Those that would have Shakespeare first going to London on foot give him six days to get there. Even by horsepower, it would have been at least a two day journey. It would have been difficult for him to have found time for a four day round trip home again very often with increasing responsibilities in the theatre, acting, writing and becoming a shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and then the King’s Men, in the Curtain Theatre and then The Globe.  While this would have presented obvious difficulties in producing further children, nobody has ever suggested that Anne went to London either.

Prof. Greer pictures Anne as self-sufficient smallholder in Stratford, independent and not missing her absent husband[1]. The Sonnets and a number of anecdotes of Shakespeare in London make it easier to believe in him involved with fair youths, dark ladies and those that frequented the theatres than poignantly missing the wife he left back at home. On the authority of Richard Burbage’s diary there is a story of Shakespeare overhearing Burbage arranging an assignation with a lady but getting in ahead of the actor and, when caught in the act, pointing out that ‘William the Conqueror came before Richard III’. The story is given more credence than such an apparently fanciful story might have been on account of being reported by Burbage.

The Sonnets are not to be accepted as pure autobiography but Katherine Duncan-Jones, among others, provides enough notes on their context and contemporary references to persuade us that they are not entirely fictional either with the thematic progress of the first eighteen addressed to the fair youth, the triangular relationship involving the dark lady, for whose identity there are a number of candidates, and the rival poet. Much of this is thought to have taken place in the 1590’s with Prof. Duncan-Jones finding that Sonnets 1-17 could be from May 1597.

Don Paterson, in his Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets, is in less doubt than anybody,

The question, ‘was Shakespeare gay?’ is so stupid as to be barely worth answering, but for the record: of course he was. Arguably he was a bisexual, of sorts. But for all the wives, mistresses and children I’m not entirely convinced by his heterosexual side. Mostly, his heart just wasn’t in it; when it was, his expressions of heterosexual love are full of self-disgust.

Don need not worry about two of the children he’s crediting Shakespeare with there but his admission of bi-sexuality gives his claim some coherence as well as it substantiating the reason why there weren’t as many children as other families produced. Anthony Burgess is even less forensic by entertaining the possibility on the grounds of him being a theatrical type,

Will would not be shocked by evidence of homosexuality: he may have been inclined to it himself: he was, after all, a member of the theatrical profession.[2]

William and Anne are living largely separate lives, it’s only a matter of when that began. But Shakespeare has taken responsibility for his family at home and continues to invest in property and land in Stratford to retire there eventually, once he’s made his fortune in London. New Place, the second biggest house in Stratford, is purchased in 1597 and he has interests in such commodities as corn and malt. The theatre is only one of his income streams and the extant documentary record of his life, and all his signatures on legal documents, are evidence of considerable business acumen.

Aubrey imagines Shakespeare’s return trips to Stratford being no more than once a year while others fondly see him having enough time for a more regular commute and actually writing plays in Stratford. There is more agreement that if it needs at least one overnight stay to break the journey, he stops at Oxford and stays in the Tavern in Cornmarket Street, run by John Davenant and his wife, Jeanette. Jeanette gives birth to the future dramatist and Poet Laureate, Sir William, in 1606 and, in a less disputable naming after a godparent, names him after Shakespeare.

For some it might seem too far-fetched but Davenant became a writer of some contemporary reputation (for debauchery as well as writing), acquired the Chandos portrait believed in places to be of Shakespeare and eventually claimed that Shakespeare was his real father. The internet can find quotations of anything from 1 in 10 to 1 in 50 children being the subject of misattributed paternity and that likelihood includes all those cases in which nobody notices or suspects otherwise. It is tempting to believe him except that he doesn’t start making the claim until later, and often in the advanced stages of a drinking session, and it looks a bit like a fantasy or a publicity stunt. However, the story does give us the chance to offer Shakespeare an illegitimate son as compensation for the deceased boy, and his sister, that we are suggesting might not have been his. It also makes Jeannette at least a minor candidate for the role of ‘dark lady’.

And while Shakespeare is conducting whichever of the extra-marital affairs one wants to credit him with in London, Oxford or elsewhere, with none of his work indicating that he’s missing her but taken up with other liaisons, Anne might be doing something similar in Stratford. Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s Ulysses is aware of the possibility. Stephen cites Hamlet and Gertrude as evidence of Anne’s faithlessness and,

The conclusive evidence of Ann’s guilt is that for thirty-four years, from the day of the marriage to the day of Shakespeare’s death, there is no news of her except that she had to borrow forty shillings from her father’s shepherd, and that Shakespeare, in his will, left her his second-best bed.                                                  

                                 Harry Blamires, The New Bloomsday Book

Edmond Malone, in 1780, took Sonnet 93 and its,

So shall I live, supposing thou art true,

Like a deceived husband

as a clue to Shakespeare’s extra-marital affairs ‘presupposing hers: she must have provoked it’, as Margreta Da Grazia summarizes it in her essay, Putting Horns on the Bard [3]. References to jealousy in such plays as Othello and The Winter’s Tale are based on unfounded suspicions and are no more relevant than whether Shakespeare’s motive was revenge or not and it’s not at all clear why they would be but the simile comes readily to Shakespeare, possibly some ten years after the event and, going beyond Malone into Sonnet 94, he reflects that,

sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds

when such repairs as those reported in 145 are no longer viable.

Rene Weis, in Shakespeare Revealed, is another open to the idea that,

it is worth considering whether Shakespeare was perhaps sexually betrayed by one of his brothers[4]

and,

that Shakespeare committed adultery while he was in London is scarcely in doubt.

Hamnet Sadler was available, too.

How concerned Shakespeare is about the wife he has left behind and what feelings any such liaisons might arose in him is open to doubt but he could be unconcerned about having Anne for himself, having moved to London without her, while still resenting her perceived disloyalty. While we might be tempted to see him as a feckless absentee husband, it’s also possible to regard him as providing for his family with his accumulating wealth for appearance’s sake even though he knows they are not all his. His ambitions of ‘gentlemanly’ status are well documented. Being such admirers of his work, it is difficult for some to separate out the wonderful writing from the man that wrote it and they are tempted to bestow upon him a kindly, humane nature who can do no wrong but that’s not what George Orwell says in Why I Write, generalizing, one would hope,

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy,

Like many entrepreneurs or impresarios, Shakespeare needed to be in London to make his fortune. Like Bach, Handel and Mozart, he produced sublime work for a living rather than for art’s sake. That doesn’t mean he liked London, from which the stench was still noticeable from twenty miles away and, like the many who have made their profits there, he regarded somewhere else as home. Thus he continues to invest in Stratford with the intention of retiring back there eventually.

[1] Greer, Germaine, Shakespeare’s Wife (Bloomsbury, 2007)

[2] Burgess, Anthony, Shakespeare (Vintage, 1996), 114.

[3] De Grazia, Margreta, Putting Horns on the Bard, How Shakespeare came to be seen as a cuckold  (TLS no. 6264, 21/4/23)

[4] Weis, Rene, Shakespeare Revealed (John Murray, 2007), 275