humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare

(quote, excerpts)

BOOK EXCERPT

'Shakespeare's Wife'
By Germaine Greer
April 4, 2008 9:07 p.m.


In the medieval period such aliases served to distinguish between
people with the same surname by specifying the region or town they
came from or the trade they followed. Perhaps an earlier Hathaway had
indeed been a gardener.

Sometimes, when there was no male heir, a female descendant's husband
might inherit on condition that he assumed her family name as an
alias.

The point of aliases is still being disputed by genealogists; although
during Ann Shakespeare's lifetime the use of aliases became less
consistent, it was a generation or two before it faded out
altogether.

We know that Ann's grandfather John Hathaway was already using the
alias, so it is not something we are likely ever to unravel. For years
nobody realised that the 'Jone Gardner of Shottery' who was buried in
Holy Trinity churchyard in 1599 was the same person they had already
identified as Ann Shakespeare's stepmother.

2 In 1590 a 'Thomas Greene alias Shakespeare' was buried in Holy
Trinity Church Stratford, sending historians off on a wild-goose chase
for a woman called Greene giving birth to an illegitimate Shakespeare,
or vice versa, for the alias was occasionally used for de facto wives
and to denote descent on the wrong side of the blanket.

The Christian name of the woman who married William Shakespeare in
1582 is as unstable as her surname. The only evidence that Richard
Hathaway alias Gardner of Shottery had a daughter called Ann is a
reference in his will to a daughter called Agnes. Scholars have
demonstrated convincingly that in this period Agnes and Ann were
simply treated as versions of the same name, pointing out dozens of
examples where Agnes, pronounced 'Annis', gradually becomes 'Ann'.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120699863067178245.html?mod=googlenews_wsj