“It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.”

                                              Alan Bennett, The History Boys

There is much Shakespeare biography written in the subjunctive mood. Readers who prefer to go no further than what is forensically evidenced have Samuel Schoenbaum’s William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life but most biographers prefer to make assumptions, to a greater or lesser extent, to provide a fuller picture based on established facts but then find themselves describing things that weren’t necessarily real.

The date of birth has been traditionally set at 23^rd April, 1564, on account of a record of the baptism on the 26^th, which fits neatly with both St. George’s Day and the more reliable date of his death in 1616 but it also runs the risk of inadvertently making him die on his birthday without having been born on it.

That he would have attended the grammar school on Church Street in Stratford is a safer guess but is without proper corroboration.  The books that accumulate, claiming that the ‘real’ Shakespeare has been made known to us once and for all, all depend on jumping from bare clues to their authors’ vivid imaginings but most of that is what might have been, from the quite likely to the wildly creative. It leaves the field open for all-comers to make their own Shakespeare for themselves. As Prof. Jonathan Bate pointed out in his review of Germaine Greer’s Shakespeare’s Wife, in the Daily Telegraph[1],

One antecedent of this book is Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, in which she created Shakespeare's imaginary sister 'Judith' as a device to explore the lot of the woman writer. But it was also Virginia Woolf who recognised that all Shakespearean biography is veiled autobiography.

It might seem as though every conceivable aspect of Shakespeare biography has been examined and pored over and thus exhausted over the hundreds of years and so it comes as some surprise that it has always been so readily accepted that Hamnet and Judith, the twins born to Anne in January 1585, were named after Hamnet and Judith Sadler, the Stratford friends of the family that have been extrapolated into godparents.

Their role as godparents has been so generally attributed to the Sadlers that it has hardened into an unquestioned fact for many biographers and it has gone unchallenged in the absence of alternative explanations. The Sadlers ran a baker’s shop nearby on the corner of High Street and Sheep Street and eventually named one of their children William. Hamnet is eventually a witness to and beneficiary of Shakespeare’s will to the tune of 26s 8d to buy a mourning ring. But he is never referred to as a godparent or anything more than those references. Hamnet (or Hamlett, or Hamblett) was not a common name and so it’s reasonable to assume that the naming of the boy born to Anne is associated with the local baker. But, as Iachimo observes in Cymbeline,

You may wear her in title yours: but, you know, strange fowl light upon neighbouring ponds. Your ring may be stolen too: so your brace of unprizable estimations; the one is but frail and the other casual;[2]

Not everything that happens or is said in a Shakespeare play can be referenced back to autobiographical detail and Iachimo might not be specifically warning about adultery but he might be saying that you never know what unexpected visitor might trespass on what was thought to be your sphere, like a friend having an affair with your wife. Cymbeline is concerned with such suspicions and the Arden edition, ed. J.M. Nosworthy, notes those lines with,

Iachimo’s precise meaning is obscure but is, presumably, sexual. We may equate the strange fowl with the ‘birds of prey’ in Measure for Measure (II i 2) and the neighbouring ponds may be equivalent to the ‘peculiar river’ in the same play (I ii 91).

Not only does an outsider invade one’s domain but someone takes another’s title in theirs and there is a ‘brace of unprizable estimations’ which is ‘casual’.

While it was once very much the fashion to study the text in the light of Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay, The Death of the Author, the English Literature industry has turned completely round and literary biography wants to find the life in the work and the work in the life. Neither extreme is entirely satisfactory and some of the life is likely to be found in some of the work while the text remains the primary object under enquiry.

It’s possible that Hamnet Sadler was the biological father of the twins, that Shakespeare realized as much and named Hamnet and Judith after their Stratford friends as a permanent reminder. Sadler might have been the father of the twins in just as subjunctive a way as he might have been their godparent.

There are any number of ways in which Shakespeare might have known he was not the father, whether having suspicions confirmed or circumstances that prevailed at the time. The most convincing would have been that he was already in London by April 1584, as John Aubrey ‘guesses’ in his life or, as Prof. E.A. J. Honigman offers in Shakespeare: the Lost Years, in Lancashire. Prof. Honigman dates the ‘lost years’ from 1585, taking the christening of the twins as evidence that Shakespeare was in Stratford then, but the register only records them on 2^nd February as ‘sonne and daughter to William Shakespeare’, not that he was there to witness the occasion.

The first record of Shakespeare in London is not until 1592 when Robert Greene, in his Groatsworth of Wit, bought with a million of repentance, writes,

for there is an vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.

By 1592, Shakespeare would have had eight years to have made his name as a dramatist so renowned as to upset the established writers in the market, the ‘University wits’ who considered it their territory and not that of a provincial newcomer. He might have done it in less but from arrival, to finding work in a theatre, acting in plays, writing his own and then becoming sufficiently well-known for it to provoke this sort of attack would not have been an overnight sensation. While one does need to be born a genius, it is also necessary to serve some sort of apprenticeship and gain an audience before it is widely recognized.

