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Shakespeare didn't love his wife and he abandoned his family to move to London: are these 13 rumours about the playwright true?
With the help of Dr Paul Edmondson, we explore the historical evidence and plausibility behind 13 common statements about William Shakespeare – from his flight from Stratford to pursue his career, to the idea that his marriage to Anne Hathaway was loveless…
Published: February 3, 2026 at 9:25 AM
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1. Shakespeare was forced to leave Stratford-upon-Avon in a hurry after he was caught poaching deer at nearby Charlecote
According to legend, young William Shakespeare was hauled up before local magistrate and owner of Charlecote Park, Sir Thomas Lucy, after he was caught poaching deer on the estate.
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It’s a popular tale, but is there any truth to it? “The deer-poaching story is a nice anecdote, but we don’t know if it actually happened,” says Paul Edmondson. “There is no documentary evidence of any local prosecutions for poaching during Shakespeare’s younger years, and there wasn’t even a deer park at Charlecote at this time. That doesn’t prove that Shakespeare wasn’t found poaching somewhere on the estate, though. The story dates back to at least the 1680s – within the lifetime of Sir Thomas Lucy’s great-nephews and great-nieces – so there could be a ring of truth to it somewhere.”
2. Anne Hathaway was an ‘old maid’ when she married Shakespeare
Anne Hathaway was 26 when she wed the 18-year-old William Shakespeare, but she was far from being left on the shelf, says Paul Edmondson. “Men were definitely marrying women of Anne’s age during this period – she was certainly still considered to be of marriageable age. What is unusual about their union, though, is Shakespeare’s youth. He was technically underage when they married (men came of age at 21) and had to ask his father’s permission to wed, so it was a pretty unusual set of circumstances.
A 19th-century reimagining of Shakespeare’s courtship of Anne Hathaway. Shakespeare’s youth and Anne’s pregnancy made their marriage something of a local scandal. (Image by Getty Images)
“Historian Jeanne Jones has identified that between 1570 and 1630, the average age for men to marry was 26, and only three married under the age of 20 – of those three, Shakespeare was the youngest, and the only man whose wife-to-be was already pregnant.”
“Anne’s pregnancy before marriage and Shakespeare’s youth would have been something of a scandal,” continues Edmondson, “and certainly not something anyone would have planned. The marriage meant that Shakespeare was forced to give up whatever apprenticeship he had [married men were not allowed to be apprentices], so there must have been real concerns about how he would support his new family with no formal trade under his belt.”
3. William and Anne were married at his local parish church, Holy Trinity
The location of Anne and William’s marriage has frustrated centuries of biographers, and there is still no definitive answer. Several options have been put forward: an entry for the marriage licence of ‘Willelmum Shaxpere’ and ‘Annam Whateley’ at St Andrew’s Church in Temple Grafton (a village about five miles from Stratford, and four miles from Anne Hathaway’s house in Shottery) has often been cited as ‘proof’ of the marriage. Other possible locations include St Martin’s, Worcester; Luddington; and Holy Trinity in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Jessie Buckley plays Anne (Agnes) Hathaway in a movie adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's 2020 historical novel, Hamnet. (Image by Universal Pictures)
“I’m increasingly of the view that William and Anne married at All Saints Church in Billesley,” comments Edmondson. “It was the church that Shakespeare’s granddaughter, Elizabeth, chose for her second marriage, even though she had no known connections to the place – it might well be that she chose the venue because her grandparents had been married there. Billesley is also close to Wilmcote, which is where Shakespeare’s mother’s family was from. Plus, it was out of the way for a hasty marriage because Anne was already pregnant. The associated scandal would have meant the pair would likely have avoided their local church of Holy Trinity.”
