Shakespeare's Wife by Germaine Greer Page B

A Midsummer Night’s Dream , Lysander defends his claim in unambiguous terms:
    Â 
    You have her father’s love, Demetrius.
    Let me have Hermia’s. Do you marry him. (93–4)
    Â 
    He gets his laugh before Egeus snaps back:
    Â 
    Scornful Lysander! True, he hath my love,
    And what is mine, my love shall render him,
    And she is mine, and all my right of her
    I do estate unto Demetrius. (95–8)
    Â 
    This is now serious. Egeus has invoked the law of feme coverte , which explicitly denies a woman’s agency and treats her as a ‘chattel’ or movable possession of her father or husband. Lysander comes back with an argument that church authorities would have understood. All things being equal, there is nothing to choose between Demetrius and him; this being the case the lady should have the casting vote.
    Â 
    I am, my lord, as well derived as he,
    As well possessed. My love is more than his,
    My fortunes every way as fairly ranked…(99–101)
    Â 
    Hermia meanwhile has sounded a new note: she will accept a life of celibacy rather than marry a man to ‘whose unwished yoke [her] soul consents not to give sovereignty’ (81–2). The idea of winning the soul ’s consent by courtship is new; in his response to Hermia, Theseus reinforces the underlying concept of marriage as a spiritual partnership by describing his marriage day as ‘the sealing day’ between his love and him ‘For everlasting bond of fellowship’ (84–5).
    The Googe story ended happily, but the seduction of country girls by wandering poets did not always end so. In Love’s Labour’s Lost , the dairymaid Jaquenetta is described by Costard as ‘a true girl’. It is her misfortune to be seduced by the posturing fool Armado. The child Moth rails against him, to no avail:

    â€¦to jig off a tune at the tongue’s end, canary to it with your feet, humour it with turning up your eyelids, sigh a note and sing a note, sometime through the throat as if you swallowed love with singing love, sometime through the nose as if you snuffed up love by smelling love, with your hat penthouse-like over the shop of your eyes; with your arms crossed on your thin-belly doublet like a rabbit on a spit, or your hands in your pocket, like a man after the old painting, and keep not too long in one tune but a snip and away. These are compliments. These are humours. These betray nice wenches, that would be betrayed without these…(III. i. 9–23)
    Poetry was almost certainly part of Shakespeare’s armamentarium as a lover, and he would surely have deployed it as part of his courtship of Ann Hathaway, but the truth of the matter could be anything but pleasant. It should not be forgotten that, when his gloving business was thriving, John Shakespeare employed women to sew up the gloves, putting together the cut-out skins or ‘tranks’. The thought that the son of the house might have seduced one of the girls working in his father’s workshop may be unattractive but it is a more usual, if less romantic, scenario than the one that has Will waylaying a milkmaid on her way to pasture and chanting woeful ballads to her eyebrow. Women in service have always been vulnerable to the sexual advances of their employers and their sons. The church courts took a particularly dim view of sexual exploitation of servants, because employers and their wives were considered to stand in loco parentis . If it was known in Stratford that Will Shakespeare had made one of his father’s workers pregnant, it would have been more shame to him than to her, and that circumstance alone could explain why his parents did not refuse their consent to his marriage. It would have been the worse for him because she was not a stranger but the daughter of a respected parishioner. The possibility should not be altogether discounted. However, even as early as 1582, John Shakespeare was probably no longer working as a