Trust Shakespeare to reveal the mystery of marriage
There are wider lessons to be learnt from a letter that challenges previous assumptions about the playwright’s unhappy marriage.
The discovery of a lost Shakespeare letter has left biographers with a “horrible problem”, say scholars, because it busts the myth that the playwright’s marriage was an unhappy one.
The accepted narrative that Anne Hathaway was an uneducated woman who spent her days in Stratford-upon-Avon while William was making his fame and fortune in London, now seems false.
The letter, addressed to “good Mrs Shakespeare” in London, appears to show the couple both living in the capital at some point in the years between 1600 and 1610, the period of William’s greatest productivity when he wrote Othello, King Lear, Macbeth and possibly Hamlet, among many others.
Not only was Anne apparently at her husband’s side but she was also involved in his business affairs, the letter suggests.
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