Anne Hathaway (about 1556–1623) was the wife of William Shakespeare, a farmer’s daughter from Shottery, near Stratford-upon-Avon, who married him in November 1582, bore their three children, and outlived him by seven years.
She was about 26 years old at the wedding, and he was 18. For most of their 34 years of marriage, she lived in Stratford while he worked in London, and she left no letters, no signature, and no description of herself. What survives is a small set of documents: her father’s will, a marriage bond, a shepherd’s will, her husband’s will, and her grave.
This article sets out what each of them shows about her life, from Shottery to Holy Trinity Church, and how four centuries of biographers, novelists, and filmmakers have filled the gaps. For the marriage and the children in more detail, see our article on Shakespeare’s marriage and family life.
At a Glance
Here are the key facts about Anne Hathaway for quick reference.
Her Family and Early Life in Shottery
Anne grew up in Shottery, a hamlet about a mile west of the center of Stratford-upon-Avon. Her father, Richard Hathaway, farmed Hewlands, a farm of about ninety acres that the family held as tenants, and in his will he described himself as a husbandman. The Hathaways were numerous in the district, and the Shottery branch often went by the alias Hathaway alias Gardner to tell themselves apart from the rest.
Richard Hathaway made his will on September 1, 1581, and died soon afterward. It is the first document that names his daughter. He left “unto Agnes my daughter” six pounds, thirteen shillings, and fourpence, a sum known as ten marks, to be paid on the day of her marriage. Three of his sons were left sums of their own, payable when they turned twenty, and the rest of his goods went to his widow, Joan, who was probably Anne’s stepmother. To oversee the will, he named his “trustie frende and neighbours” Stephen Burman and Fulk Sandells. Fourteen months later, Sandells would guarantee Anne’s marriage.
The farmhouse where Anne grew up still stands. Her brother Bartholomew inherited the tenancy, bought the freehold in 1610 for £200, and enlarged the house. It stayed in the Hathaway family until the nineteenth century, and Hathaway descendants were still living there as tenants when the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust bought it in 1892. It is now the museum known as Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, although it was a substantial farmhouse rather than a cottage.
Anne or Agnes?
Her father’s will calls her Agnes, while her marriage bond and her grave call her Anne. The two names were often used interchangeably in Elizabethan England, and the same woman could appear under either one. Her brother Bartholomew, for example, named a daughter Annys, who was buried as Ann.
There is no doubt that Agnes and Anne were the same person. A will made in 1601 by Thomas Whittington, a shepherd who had worked for Richard Hathaway, names “Anne Shaxspere,” the wife of William Shakespeare, alongside debts owed to him by the Hathaway family, and that link confirms that Shakespeare’s wife was Richard’s daughter. Maggie O’Farrell chose the name Agnes for the heroine of her novel Hamnet, and it has since become familiar to a wider audience through the film.
How Old Was Anne Hathaway?
No record of Anne’s birth or baptism survives. She appears to have been born before Stratford’s surviving parish registers begin, and her age comes from a single source: the brass plate on her grave, which says she died on August 6, 1623, “being of the age of 67 yeares.” If that figure is right, she was born in 1555 or 1556, and she was about 26 when she married Shakespeare, who had turned 18 that April. Grave inscriptions of the period could be wrong, so the familiar eight-year age gap is an inference rather than a recorded fact.
The age gap has drawn a great deal of comment. Some biographers have heard an echo of it in Twelfth Night, where Orsino advises the disguised Viola:
Let still the woman take
An elder than herself; so wears she to him,
So sways she level in her husband’s heart.
The lines belong to a lovesick duke in a comedy, speaking to a character he believes is a boy, and there is no evidence that Shakespeare meant them as a comment on his own marriage.
The Marriage in 1582
Two documents in the records of the Diocese of Worcester record the marriage. The more reliable is the marriage bond of November 28, 1582, an original document in which two Stratford farmers, Fulk Sandells and John Richardson, pledged £40 as a guarantee that there was no lawful obstacle to the marriage of “William Shagspere” and “Anne Hathwey of Stratford in the Dioces of Worcester maiden.” The bond allowed the couple to marry after the banns had been read once instead of the usual three times.
The bond has two notable features. Shakespeare, at 18, was under age and could not stand as one of the sureties, and his father did not stand for him. Anne’s father was dead, and no Hathaway stood for her either. The two men who did were friends of her family, and Sandells had been named in her father’s will. The guarantee, in other words, came from the Hathaways’ circle.
The second document is an entry in the bishop’s register, dated the day before, which records a license for “Willelmum Shaxpere” to marry “Annam Whateley de Temple grafton.” No Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton has ever been traced, and most scholars treat the name as a clerk’s error. The register was written up later from notes, and the same court heard a case involving a William Whateley, the vicar of Crowle, that day. The error has nonetheless inspired a long line of theories about a second woman Shakespeare loved and lost.