While so much Shakespeare biography is conjecture and supposition, some is more persuasive than some other. While readily accepting that, John Southworth, in Shakespeare, The Player (Sutton, 2000), investigates how he might have gained access to his theatrical career and makes a case for it beginning at the age of 16 when the most likely of the touring companies that visited Stratford that he might have joined are Worcester’s Men who were there in 1580. Southworth also estimates the acting apprenticeship as seven years during which time he would have learned lines from plays by Marlowe and Thomas Kyd, traces of which he forensically finds echoes of in Titus Andronicus, Henry VI, The Taming of the Shrew and Arden of Faversham, for which he gives Shakespeare a co-author credit. This is exactly the period required to be filled to explain the ‘lost years’ and allows him time to become fully conversant with all aspects of playwriting which time spent teaching in Lancashire at Hoghton Tower would not.

While Southworth doesn’t question the parentage of the twins and has Shakespeare back in Stratford in 1584 to provide Anne with further progeny he only does so to facilitate such requirements. It is equally possible that he was on tour and beginning to progress to bigger parts as his acting career, which Southworth regards a success, developed. Very few biographers put Shakespeare’s departure from Stratford as early as 1580-82 and it wasn’t a once-and-for-all leavetaking but not being there in April 1584 would be all the evidence he needed to know that Hamnet and Judith were not his flesh and blood.

In her brilliant Ungentle Shakespeare, Katherine Duncan-Jones attributes the Groatsworth of Wit to Thomas Nashe who used the newly-departed Greene’s name as cover for his attack but, more tellingly, she has Shakespeare with the Queen’s Men by 1589, adding that they picked the best talent from other companies which would have Shakespeare doing an apprenticeship elsewhere before coming to their notice.

Be that as it may, William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, who only Germaine Greer among recent biographers makes a point of calling Anne Shakespeare, produce no more children between them at a time when families were committed to producing sufficient offspring to compensate for the high infant mortality rate. William was one of eight, three of which did not survive into adulthood and the Sadlers proceeded to have fourteen, of which six died in infancy. The  impression gained by some observers of a ‘shotgun’ wedding is given some credence by the appearance at the ceremony of two friends of the Hathaway family, Sandells and Richardson, and the hasty arrangements involving only one reading of the banns. But Sonnet 145, filling in towards the end of the collection organized with several numerological significances, looks like a further glimpse of a less than harmonious union.

145 is the only sonnet written in eight syllable lines and as such has been suggested as ‘early’ work, possibly from 1582. For Don Paterson it is ‘clichéd’, ‘incompetently rhymed’ and ‘tasteless’ and so not comparable with the other 153[3]. The lady has said, ‘I hate’ before changing her mind and Shakespeare makes play with a pun on the name Hathaway,

I ‘hate’ from ‘hate’ away she threw

And saved my life, saying ‘not you’.

Even at this distance, signs of marital or pre-marital discord are readily picked up, the domestic bliss of the fireside chat at the end of the day between David Mitchell and Lisa Tarbuck in Ben Elton’s Upstart Crow using as much licence as the device of having Christopher Marlowe alive and well beyond 1593 and regularly in Stratford. It is no surprise that Anne has no more children, not only in line with the suggestion that difficulties bearing twins might have affected her chances of having more, but also that her husband was away and they might no longer have been so enamoured of each other. Katherine Duncan-Jones suspects that ‘conjugal relations between William and Anne ceased some time in the 1580s’[4]. If she wasn’t allowing the twins to be credited to William, she might have dated it more specifically to April 1584 when the twins were conceived, or even before then.

When Susannah was born in 1583, William and Anne weren’t to know that they would be having twins next that they could name after their friends. Sadler is said to have been a ‘life-long’ friend and likely to have met Shakespeare at school. If they were so keen to make these friends godparents and name their children after them, the first daughter would have been called Judith. Of course, the idea might not have occurred to them at the time and twins might have presented an ideal opportunity to use the pair of names. That the Sadlers subsequently name a child William as late as 1598 doesn’t suggest they made the reciprocal gesture as a priority.  

While all the reasons for thinking that Sadler might have been the father of the twins are circumstantial and in the subjunctive, the pieces fit together to provide a coherent alternative narrative that overcomes a number of difficulties in the traditional account. The story of Shakespeare becoming father of twins in a growing family and an atmosphere of domestic harmony doesn’t fit so well with him making his way to London soon after. While he might want to leave the indelible mark of Sadler in their names and feel slighted at the infidelity it’s not clear that he is too put out by local events in Stratford when he has a career to pursue in London if he’s either already there or making plans to go. Or perhaps the infidelity provided the impetus behind his departure.

[1] Bate, Jonathan, Germaine Greer on Ann Hathaway - and herself, review of Shakespeare's Wife by Germaine Greer, Daily Telegraph, 7/08/2007

[2] Shakespeare, ed. J.M. Nosworthy, Cymbeline (Arden, 1955), Act 1, Sc 4, l.85-87.

[3] Paterson, Don, Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Faber, 2010), 443.

[4] https://www.theheraldrysociety.com/articles/shakespeare-part-2-shakespeare-among-the-heralds/