Opinion The Bard’s love story and a Shakespearean twist

Like any good Shakespearean revelation, this comes not with thunder and lightning, but in ink and parchment. A crumbling letter has upended one of literary history’s long-held assumptions — that William Shakespeare abandoned his wife Anne Hathaway in Stratford-upon-Avon while he made his fortune in London. Analysed by professor Matthew Steggle of the University of Bristol, the fragment found in the binding of a book in Hereford Cathedral’s library and addressed to “Good Mrs Shakspaire” suggests Anne may have been far more present in his life than the myth of the forsaken provincial wife allows: It is an appeal to her by a London widow to repay the money entrusted to Shakespeare by her husband.

Biographers have chipped away at Anne’s agency over the centuries. She has been cast variously as a supportive wife bringing up their three children in the countryside while running the family brewery, a woman of weary estrangement, a harridan who forced Shakespeare into marriage because she was pregnant with their child. But what if Shakespeare’s creative life and their marriage weren’t at odds? What if Anne was Sonnet 137’s “fair truth” — not an absence in his story, but its quiet anchor? In his will, Shakespeare had bequeathed “…my second best bed with the furniture” to Anne, interpreted by later scholars as a snub. But in the Elizabethan world, the second-best, often the marital bed, symbolised fidelity; the “best” was usually kept in the guest room as a status symbol.

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From Viola to Portia to even Lady Macbeth, Shakespeare’s heroines were women of agency and complexity. His domestic story may lack the sweep of legend, but it may have been something richer — a partnership sturdy enough to survive separation, sonnets and speculation.