Where the wedding took place is unknown, since the ceremony is not recorded in the Stratford parish register. What is clear is that Anne was pregnant. Their first child was baptized six months after the bond, and a betrothed couple conceiving a child before the church ceremony was not uncommon in the period. Our guide to Elizabethan England describes the wider world of the marriage.
Wife and Mother in Stratford
Anne’s daughter Susanna was baptized at Holy Trinity Church on May 26, 1583, and the twins Hamnet and Judith on February 2, 1585. The twins were probably named after their godparents, Hamnet and Judith Sadler, neighbors and friends of the family. The records show no more children. The newlyweds are generally thought to have lived at first with Shakespeare’s parents in their house on Henley Street, though no document says so.
After the twins’ baptism, little is known of Shakespeare for about seven years, the period known as the lost years. When he reappears, in 1592, he is a writer in London. For the next two decades or so, his working life was in the capital, as a playwright, actor, and sharer in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, while Anne and the children stayed in Stratford. No record places Anne in London.
In August 1596, the family lost Hamnet, who was buried at Holy Trinity on August 11 at the age of eleven. The cause of his death is not recorded, and nothing survives to tell us how Anne bore it. Our article on Hamnet Shakespeare sets out what the records show.
The following year, Shakespeare bought New Place, one of the largest houses in Stratford. Anne lived there for roughly a quarter of a century. With Shakespeare in London for much of the year, she was probably the one who ran the household day to day. The one document from these years that names her shows money passing through her hands, and it is the subject of the Closer Reading below.
Sonnet 145: A Poem for Anne?
One of Shakespeare’s poems may have been written for Anne. Sonnet 145 is printed among the Dark Lady sonnets in the 1609 Quarto, but it stands apart from them: it is the only sonnet in the sequence written in tetrameter, with eight syllables to the line instead of ten, and its language is simpler than that of the poems around it. It tells how a woman says “I hate,” sees her lover’s distress, and finishes the sentence with “not you.” It ends:
“I hate” from hate away she threw,
And saved my life, saying “not you.”
In 1971, the scholar Andrew Gurr argued that “hate away” is a pun on Hathaway and that the poem is a teenage courtship sonnet from 1582, which would make it his earliest surviving poem. Others have heard a second pun in the last line, where “And saved my life” might be heard as “Anne saved my life.” The reading is widely discussed and cannot be proved, but if it is right, the poem is a rare glimpse of Anne in her husband’s writing.
The Second-Best Bed
Shakespeare signed his will on March 25, 1616, and died the following month. It names Anne once, and not by name. Squeezed in between the lines of the last page is the bequest: “I give unto my wife my second best bed with the furniture,” meaning the bed’s hangings and coverings. The bulk of the estate, including New Place, went to Susanna and her heirs.
For centuries the line was read as a final insult. Many historians now read it differently. Under English common law, a widow was generally entitled to a third of the income from her husband’s property for the rest of her life, known as her dower, whether or not the will mentioned her, though scholars disagree about how much of Shakespeare’s property it covered. The best bed in a house of this kind was often kept for guests and passed down as an heirloom, so the second-best may well have been the couple’s own. And, as the historian Lena Cowen Orlin has pointed out, words like “best” and “second-best” were common in wills of the period as a way of identifying objects, not of expressing feelings.
What remains odd is the silence. Wives in wills of the period were often named with affection and made executors, and Anne is neither. Whether that reflects coldness, legal convenience, or an arrangement already made with Susanna is unknown. Our article on Shakespeare’s later life and death looks at the will as a whole.
Widowhood, Death, and Burial
Anne lived for seven more years. Susanna and her husband, the physician John Hall, who were Shakespeare’s executors, moved into New Place around the time of his death, and Anne lived there with them and their daughter, Elizabeth, for the rest of her life. She died on August 6, 1623, and was buried two days later. The parish register records her burial as that of “Mrs” Shakespeare, the title for a mistress of standing, where most widows in the register were simply called widows.
She was buried in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church, a place of honor, between her husband’s grave and his monument. Her stone carries a brass plate with an English inscription, “Heere lyeth interred the body of Anne wife of William Shakespeare,” followed by six lines of Latin verse. The epitaph was in place by 1634, and it was probably written by Susanna. In our translation, it reads:
Mother, you gave me the breast, you gave me milk and life;
woe is me, that for so great a gift I give you stones.
How I would rather the good angel rolled the stone from the tomb’s mouth,
so that your likeness might come forth, as the body of Christ did.
But my prayers avail nothing. Come quickly, Christ, and my mother,
though she is shut in the tomb, will rise again and seek the stars.
