herself a bride,
    she simpered smooth like bonny bell.
    The swain that saw her squint-eyed kind…
    His arms about her body twined,
    and said ‘Fair lass, how fare ye? Well?’
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    The country-kit said, ‘Well, forsooth…
    But that I have a longing tooth,
    a longing tooth that makes me cry.’
    â€˜Alas,’ said he, ‘What garrs thy grief?’…
    â€˜A wound,’ quoth she, ‘without relief.
    I fear a maid that I shall die.’
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    â€˜If that be all,’ the shepherd said…
    â€˜I’ll make thee wive it, gentle maid,
    and so recure thy malady.’
    Hereon they kissed with many an oath…
    And ’fore God Pan did plight their troth,
    and so to the church apace they hie. 12
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    In this ballad, ‘Coridon’s Song’, by Thomas Lodge, published in England’s Helicon (1600), responsibility for the clapped-up marriage is equally distributed between the needy maid and the opportunistic boy. Post-Victorian commentators are not so even-handed; the presumed mismatch between Ann and Will is seen as entirely down to Ann, who is taken to have been well past her sell-by date, because the received wisdom was that early modern Englishwomen married in their early teens. When Peter Laslett published his ground-breaking work The World We Have Lost in 1965 it contained many surprises, not least of which was the age at which Elizabethans married: ‘We have examined every record we can find…and they all declare that, in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, marriage was rare at these early ages and not as common in the late teens as it is now.’ 13
    What Laslett and the Cambridge Group found when they examined a thousand licences issued by the Diocese of Canterbury between 1619 and 1660 was that the commonest age of brides was twenty-two, and the average mean age even higher, twenty-four. Further research has come up with a mean age at marriage of twenty-six or-seven for early modern Englishwomen and twenty-eight for men. 14 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…’ 15
    The mating of younger men with older women, though unusual, occasioned no outrage in the sixteenth century. Indeed, for apprentices, far from their families, kept on hard rations and often beaten, marrying the master’s widow was the kind of dream-wish that fuelled many ballads and popular romances. 16 In Part II of Thomas Deloney’s The Gentle Craft we find an elaborated tale of the Widow Farmer’s love for William, the most menial of her servants.