Our knowledge of Shakespeare's life mostly takes the form of colorless documents such as are preserved in church registers, licensing offices, land records offices, and the like. We know, for example, that he was baptized on April 26, 1564, at the Church of the Holy Trinity in the market town of Stratford, in Warwickshire, about 100 miles northwest of London. He was the eldest child of John Shakespeare and Mary Arden, and we catch our next glimpse of him when, on November 27, 1582, a marriage license was obtained naming principles William Shakespeare, who was then 18, and Anne Hathaway, who was 26. The young couple's first child, a daughter they named Susanna, was christened six months later, on May 26, 1583. People since time immemorial have been counting months backwards and smiling to themselves upon failing to attain 9, but it has been pointed out that a "shotgun wedding" is not the only possible explanation for the facts—the betrothal, for example, may have occurred well before the license was obtained, and, as Harry Levin tactfully puts it in his introduction to The Riverside Shakespeare, "we may allow the couple the benefit of ceremonies timed more casually in their day than in ours."
Speculation about the marriage has been encouraged further, however, by other factors, including preeminently Shakespeare's will, which grants Anne a single bequest, that of the testator's "second-best bed." Levin, who is determinedly opposed to all drama on this question, comments that Anne "was provided for otherwise through her dower rights." If, though, one remains curious, there is still to consider the day-to-day details of the Shakespeares' married life, for it appears certain that from roughly 1592 to 1612 they lived apart, she remaining in Stratford with the children while he pursued his career in London. A son, Hamnet, was buried at Stratford in 1596, and Shakespeare's rising fortunes in the world are evidenced by a real estate conveyance of 1597 wherein he acquired the title to New Place, "one of the most substantial residences in Stratford," according to Levin. Anne no doubt lived there with the kids. It seems they could not often have seen each other: a hundred miles was a lot farther then than it is now, and in those twenty years he wrote 36 plays, at least a half dozen of which are widely regarded as ranking among the greatest works of the world's literature—and authorship was only one aspect of his career, which included also acting and the gradual accumulation of substantial business interests within the theatrical profession. People with romantic notions have sometimes been put off by the picture of a careful, practical man of affairs pursuing his private interests with avidity. The plays he wrote exhibit a comprehensive mastery of the whole human scene—Dr Johnson famously asserted that a hermit could deduce from Shakespeare's dramas all the world's transactions—and the "many mindedness" with which he has as a consequence been credited appears to have extended to areas outside the theater. I mean to suggest that Shakespeare could have been the sort of high achiever that a wife who disliked the big city and the theater world, and who was left behind in a big house with all the domestic drudgery back in Stratford, might have regarded with considerable resentment and bitterness.
Maybe she was fine with rarely seeing him. Maybe that's part of why he was able to achieve so much. It seems possible, maybe somewhat likely, or at the least consistent with everything we know, that civilization has been enriched considerably by the marital unhappiness of Anne.
After Shakespeare, the next giant of English literature we come to is Milton, and we know a fair amount about his marital history. It wasn't happy. Here is what Robert Adams has to say about it in the headnote to Milton included in The Norton Anthology of English Literature:
Of Milton's complex and troubled career in controversy we need not say much. He began by publishing anti-prelatical tracts, against the government of the church by bishops. These are rough, knockabout, name-calling tracts in the style of the times, which take a popular position on a relatively popular issue. But Milton's next venture procured him a reputation as a radical. In June, 1642, he married Mary Powell. Within six weeks, she left him, to return to her parents' house; and from 1643 to 1645, Milton published a series of pamphlets advocating that divorce be granted on the grounds of incompatibility. Clearly his personal situation had influenced his social judgment; just as clearly, respectable Englishmen, who were disturbed by the troubles of the time, were bound to feel that "divorce at pleasure" represented the end of all social order, the coming of complete anarchy. Milton not only effected no change in the divorce laws, he largely discredited himself by his divorce pamphlets. His last undertaking was more worthy of his gifts. . . .
