‘Let the woman take
An elder than herself: so wears she to him;
So sways she level in her husband’s heart:
For, boy (however we do praise ourselves),
Our fancies are more giddy and infirm,
More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn,
Than women’s are.
Then let thy love be younger than thyself,
Or thy affection cannot hold the bent.’
But do not put too much faith in the biographical value of literary expression, nor assume that these views have much bearing upon Shakespeare’s married life. His sonnets breathed love and passion for ladies dark or fair, and very various; but then ’twas his trade to assume what he did not feel, and to trick it out in glowing pages of dainty poesy. I, for one, would not regard them nor their like as arguments or evidence in favour of divorce. So, in all charity to sweet Will, let us scout the suggestion of a writer who wrote some years since on the unhappy marriages of men of genius, even as I do here, that ‘we have the internal evidence of his sonnets that he was not a faithful husband.’ We had far better keep to the scanty facts which have come down to us respecting Shakespeare’s life. We know, for instance, that he left Stratford-on-Avon and settled in London but four years after his marriage. It cannot be said with certainty whether or not his wife came up with him from Warwickshire, but it is likely enough that she did not. And yet can we reasonably blame any one less impersonal than Thalia or Melpomene for his leaving his wife behind him in that old town beside the Avon? I would suppose that Ann Hathaway was uncongenial to him in so far that, and because she had no sort of appreciation of, nor any love of, the medium of words in which her husband worked.
It was not until he had reached his forty-eighth year that Shakespeare returned to his native town. He lived there with his wife and his daughter Judith for four years, and then died.
Dryden’s wife must have been, no less than Carlyle, ‘gey ill to live wi’.’ He married, in his thirty-third year, the Lady Eliza Howard, daughter of the Earl of Berkshire, a woman whose intellect was as cloudy as her reputation, and whose violence ofttimes caused the poet to wish her dead. He wrote an epitaph in anticipation of that consummation he most devoutly wished; but she survived him, and, singularly enough, the epitaph which was never used has survived them both to the present day. He said—
‘Here lies my wife; here let her lie;
Now she’s at rest—and so am I.’
And so they are.
Wycherley, too, had his connubial infelicities. He married the widowed Countess of Drogheda, whom Macaulay describes as ill-tempered, imperious, and extravagantly jealous. Nothing is more likely than that she had due cause for jealousy, for Wycherley was no saint. But she managed to keep him under restraint, and only permitted him to meet his cronies under her surveillance. That is, he was suffered to entertain his fellow-dramatists in a room of the tavern that stood opposite their house, whence she could observe him through the open windows, and assure herself that no woman was of the company.
Wycherley had, doubtless, himself to blame for this espionage and suspicion; but jealousy is, perhaps, as frequently unfounded as deserved. Berlioz, for instance, who married the charming Henrietta Smithson, an Irish operatic singer, was driven, through his wife’s unreasonable jealousy, to elope with the first pretty girl he met. He had been madly infatuated with her, and she seems to have wed him, not from affection, but because of his importunity; and, even so, she did not comply until after an accident had unfitted her for the stage, and she was fain to retire. But indifference changed to an acute jealousy after marriage. She so wearied the musician with her baseless suspicions, that at last he felt the absurdity of bearing the odium of sin without having experienced its pleasures. So, one fine day, he packed a portmanteau and sped to Brussels in company with ‘another,’ to speak in the manner of the lady novelists.
Comte, the founder of the Positivist religion, and the defender of marriage, led a wretched married life. Hooker, the ‘judicious,’ seems not to have deserved that epithet in so far as his choice of a domestic tyrant was concerned. Sir Richard Steele should not have married a second time; he might have known that the good fortune of his first choice militated against the chance of equal luck on another occasion. Montaigne—good soul—declared that he would not marry again after his untoward experiences; no, not if he had the choice of wisdom incarnate.
Man who has once been wed deserves the consolations of heaven, according to the story in which a soul (masculine) comes to the gates of Paradise and knocks. Peter catechises him, but finds his record inadequate, and is about to turn him away. ‘Stay, though,’ says the saint; ‘have you been married?’ ‘Yes,’ replies the soul. ‘Enter, then,’ rejoins the janitor, compassionately; ‘you have deserved much from your sufferings on earth!’ ‘Ah!’ cries the spirit, enlarging upon its claims to present bliss from past ills; ‘I have been married twice!’ ‘Twice?’ shouts Peter, indignantly; ‘away with you. Paradise is not for fools!’