History of Anne Hathaway (wife of Shakespeare) in Timeline

September 1581

Anne Hathaway is believed to have grown up in Shottery, a village just to the west of Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. She is assumed to have grown up in the Hathaway family's farmhouse, which is located at Shottery and is now a major tourist attraction for the village. Her father, Richard Hathaway, was a yeoman farmer. He died in September 1581 and left his daughter the sum of ten marks or £6 13s 4d (six pounds, thirteen shillings and fourpence) to be paid "at the day of her marriage".

1582

Anne Shakespeare (née Hathaway; 1556 – 6 August 1623), commonly known as Anne Hathaway and sometimes referred to as Agnes Hathaway (from her father's will), was the wife of William Shakespeare, the English poet, playwright and actor. They were married in 1582, when Hathaway was pregnant at 26 years old and Shakespeare was 18. Some writers, such as Samuel Schoenbaum, have assumed that she was rather old for an Elizabethan bride, but in fact it was normal for her contemporaries to marry in their 20s, although legally they could marry earlier. Shakespeare, on the other hand, was young for an Elizabethan bridegroom.

November 1582

Hathaway married Shakespeare in November 1582, likely November 28, while already pregnant with the couple's first child, to whom she gave birth six months later. The age difference, added to Hathaway's antenuptial pregnancy, has been employed by some historians as evidence that it was a "shotgun wedding", forced on a somewhat reluctant Shakespeare by the Hathaway family. There is, however, no other evidence for this inference.

1583

Three children were born to Hathaway and her husband: Susanna in 1583 and the twins Hamnet and Judith in 1585. Shortly after their birth, in between 1585-1587, Willam Shakespeare moved to London. Hamnet died at 11 years old during one of the frequent outbreaks of the bubonic plague and was buried in Stratford-upon-Avon on 11 August 1596.

1601

Apart from documents related to her marriage and the birth of her children, the only recorded reference to Hathaway in her lifetime is a curious bequest in the will of her father's shepherd, Thomas Whittington, who died in 1601. Whittington left 40 shillings to "the poor of Stratford", adding that the money was "in the hand of Anne Shakespeare wife unto Master William Shakespeare, and is due debt unto me, being paid to mine executor by the said William Shakespeare or his assigns according to the true meaning of this my will." This passage has been interpreted in several different ways. One view is that Whittington may have lent Anne the money, presumably because she was short of cash while her husband was away. More likely, however, it may have been "uncollected wages, or savings held in safekeeping", since the will also lists debts owed to him from her brothers in the same amount.

1607

In 1607, Hathaway's daughter Susanna married the local doctor, John Hall, giving birth to Hathaway's and Shakespeare's granddaughter, Elizabeth, the following year. Judith married Thomas Quiney, who was a vintner and tavern owner from a good family, in February 1616 when she was 31 and he was 27. Shakespeare may later have disapproved of this choice when it was discovered that Quiney had got another girl pregnant; also, Quiney had failed to obtain a special wedding licence needed during Lent, leading to Judith and Thomas being excommunicated on 12 March. Soon afterwards, on 25 March 1616, Shakespeare modified his will for Judith to inherit £300 in her own name, leaving Quiney out of the will and giving most of his property to Susanna and her husband.

1613

It has sometimes been inferred that Shakespeare came to dislike his wife, but there is no existing documentation or correspondence to support this supposition. For most of their married life, he lived in London, writing and performing his plays. However, according to John Aubrey for a period every year he returned to Stratford, where Anne is assumed to have been based. In 2025 it was suggested that Anne may at one point have lived with her husband in London, assuming that she was the recipient of a letter addressed to a "Mrs Shakspaire" known to have lived in "Trinity Lane". (The letter, which surfaced in the binding of a book printed by Richard Field, was not initially deemed to point clearly to Anne, but later analysis suggests that on the balance of probabilities, it likely refers to her). When he retired from the theatre in 1613, he chose to live in Stratford with his wife, rather than in London.

