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Literary Passion · Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire

Anne Hathaway's Cottage (Shakespeare's courtship)

The thatched farmhouse where the eighteen-year-old Shakespeare courted Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior — and married her three months before their daughter's arrival made the timeline eloquent. The settle by the fire is still called the courting bench.

StatusDocumented history

Datecourtship 1582; married November 1582

The peopleWilliam Shakespeare, Anne Hathaway

The siteAnne Hathaway's Cottage, Cottage Lane, Shottery

Coordinates52.18694, -1.72278 (confidence 5/5)

The story

Almost everything people "know" about Anne Hathaway's marriage is either an insult or a mistake. The hard facts are two documents at Worcester. On 27 November 1582 the Bishop's register recorded a licence for "Willelmum Shaxpere" and "Annam Whateley de Temple Grafton"; the next day, 28 November, two farmers, Fulk Sandells and John Richardson, posted a £40 bond for the marriage of William Shakespeare and "Anne Hathwey of Stratford… maiden," allowing the banns to be read once instead of three times. The "Anne Whateley" of the licence has fuelled a century of romance about a lost first love, but the scholarly consensus (following J. W. Gray) is that it was a clerical error by a careless clerk — no evidence has ever surfaced that Anne Whateley existed.

The hurry was because Anne, aged 26, was pregnant; William was 18. Their daughter Susanna was baptised on 26 May 1583, about six months after the wedding, so Anne was roughly three months pregnant at the altar. Far from a scandal, this was ordinary: in Elizabethan Warwickshire, as in rural Wales, betrothal was binding, sex often came before the wedding, and the marriage regularised it. The twins Hamnet and Judith followed in 1585, after which Shakespeare spent most of two decades in London.

His will of 1616 famously left Anne "my second best bed with the furniture," long read as an insult. The best modern reading reverses that: the best bed was for guests, the second-best was the marital bed — the intimate one — and Anne was entitled to a widow's third of the estate regardless. Germaine Greer's Shakespeare's Wife (2007) rehabilitated her as a capable, independent woman rather than a discarded one.

The house at Shottery, owned by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust since 1892, has timbers dated to 1463 and housed thirteen generations of Hathaways. Its picturesque garden is a 1920s design; a fire in 1969 caused serious damage, since repaired. Inside is a carved Hathaway bed from Anne's lifetime — which everyone wants to be the second-best bed, and which the Trust honestly admits cannot be proven to be it.

More stories at this spot

The shepherd's will that proves her name

One of the surest pieces of evidence tying "Anne" to Shakespeare is not romantic at all. In 1601 Thomas Whittington, a Shottery shepherd who had worked for Anne's father, left in his will forty shillings "in the hand of Anne Shaxspere wyf unto Mr Wyllyam Shaxspere." A shepherd's bookkeeping, four centuries on, quietly confirms the marriage the poets have argued about ever since.

A garden that never was

The cottage's celebrated flower garden, all colour and mown paths, was largely created in the 1920s on the advice of the horticulturist Ellen Willmott, after a new sewer destroyed the earlier plot. The Elizabethan garden Anne knew would have been strong-smelling herbs, a cabbage patch, and pigs and chickens at the front — practical, pungent and nothing like a postcard.

The courting bench

Guides at the cottage have long pointed out a settle beside the parlour fire as the "courting bench," where William supposedly sat with Anne. There is no proving it, but the Hathaways told the story to visitors for generations. Like the second-best bed, it is a piece of family memory that hardened, over centuries, into a shrine.

Sources

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