Anne Shakespeare in love

Love is one of Anne Shakespeare’s core beliefs, but wasn’t it a nice little film? Unfortunately, it had the wrong Shakespeare in the lead. If we were to do a true to life film of William Shakespeare in love it would look completely different. William was a philandering misogynist who betrayed his wife with many women (see sonnets 35, 41, 42, 135-6, for example and then William’s own confessions in his poorly written A Lover’s Complaint).

In truth, if we want to look at a real love story, we need to look at how Anne Shakespeare spent her life seeking to immortalise William by attaching his name to the poems and plays that she wrote. Indeed, Anne was to spend her life devoted to and doting on William to the point of domestic abuse and coercive control by William. Yes, the alleged great William Shakespeare was nothing but a businessman, one of the emerging nouveaux riche capitalists who, while ostensibly not in love with his wife, was happy to take the accolades coming from her writings and the doors it opened for him to accumulate his wealth (and to carry on his affairs with other women).

All the while Anne toiled away in Stratford writing the plays and poems that would make William’s name famous. Why? Because Anne was totally besotted with William and fulfilled her promise she had made to him to make his name immortal (see sonnet 81, for example). And this even extended beyond William’s death as Anne edited and prepared for publication the plays she had written under his name and published as the First Folio. This complete devotion, throughout his life (and beyond), through his affairs, through his sickness (when he returned from London around 1611 possibly suffering from dementia, see Summers, 2021, pp. 45-46), is evidence of her love for him even when this love was not reciprocated by William.

Here then is the real love story of Anne Shakespeare. A love story predicated on a one sided relationship characterised by complete devotion and forgiveness, even in the face of her knowledge of not only his affairs but also knowing that her love was not to be reciprocated to the extent that she gave her own love. This is the real story that needs to be told to the world: to acknowledge that the real author is Anne, not William.

More to come.