This account is missing some context, such as the fact that at their marriage Milton was 34 and Mary just 17. Milton, moreover, an educated man of the northern Renaissance, had learned pretty much everything that could be taught in school early in the 17th century—all the math and science, the philosophy, the languages, especially Latin and Greek but also Hebrew, French, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch, as well as the literature of these languages—while Mary was of necessity unlettered, women being afforded no education. On the one hand, you could say that the spouses were too unlike and that the marriage was unwise. On the other, considering Milton's character and background, the prospect of him achieving "a marriage of minds" with anyone was approximately nada. Should a mistake commonly made be a dead weight forever? That Milton's views on the subject were affected by his own experience does not prove them wrong. I've read parts of these divorce tracts, and boy, the 17th-century English prose is a tough slog, but I do not think the argument lacks force, or that Milton "discredited" himself in any way. The government authorities evidently found the divorce tracts cogent enough to merit suppression, thereby eliciting from Milton his most famous essay, the Areopagetica, opposing censorship and arguing ardently for freedom of expression.
The story of his first marriage ends with a kind of dead fall. Neither desertion nor incompatibility was a valid ground for divorce, only adultery, so the marriage did not end, and after three years Mary returned to Milton. They had four children, but the last labor killed Mary. She was 27. Milton soon remarried, surviving his second wife, too, another victim of childbirth. Picking up the story in his anthology headnote, Adams allows himself some grandiloquence:
In 1663, Milton married his third wife, Elizabeth Minshull; and in blindness, poverty, defeat, and relative isolation, set about completing a poem "justifying the ways of God to men," which he had first envisaged many years before. It was published in 1667, as Paradise Lost. . . .
In "A Room of Her Own," Virginia Woolf muses about Shakespeare's sister; I have thought that an alternative subject might have been Milton's first wife, whose travails ended early and without fanfare. Dead wife number 2 was memorialized in a sonnet, "Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint."
"The Life of Milton," by the aforementioned Dr. Johnson, the next century's most eminent man of English letters, may be read with enjoyment, partly on account of his entertainingly plausible suppositions concerning what might have caused Mary Powell to run home and stay away for three years. Johnson, conservative in his politics and a staunch royalist, would have abhorred many of Milton's views, certainly including those expressed in the divorce tracts, and this may have contributed to the animus that rises to the surface in "The Life of Milton." He nevertheless gives Milton his due as an author, though his condemnation of "Lycidas" is infamous, and his praise of Paradise Lost qualified by the immortal observation that "no one ever wished it longer." The lack of human characters leads to a lack of human interest, Johnson thought, and generations of English majors concur. The same could not be said of Boswell's Life of Johnson, a work that I am currently rereading, prudently in the abridged version of Louis Kronenberger that's printed in The Portable Johnson & Boswell. Despite Boswell's boast near the beginning—
I venture to say that [Johnson] will be seen in this work more completely than any man who has ever yet lived
—he is frequently somewhat sketchy about the young Johnson, writing for example
How he employed himself upon his first coming to London is not particularly known
and, a few pages later,
It appears that he was now enlisted by Mr. Cave as a regular coadjutor in his magazine, by which he probably obtained a tolerable livelihood [emphases added].
