27 November 1582

Abstract

William Shakespeare, his father’s eldest son, was meant to learn a trade through an apprenticeship, like his father. He would have been indentured at age 17 to serve seven years in training. Local lore suggests that he was apprenticed to a butcher. However, early modern apprenticeship indentures indicated that the apprentice was prohibited from marrying, and Shakespeare wed in 1582 at age 18. This chapter conjectures that a main purpose of the marriage was to break his covenants. What other biographies have described as ‘lost years’ may for him have been ‘found years’, years he was able to spend learning the craft of playwriting rather than that of butchery. The wedding is usually depicted as a shotgun affair, forced upon him because Anne Hathaway was pregnant, requiring a special marriage licence and a marriage bond, and performed outside Stratford-upon-Avon because of the shame of it all. In the late sixteenth century, however, as many as one-third of brides were pregnant, and by marrying they avoided social disgrace. Shakespeare may have wed outside Stratford because this made it possible for his father, who was hiding from local officers charged to arrest him for debt, to attend the ceremony. The chapter also tells the story of William Trowte, Shakespeare’s biographical cognate and an object lesson in the sort of life Shakespeare might have lived if he had remained a butcher in Stratford.