♀️ 🟥 #Oficialidá

There is no Woman of the Day post today but if there was, it would be Anne Hathaway (1556-1623) of Shottery, Warwickshire, whose twins were baptised exactly two weeks earlier in 1585. This capable 29 year old woman was a tower of strength. She was already coping with a two year old toddler and running the family home without much support from her husband. He was eight years younger than her, the son of an impecunious glove-maker, and didn’t have much by the way of prospects when he proposed to her - they were hardly star-crossed lovers - but love is blind and there was method in his madness. Anne was a catch. She had been brought up in a spacious farmhouse. Some referred to it as a cottage but measure for measure, it was a des res: twelve rooms, multiple chimneys, extensive gardens and over 90 acres of land just outside Stratford-on-Avon. Nowadays, you’d need to offer a pound of flesh for a property like this on the market. Anne was three months pregnant with their daughter Susanna when they married. It might have raised an eyebrow a couple of centuries later but it was quite common in those days. Handfasting ceremony first, see if it’s a match, marry if there’s a child on the way. Really, much ado about nothing. He stayed around long enough to father twins Judith and Hamnet in 1585 and then went off on a wild goose chase, looking for a brave new world. In one fell swoop, he vanished into thin air for seven years, leaving her to get on with the business of running the household and raising three young children. Fortunately she was made of sterner stuff. She was self-sufficient and had her own money. Neither a borrower nor a lender, she. God knows what he’d been doing for those seven years: his Lost Years. It could have been anything from poaching deer to carousing around town with a bloke called Kit Marlowe. You can have too much of a good thing, you know. Marlowe was a blinking idiot - I’d have sent him packing. He came to a bad end, a foregone conclusion. He breathed his last at 29, dead as a doornail, having been stabbed in the eye in a tavern after causing a tempest over a debt. The husband ended up in London writing play after play, some with the most unimaginative titles - seven of them were called Henry and two Richard (he seemed obsessed with them and trust me, they were not for the faint hearted). He even tried his hand at writing sonnets. Some of his stuff would set your teeth on edge, for goodness sake, but it was a lucrative business so fair play to him, I suppose. Anne, meanwhile, arranged for her daughters to be home-schooled (Susanna especially had a neat signature), and nursed young Hamnet through the Bubonic Plague only to lose him at age 11, although her daughters survived the disease. There was neither rhyme nor reason to it. It was love’s labour’s lost and I bet she slept not one wink the whole time. To give the devil his due, her husband came home every now and again but the game was up in 1613. He exited stage left from the theatre world - all that glitters is not gold - and finally returned to his own flesh and blood in Stratford, but summer’s lease has all too short a date. He shuffled off this mortal coil on his 52nd birthday in 1616, having left £300 (roughly £65k in today’s sterling) to their daughter Judith and his "goodes, Chattels, Leases, plate, jewles and Household stuffe whatsoever after my dettes and Legasies paied and my funerall expences discharged" to their daughter Susanna. Anne got the “second best bed”, which had probably seen better days but she had the last laugh. She outlived him by seven years, dying in 1623 at the age of 67, so all’s well that ends well.