For Magpie 72

Studying this week’s prompt, a few lines from Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” came back to me.

“It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
Between the acres of the rye,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino
These pretty country folk would lie.

“This carol they began that hour,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
How that a life was but a flower
And therefore take the present time.
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino.”

So the young country folk went out into the fields and – took the present time. What is so striking about the poem, and is suggested by Van Gogh’s painting, is that this seems to be the kind of field where the teenager named Shakespeare had carnival knowledge of his girl friend Anne Hathaway. :-)
But the light-hearted lines about young folk fooling around out in the fields signified something serious: Anne became pregnant and Will had to marry the girl.
So, a few years later, still a young man barely out of his teens, William Shakespeare found himself to be a solid pere-de-famille, a married man with three kids.
Had it been a forced wedding? Probably. The young lady would have been for it, but whether he liked the idea or not marriage was about the only option open to a decent young man of that time.
He may have been against getting hitched but, as James Joyce wrote:
“Shakespeare hath a Will,
But Anne Hathaway.”
:-)

Happy Birthday, Will!

My hobby is Shakespeare. So, since today is William Shakespeare's birthday, I thought I'd reprint an older post for the occasion.
I call this “That Whatley Girl.”
In a recent post, we were talking about young Will Shakespeare’s marriage to Anne Hathaway. But there’s a mystery about that marriage that has had scholars puzzled for a couple of centuries. When the clerk of the court wrote out the license, he gave the bride’s name as “Anne Whatley.” Her name – she’s known as the Second Anne – appears there and nowhere else.
Could it be that the clerk was just careless or incompetent? That he had meant to write “Hathaway” but it had been a long day and he was tired? Because it’s a fact that the mistake, if it was a mistake, was corrected and the marriage that finally did take place was definitely between Will S. and Anne Hathaway; she was his wife and the mother of his children.

So novelists have made up a True Romances story; it would make a good TV soap. In their scenario, Teenager Will had as his true love the beautiful Anne Whatley (they might have looked like the couple above); she was the girl he wanted to marry. He went so far as to make application for the marriage with the clerk of the court.
But the Hathaway family, not to mention his own family, told Will that was out of the question. The Hathaway Anne was visibly pregnant and he was responsible so he could just forget about that other Anne, the Whatley girl – who wasn’t even from Stratford.

So Will had to forget about his true love.
Well, that’s the story. It’s all pure speculation, but it makes for a more interesting scenario than the one about the clerk of the court who simply had a bad day and mistakenly wrote down the wrong name.
Again, have a nice birthday, Will.

Anne Hathaway

I was under the impression that actress Anne Hathaway, who played an awkward American teen in “The Princess Diaries” and who was Jake Gyllenhaal’s long-suffering wife in “Brokeback Mountain,” was another example of a movie star who had been born with a name that didn’t seem right for film publicity, the way Greta Gustafsson’s last name had to be changed to Garbo.

So I thought that this young woman chose, as a nom de movie, the name of William Shakespeare’s wife: Anne Hathaway.



But none of that is true; actress Anne Hathaway was born Anne Hathaway.

However, this interesting factoid got me to thinking about Will Shakespeare’s marriage. Most people don’t think of our greatest playwright as a family man, but he was, with three kids, by the time he was 21.

In fact, he had been forced to get married. As a lad, he had gotten mixed up with an older woman. (Did they have “cougars” back then?)

Actually, Anne wasn’t all that old, but she was eight years older than teenager Will. One embarrassment was that Anne had to go with her family to get the marriage license; the guy she was marrying was a minor so he couldn’t do it.

Years later Shakespeare wrote these lines:
“Between the acres of the rye
These pretty country folk would lie.”

And that’s evidently pretty much what they did.

From the evidence that exists, it would appear that young Will was not all that eager to get married. However, in his Puritan community once it was determined that Ms Hathaway was definitely preggers there weren’t many other choices. And Anne would certainly have insisted.

James Joyce put it this way: “Shakespeare hath a Will, but Anne Hathaway.”