Shakespeare's Wife by Germaine Greer

knows that the writer is ‘young Orlando’. Jaques too decries his attempts: ‘I pray you mar no more trees with writing love-songs in their barks.’ And Orlando, like a shrewish boy, snaps back: ‘I pray you mar no more of my verses with reading them ill-favouredly’ (III. ii. 255–6). In Jaques’s famous description of the seven stages in the life of man, the lover, ‘Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress’ eyebrow’ comes directly after the schoolboy, which would suggest someone rather younger than eighteen. Commentators on Shakespeare’s life have tended to assume that there was no time for a proper courtship, because Shakespeare was so young when he was married, but he could have been making a nuisance of himself and disfiguring the trees round Shottery for years before Ann finally stooped to his lure. Elizabethans recognised no interim period between child and adult; there was no concept of adolescence or of teenage. According to Roger Ascham: ‘from seven to seventeen, young gentlemen commonly be carefully enough brought up: But from seventeen to seven and twenty (the most dangerous time of all in a man’s life and most slippery to stay well in) they have commonly the rein of all license in their own hand…’. 9
    Ann’s could have been the crime of cradle-snatching as described in The Golden Book of Christian Matrimony : ‘When a wicked subtle and shameless woman enticeth an ignorant young man from his father, which with great expenses, travail and labour hath brought him up, when she blindeth him with love and at the last getteth him away under the title of marriage.’ 10 If Will Shakespeare had been a young man with prospects there might have been some point in entrapping him, but he wasn’t. The family’s disgrace was known to everyone inStratford even before John Shakespeare became involved in a violent quarrel with four of his neighbours, against whom he was forced to take out an injunction ‘for fear of death and mutilation of his limbs’. Will was certainly young and witty, possibly handsome, but he had nothing else to offer the kind of girl who, as a sober, industrious, patient, frugal wife, would help him repair his family’s ruined fortunes. Perhaps Will was like Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice , a gambler in love, risking his whole future on winning a wife. And perhaps the quiet woman of Hewlands Farm was like the doyenne of Belmont, constrained by her dead father’s will to seek a better match than a penniless boy. Bassanio is worse than penniless; after squandering his own fortune he has entered over ears in debt.
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    â€™Tis not unknown to you, Antonio,
    How much I have disabled mine estate,
    By something showing a more swelling port
    Than my faint means would grant continuance.
    Nor do I now make moan to be abridged
    From such a noble rate, but my chief care
    Is to come fairly off from the great debts
    Wherein my time (something too prodigal)
    Hath left me gaged. To you Antonio
    I owe the most in money and in love,
    And from your love I have a warranty
    To unburthen all my plots and purposes
    How to get clear of all the debts I owe. (I. i. 122–34)
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    In case we have not quite grasped the nature of the case, he reiterates:
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    I owe you much, and (like a wilful youth)
    That which I owe is lost…(146–7)
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    Shakespeare, of course, was ‘a wilful youth’. Bassanio gambles, and he wins the prize, the mistress of Belmont, who seems a great deal wiser and more mature than he is himself.
    â€˜Hanging and wiving go by destiny,’ according to the proverb, but, unlike Portia’s father, Elizabethans were not content to leave such animportant matter to luck. To make a difficult matter more difficult a sea-change was happening in the basic concepts that ruled wedding and wiving, as we can see from the case of Mary Darrell and the clergyman-poet