A later story adds a detail. In 1693, a visitor to Stratford named Dowdall recorded what the elderly parish clerk told him: that Shakespeare’s wife and daughters had wanted to be buried in the same grave as he was, but that no one dared to open it because of the curse carved on his stone. The report is secondhand and set down seventy years after Anne’s death. Later in 1623, the year she died, the First Folio appeared, the collection of 36 of his plays compiled by two of his fellow actors.
How Anne Hathaway Has Been Imagined
Anne entered Shakespeare’s biography late. William Dugdale printed her epitaph in his Antiquities of Warwickshire in 1656, but the first biography to mention her was Nicholas Rowe’s, in 1709, which described Shakespeare’s wife as the daughter of a man “said to have been a substantial yeoman” near Stratford. No portrait that can be securely identified as her survives.
Into that blank, biographers have poured their own theories of Shakespeare. The pregnant older bride, the husband in London, and the second-best bed have been used to cast Anne as a trap he fell into and escaped, and more recent biographies have kept the idea alive: Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World (2004) reads the marriage as a mismatch that Shakespeare escaped by going to London. Germaine Greer’s Shakespeare’s Wife (2007) argued the other side, rebuilding Anne’s life from the records of Stratford women, and Katherine West Scheil’s Imagining Shakespeare’s Wife (2018) traced how each generation has reshaped her to suit its picture of Shakespeare.
The most influential modern portrait is fiction. Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020, makes Agnes an herbalist who flies a hawk and puts her at the center of the story. Chloé Zhao’s 2025 film of the novel carried that Agnes to a far larger audience, and Jessie Buckley won the Academy Award for Best Actress in March 2026 for playing her. The novel and film invent a great deal, and our Hamnet article separates their story from the records.
A Closer Reading: “In the Hand of Anne Shaxspere”
Anne’s reputation has been built mostly from her husband’s will, a document in which she is an afterthought squeezed between the lines. But the will was written about Shakespeare’s property. The one document from her married life that names her was written by a man who had known her family for decades, and it shows her not as an afterthought but as someone a neighbor trusted with money.
The document is the will that Thomas Whittington, a shepherd who had worked for Anne’s father, made on March 25, 1601. Whittington left forty shillings to the poor of Stratford, money that was, in his words, “in the hand of Anne Shaxspere wyffe unto Mr Wyllyam Shaxspere” and owed to him, to be paid to his executor by Shakespeare or his assigns. Why Anne held the money is not recorded. She may have borrowed it, or Whittington may have left his savings in her keeping, as people without banks sometimes did with neighbors they trusted.
What makes the document revealing is the list of debts at the foot of the will. Whittington listed just over £20 owed to him by various people, including nearly £6 owed by members of the Hathaway family, among them Anne’s brothers John and William. Some of that sum had been left unpaid from Joan Hathaway’s estate. When the inventory of his goods was taken, those debts were entered as “desparate,” the term for debts no one expected to be repaid. The money in Anne’s hand was treated differently. Whittington did not simply list it; he gave it away in the body of his will, trusting that it would reach the poor.
That is a small fact, but it is a fact about Anne herself, and the will is the only document from her married life in which she acts rather than being acted upon. A shepherd whose debts had been left unpaid by her own family judged that money in her hands was as good as paid. The will names her husband as the man who would settle the account, but the money was in Anne’s hand, and it is Anne whom Whittington names first.
Read together, the surviving documents give a different Anne from the one in the legend. Her father’s will, the Whittington bequest, and the epitaph on her grave were written by people who knew her in Shottery and Stratford, and they show a daughter provided for, a woman trusted with money, and a mother mourned with real warmth. The documents from her husband’s side, the London records and the will, say almost nothing about her. That silence tells us about Shakespeare’s papers, not about Anne. To find her, the place to look is Stratford.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about Anne Hathaway, answered briefly.
How Old Was Anne Hathaway When She Married Shakespeare?
About 26. Shakespeare was 18. Her age is worked out from her gravestone, which says she was 67 when she died in 1623, so she was born in 1555 or 1556.
Was Anne Hathaway Called Agnes?
Her father’s will of 1581 calls her Agnes, and her marriage bond and grave call her Anne. The two names were often interchangeable at the time. The novel and film Hamnet use Agnes.
What Did Shakespeare Leave Anne Hathaway in His Will?
His will leaves her “my second best bed with the furniture,” added between the lines, and mentions her nowhere else. As a widow, she was generally entitled by law to a third of the income from his property for life, whether or not the will named her.
When Did Anne Hathaway Die?
On August 6, 1623, seven years after her husband. She was buried on August 8, 1623, a few months before the First Folio was published.
Where Is Anne Hathaway Buried?
In the chancel of Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, between Shakespeare’s grave and his monument. Her stone has a brass plate with an English inscription and a Latin epitaph.
Shakespeare’s Family
Three articles about the household Anne kept in Stratford.