Anne Hathaway

Anne Hathaway is believed to have grown up in Shottery, a small village just to the west of Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England. She is assumed to have grown up in the farmhouse that was the Hathaway family home, 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 Anne the sum of £6 13s 4d (six pounds, thirteen shillings and fourpence) to be paid "at the day of her marriage".

Wedding
The Hathaway family cottage near Stratford. Hathaway married Shakespeare in November 1582 while pregnant with the couple's first child, to whom she gave birth six months later. Hathaway was 26/27 years of age; Shakespeare was only 18. This age difference, together with Hathaway's antenuptial pregnancy, has been employed by some historians as evidence that it was a "shotgun wedding", forced on a reluctant Shakespeare by the Hathaway family. There is, however, no evidence for this inference.

For a time it was believed that this view could be supported by documents from the Episcopal Register at Worcester, which records in Latin the issuing of a wedding licence to "Wm Shaxpere" and one "Annam Whateley" of Temple Grafton. The day afterwards, Fulk Sandells and John Richardson, friends of the Hathaway family from Stratford, signed a surety of £40 as a financial guarantee for the wedding of "William Shagspere and Anne Hathwey". Frank Harris, in The Man Shakespeare (1909), argued that these documents are evidence that Shakespeare was involved with two women. He had chosen to marry one Anne Whateley, but, when this became known, he was immediately forced by Hathaway's family to marry their pregnant relative. Harris believed that "Shakespeare's loathing for his wife was measureless" because of his entrapment by her, and that this was the spur to his decision to leave Stratford and pursue a career in the theatre.

However, according to Stanley Wells, writing in the Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, most modern scholars take the view that the name Whateley was "almost certainly the result of clerical error".Germaine Greer argues that the age difference between Shakespeare and Hathaway is not evidence that he was forced to marry her, but that he was the one who pursued her. Women such as the orphaned Hathaway often stayed at home to care for younger siblings and married in their late twenties. As a husband Shakespeare offered few prospects; his family had fallen into financial ruin, while Anne, from a family in good standing socially and financially, would have been considered a catch. Furthermore, a "handfast" marriage and pregnancy were frequent precursors to legal marriage at the time. Shakespeare, certainly, was bound to marry Hathaway, having made her pregnant, but there is no reason to assume that this had not always been his intention. It is nearly certain that the respective families of the bride and groom had known one another.

Source article:  wikipedia.org/