March 1616

However, the will as initially drafted did not mention Anne at all. It was only through a series of additions, made on 25 March 1616, slightly less than a month before Shakespeare died, that the bequest to his wife of his "second best bed with the furniture" was made. Author Stephen Greenblatt, in Will in the World, suggests that as Shakespeare lay dying, "he tried to forget his wife and then remembered her with the second-best bed. And when he thought of the afterlife, the last thing he wanted was to be mingled with the woman he married. There are four lines carved in [Shakespeare's] gravestone in the chancel of Stratford Church: Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare, To digg the dust encloased heare: Bleste be ye man y't spares thes stones, And curst be he y't moves my bones. [Shakespeare may have] feared that his bones would be dug up and thrown in the nearby charnel house ... but he may have feared still more that one day his grave would be opened to let in the body of Anne Shakespeare."

August 1623

A tradition recorded in 1693 is that Hathaway "greatly desired" to be buried with her husband. In fact she was interred in a separate grave next to him in the Church of the Holy Trinity, Stratford-upon-Avon. The inscription states, "Here lyeth the body of Anne wife of William Shakespeare who departed this life the 6th day of August 1623 being of the age of 67 years." A Latin inscription followed which translates as "Breasts, O mother, milk and life thou didst give. Woe is me—for how great a boon shall I give stones? How much rather would I pray that the good angel should move the stone so that, like Christ's body, thine image might come forth! But my prayers are unavailing. Come quickly, Christ, that my mother, though shut within this tomb may rise again and reach the stars." The inscription is believed to have been written by John Hall on behalf of his wife, Anne's daughter, Susanna.

1938

The Secret Confessions of Anne Shakespeare (2010), a novel by Arliss Ryan, also proposes Anne Hathaway as the true author of many of the Shakespeare plays (a claim originally made in 1938 ). In the novel, Anne follows Will to London to support his acting career. As he finds his true calling in writing, Anne's own literary skills flower, leading to a secret collaboration that makes William Shakespeare the foremost playwright in Elizabethan England.

1998

The World's Wife, a collection of poems by Carol Ann Duffy, features a sonnet entitled "Anne Hathaway", based on the passage from Shakespeare's will regarding his "second-best bed". Duffy chooses the view that this would be their marriage bed, and so a memento of their love, not a slight. Anne remembers their lovemaking as a form of "romance and drama", unlike the "prose" written on the best bed used by guests, "I hold him in the casket of my widow's head/ as he held me upon that next best bed". In Robert Nye's novel Mrs Shakespeare: the Complete Works, which purports to be Anne's autobiographical reminiscences, Shakespeare buys the best bed with money given to him by the Earl of Southampton. When Anne comes to London, the couple use the bed for wild sexual adventures, in which they engage in role-playing fantasies based on his plays. He refers to the bed he bequeaths her as "the second best" to remind her of the best bed of their memories. The novel was dramatised for BBC radio in 1998 with Maggie Steed playing Hathaway.

November 2019

Anne Hathaway is portrayed by actress Cassidy Janson in the musical & Juliet. The show opened in the West End on 20 November 2019. The show transferred to Broadway in 2022. It officially opened on 17 November 2022. In the Broadway and Australian production, Anne is portrayed by Betsy Wolfe and Amy Lehpamer, respectively. In the German production, opening in 2024 in Hamburg, she was portrayed by Willemijn Verkaik and Sabrina Weckerlin. The show will transfer to Stuttgart in autumn 2026, it is yet to be announced who will star as Anne in the upcoming production. The play is a modern take on the classical plot of Romeo and Juliet, in which Anne has her own thoughts on her husband's story and gives it a feminist twist. She is portrayed as a strong-willed, smart woman that had to manage her daily struggles on her own, without her absent husband.

2023

A poetry anthology about Anne Hathaway, titled Anne-thology, was released by Broken Sleep Books in 2023, edited by Paul Edmondson, Aaron Kent, Chris Laoutaris, and Katherine Scheil, featuring poetry by poets such as Carol Ann Duffy, U. G. Világos, Roger Pringle, John Agard, and Imtiaz Dharker. Anne-thology was chosen as a Guardian Book of the Year 2023, and a Daily Telegraph book of the year 2023.