The neglected letter rewrites the story of Shakespeare's bad marriage
Any clue about the life of William Shakespeare usually excites scholars, but a piece of trial had been overlooked for decades. Now, a new analysis of that neglected document seems to break a longtime narrative on the bad marriage of the Bardo.Shakespeare was 18 years old in 1582 when he married Anne Hathaway, daughter of a family friend in Stratford-Upon-Avon who was in the mid-1920s and pregnant. For centuries, it was thought that the writer left his wife and children behind for a literary life in London, trying to avoid "the humiliation of domestic feuds", as an influential essayist of the 19th century said.This vision of Shakespeare's wife as a "distant footprint" suitable for scholars who thought that "Shakespeare was too interesting to be a married boy," said Matthew Steggle, a pr...