Anne (or Anna) Whateley is the name given to a woman who is sometimes supposed to have been the intended wife of William Shakespeare before he married Anne Hathaway. Most scholars believe that Whateley never existed, and that her name in a document concerning Shakespeare's marriage is merely a clerical error. However, several writers on Shakespeare have taken the view that she was a real person, and a rival to Hathaway for Shakespeare's hand. She has also appeared in imaginative literature on Shakespeare and in Shakespeare authorship speculations. Shakespeare's biographer Russell A. Fraser describes her as "a ghost", "haunting the edges of Shakespeare's story".Russell Fraser, Shakespeare: A Life in Art, Transaction Publishers, 2007, p.66. She has also been called "the first of the Shakespearean Dark Ladies".Ivor Brown and George Fearon, Amazing monument : a short history of the Shakespeare industry, Heinemann, 1939, p.18
Evidence Whateley's existence has been deduced from an entry in the Episcopal register at Worcester which states in Latin ." ('In the year of our Lord 1582 — November — the 27th day of that month. Also on the same day aforesaid a License was issued between Wm Shaxpere and Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton'.) The following day, Fulk Sandells and John Richardson, friends of the Hathaway family from Stratford-upon-Avon, signed a surety of £40 as a financial guarantee for the wedding of "William Shagspere and Anne Hathwey".Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: a compact documentary life, Oxford University Press, 1977, pp.84-7.E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of the Facts and Problems, Oxford University Press, 1989, pp.41-42. The marriage was registered in Worcester because the Anglican Diocese of Worcester included southern Warwickshire.
The entry in the register was discovered in the late nineteenth century by Reverend T. P. Wadley. Various explanations were offered. Initially it was assumed that Whateley was an alternative surname for Anne Hathaway herself. Wadley believed that it was probably an alias, used by Hathaway in order to keep the date of the marriage secret to obscure the fact that she was already pregnant. Another suggestion was that Anne Hathaway might legitimately have used the name, either because her father Richard Hathaway was in fact her step-father, her mother having previously been married to a man called Whateley, or because Anne herself may have previously been married to a man named Whateley.Joseph William Gray, Shakespeare's Marriage: His Departure from Stratford and Other Incidents in His Life, Chapman and Hall, 1905, pp.13-18; 27-28 None of these suggestions gained support, since they contradicted other existing evidence.
The Whateley note is discussed in Sidney Lee's 1898 book A Life of William Shakespeare. Lee argues that the "William Shakespeare" who is engaged to Whateley is probably a different person from the playwright, as there were "numerous William Shakespeares, who abounded in the diocese of Worcester".Sidney Lee, A life of William Shakespeare, 1915 edition, p. 30. In 1905 Joseph William Gray in Shakespeare's Marriage gave a detailed argument for clerical error due to the existence of lawsuits involving Whateleys that were being written up by the same scribe.William Ingram, The business of playing: the beginnings of the adult professional theater in Elizabethan London, Cornell University Press, 1992, p.24. However, Frank Harris's 1909 book, The Man Shakespeare, ignored Gray's argument and dismissed Lee's suggestion that there were two William Shakespeares as wildly implausible. He insisted that these documents are evidence that Shakespeare was involved with two separate women. He intended to marry Anne Whateley, but, when this became known, he was immediately forced by Anne Hathaway's family to marry their relative, since he had already made her pregnant. Harris believed that Shakespeare despised his wife, and that his forced marriage was the spur to his creative work:
If Shakespeare had married Anne Whately he might never have gone to London or written a play. Shakespeare's hatred of his wife and his regret for having married her were alike foolish. Our brains are seldom the wisest part of us. It was well that he made love to Anne Hathaway; well, too, that he was forced to marry her; well, finally, that he should desert her. I am sorry he treated her badly and left her unsupplied with money; that was needlessly cruel; but it is just the kindliest men who have these extraordinary lapses; Shakespeare's loathing for his wife was measureless.Frank Harris, The Man Shakespeare, BiblioBazaar, LLC, 2007, (reprint) p.362. Harris's spelling "Whatley" with one "e" is followed by several other authors, sometimes with the "e" before the "l". However, "Whateley" is the most common form of the name.