Johnson was a widower and a pensioner by the time Boswell met him, and the 1200-page bulk of the unabridged Life may be attributed to the detailed notes he had pertaining to the last 21 year's of his subject's life. Information relating to the earlier years had to be filled in from other sources, including Johnson himself, and people are not necessarily the best source for their own histories, not excluding possible marital woe. And Boswell's fogginess includes, I think, the entire topic of Johnson's marriage, about which he (Johnson) seems to have been reticent, a circumstance Boswell attributes to reverential love. The details surrounding the courtship and marriage, however, are redolent of desperation. Johnson had dropped out of university, at Oxford, on account of depression and lack of funds. This set off a period of prolonged scuffling that Boswell acknowledges without emphasizing in the least. His marriage to Elizabeth Porter, a recent widow, occurred when he was 27 and she was 47. Johnson was a huge man, lank and awkward as a youth, fat in his maturity, a shabby dresser, often wearing a wig cocked crookedly on his head, his features marred by scrofula and his bearing punctuated alarmingly by compulsive nervous tics and mutterings such as are often associated with Tourette's, which however he did not have. Read between the lines of Boswell's description of the bride:
Though Mrs. Porter was double the age of Johnson [this was a modest exaggeration], and her person and manner, as described to me by the late Mr. Garrick, were by no means pleasing to others, she must have had a superiority of understanding and talents as she certainly inspired him with a more than ordinary passion; and she having signified her willingness to accept his hand, he went to Lichfield to ask his mother's consent to the marriage; which he could not but be conscious was a very imprudent scheme, both on account of their disparity of years, and her want of fortune. But Mrs. Johnson knew too well the ardour of her son's temper, and was too tender a parent to oppose his inclinations.
Despite her "want of fortune," Elizabeth Porter did come with a dowry of £600, which Johnson used to establish a school with himself as master. The school failed and he soon moved to London, where, notwithstanding Boswell's surmise that "he probably obtained a tolerable livelihood," he actually suffered extreme privations, homelessness and what we now call "food insecurity," so that the question naturally arises: how was Elizabeth occupied during these trials? Here is the only clue supplied by Boswell:
I have, indeed, been told by Mrs. Desmoulins, who, before her marriage, lived for some time with Mrs. Johnson at Hampstead, that she indulged herself in country air and nice living, at an unsuitable expence, while her husband was drudging in the smoke of London, and that she by no means treated him with that complacency which is the most engaging quality in a wife.
Boswell then explains why this account is not to be trusted—it isn't very convincing—before filling out her physical description with more details from Garrick:
[He] described her to me as very fat, with a bosom of more than ordinary protuberance, with swelled cheeks, of a florid red, produced by thick painting, and increased by the liberal use of cordials; flaring and fantastick in her dress, and affected both in her speech and her general behaviour.
In other words, a ridiculous person, probably alcoholic. But Johnson was somewhat ridiculous himself. In his introduction to The Portable Johnson & Boswell, Kronenberger says something that I think is very shrewd. He indicates that for Johnson the idea of marriage was associated with a normal life, something that a person with some claim to being a freak might desperately want, and, his own odd qualities marking down his value in the marriage market, Elizabeth Porter was the best he could do. He got £600, too. One thing is sure: as a mature writer, he took quite a dim view of marriage. His theme of themes, that "human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little is to be enjoyed," is set out in his novella-length fable Rasselas, written in the evenings of a single week in 1759 to defray the expense of his mother's funeral. The work commences bluntly:
Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope, who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow—attend to the history of Rasselas, prince of Abyssinia.
The expectation of a rewarding marriage is one of the phantoms that is briskly dismissed:
Such is the common process of marriage. A youth and maiden meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home, and dream of one another. Having little to divert attention, or diversify thought, they find themselves uneasy when they are apart, and therefore conclude that they shall be happy together. They marry, and discover what nothing but voluntary blindness had before concealed; they wear out life in altercations, and charge nature with cruelty.
When aked his opinion on second marriages, a subject of potential interest to a man who became a widower in midlife, Johnson's answer was that they "represent the triumph of hope over experience."
My concluding word on this subject relates to Thomas Carlyle, the Scotsman who is sometimes regarded as the Victorian era's preeminent author of nonfiction prose. Concerning his marriage to his wife, Jane, a wit commented that it was indeed another of the Almighty's beneficences to bring the Carlyles together, since by marrying they made only themselves miserable, whereas, had they been permitted to marry other people, the contagion would have consumed four lives.