Some biographers, notably Ivor Brown and Anthony Burgess, followed Harris' lead, portraying Whateley as Shakespeare's true love. Brown argued that she was the Dark Lady of the sonnets. In 1970 Burgess wrote, It is reasonable to believe that Will wished to marry a girl named Anne Whateley. The name is common enough in the Midlands and is even attached to a four-star hotel in Horse Fair, Banbury. Her father may have been a friend of John Shakespeare's, he may have sold kidskin cheap, there are various reasons why the Shakespeares and the Whateleys, or their nubile children, might become friendly. Sent on skin-buying errands to Temple Grafton, Will could have fallen for a comely daughter, sweet as May and shy as a fawn. He was eighteen and highly susceptible. Knowing something about girls, he would know that this was the real thing. Something, perhaps, quite different from what he felt about Mistress Hathaway of Shottery. But why, attempting to marry Anne Whateley, had he put himself in the position of having to marry the other Anne? I suggest that, to use the crude but convenient properties of the old women's-magazine morality-stories, he was exercised by love for the one and lust for the other.Anthony Burgess, Shakespeare, London: Jonathan Cape, 1970, p. 57.
According to Stanley Wells in the Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, most modern scholars take the same view as Gray, that the name Whateley was "almost certainly the result of clerical error".Stanley Wells, "Whateley, Anne". Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, Oxford University Press, 2005, p.185; p.518. See also Park Honan, Shakespeare: a life, Oxford University Press, 2000, p.84. It may have arisen because the clerk was also recording information about a tithe appeal by a vicar, which included a reference to a person named Whateley.Peter Levi, The Life and Times of William Shakespeare, London: Macmillan, 1988, p.37. Though there was a Whateley family in the area, no independent evidence has ever been found of the existence of an Anne Whateley in Temple Grafton or anywhere else nearby. As for Lee's claim that there were "numerous" other William Shakespeares in the diocese, later researchers have found no surviving records of any other William Shakespeares of marriageable age in the diocese of Worcester.
Authorship speculations
After Harris's initial argument a number of imaginative claims were made about Anne Whateley, most dramatically that she was the true author of Shakespeare's works. This argument- which has been concluded to be entirely without satisfactory evidence- was made by William Ross in his book The Story of Anne Whateley and William Shaxpere (1939),Shakespeare Quarterly, 1950-1, p.256 in which he asserted that Whateley was a nun who was Shakespeare's "lover and consort in their spiritual union". Ross claims she was born in 1561, the daughter of the well-known seafarer Anthony Jenkinson, and that she was living a secluded life among the nuns of the Order of St. Clare when she met Shakespeare. According to Ross's story, they fell in love, and Anne was about to leave the order to marry him when Hathaway revealed her pregnancy. In Ross's view, Whateley wrote the sonnets as gifts to Shakespeare, and he states that her authorship can be deduced from them, in that they describe the history of her spiritual relationship with him. Ross considers that Hathaway is the Dark Lady of the sonnets, while Shakespeare himself is the Fair Youth, and that their intimate friendship continued after his marriage to Hathaway; its deepening spirituality is explored in the later sonnets. Eventually the friendship was broken up by Hathaway's jealousy, and Shakespeare left for London. She wrote A Lover's Complaint, which was appended to the sonnets, to express Anne Hathaway's point of view. No evidence was provided by Ross for these conclusions save that they resulted from his own interpretation of the texts.
Ross claimed that Whateley wished to dedicate the sonnets to Shakespeare, but wrote the dedication to Mr W.H. instead of "W.S", so that the identity of her lost love should remain mysterious; "W.H" was preferred because it was the initials of both her own surname and Hathaway's, implying that Shakespeare was, in a sense, both their husbands: Mr W and Mr H. According to Ross, "the initials therefore represent all three, and no better selection was possible".William Ross,The story of Anne Whateley and William Shaxpere as revealed by 'The sonnets to Mr. W.H.' and other Elizabethan poetry, Holmes, 1939, p.122; p.207 Ross alleged that she gave him the full collection when he left for London- which explains the dedication to the "well-wishing adventurer in setting forth"- and that she later wrote The Phoenix and the Turtle to commemorate their spiritual union.
Ross emphasises that his discovery removes all suggestion of homoeroticism from the sonnets, and thus "the taint of perversion, so odious to all lovers of Shakespeare, has been dissipated". He has very little to say about the plays, but states that Whateley probably wrote Shakespeare's plays to help him make a living. Nevertheless, he describes the playwriting as a "collaboration", though Shakespeare's role was probably "passive". Ross portrays Shakespeare himself as a talented writer, a worthy assistant to Whateley's "genius". After Anne's death he wrote "The Twenty-First and Last Book of the Ocean, to Cynthia", hitherto attributed to Walter Raleigh.
Ross argues that the sonnets reveal that Whateley also knew Edmund Spenser and helped him to write The Shepherd's Calendar. She was also the sole author of The Faerie Queene and Amoretti. In the 1580s she met and helped Michael Drayton and Philip Sidney, probably inspiring the sonnet revival of the period. The poem Hero and Leander, usually attributed to Christopher Marlowe, describes her relationship with Shakespeare. She also wrote Marlowe's plays. After her death in 1600 her unpublished works were published in the book Poetical Rhapsody, attributed to "A.W."