4. Shakespeare abandoned his family for a new life in London, but retired back to Stratford-upon-Avon
“Nobody knows the precise reason why Shakespeare left Stratford-upon-Avon for London,” says Edmondson. “In the absence of this information, a rags to riches, ‘Dick Whittington’ type of story has grown up around Shakespeare – that he went to find his fortune and then remained in London until his ‘retirement’, when he returned home to Stratford.
The truth is, that there were always two centres of Shakespeare’s life from around the late 1580s, when we know he was in London, until around 1612, when we know he was more or less living full-time in Stratford.
Shakespeare's Birthplace at Stratford-upon-Avon. (Image by Getty Images)
“Shakespeare bought New Place – a freehold with between 20 and 30 rooms, as the archaeology would have us believe – in 1597, and by 1598 had remodelled the front of it. The house was one of the largest in Stratford and would surely have been his pride and joy. His decision to buy and alter the house doesn’t smack of someone who wasn’t there often. New Place would have been his retreat when the London theatres closed due to plague, which they often did, and was where his wife and children were.”
In 1602, Shakespeare bought land in Stratford for the sum of £320, followed by an investment of £440 in a share of Stratford’s tithes (a form of taxes on people who worked the land, which generated an income for their owners) – actions that would also place him frequently in his home town, comments Edmondson.
“The investments Shakespeare makes in Stratford in 1602 and 1605 would have required managing and overseeing. What’s more, from 1604–12, references to Shakespeare in London are very few, which suggests he was spending more time in Stratford. When you look at the evidence, an image emerges of a man who was spending time in both places – this isn’t someone who, as it were, retired back to his hometown as Kenneth Branagh’s 2018 film, All Is True, would have us believe.”
5. Shakespeare is not the real author of the works attributed to him
Myths and conspiracy theories have swirled around the authorship of Shakespeare’s works since the 19th century. Some doubters believe Shakespeare couldn’t have been a writer because no books are mentioned in his will, while others cite his humble background as a reason why he could not have been so successful.
“Each piece of evidence points to the fact that Shakespeare did author the works rather than didn’t,” says Edmondson. “Books tended not to be mentioned in wills at this time; they were listed in inventories. And we don’t have an inventory for Shakespeare. Authorship deniers find it unlikely that someone from a humble background could have been so successful. But we see all the time that genius can arise from surprising places. Each piece of evidence that puts Shakespeare as the creator of his works needs to be contradicted before we can even consider anyone else as the possible author, and that’s something that authorship deniers simply cannot do.”
Fellow playwright John Fletcher collaborated with Shakespeare on several works, including The Two Noble Kinsmen. (Image by Getty Images)
But what about collaborations? “We’ve known that Shakespeare was a collaborator since his own lifetime,” comments Edmondson. “When The Two Noble Kinsmen (written in c1613–14), was published in 1634, it was jointly attributed to John Fletcher and William Shakespeare. The History of Cardenio, a lost play known to have been performed by the King’s Men in 1613, was also mentioned, posthumously, as a collaboration between them. Henry VIII, or All Is True was also written in collaboration with Fletcher, although this wasn’t realised until the 19th century. We know this because of stylistic evidence. For example, one of the stylistic ‘fingerprints’ of John Fletcher was that he used ‘ye’ rather than ‘you’. Shakespeare, on the other hand, rarely used ‘ye’, so the scenes written by Fletcher are pretty obvious.
“We also know that he collaborated with Thomas Middleton. Shakespeare tended to collaborate at the beginning and the end of his career. Particularly before 1594 when he was a jobbing playwright finding his feet in the professional theatre world. After he becomes a co-founding shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men theatre company, Shakespeare seems to have become a single author focused on writing for the benefit of that company to make money.”
6. Shakespeare invented thousands of words
Shakespeare has long been credited as the creator of thousands of words in the English language that are still in use today.
But, says Edmondson, the number of words coined by the great playwright is actually significantly fewer. A team of experts led by Professor Jonathan Culpeper from Lancaster University, launched the three-year Encyclopaedia of Shakespeare’s Language research project in 2016, which used computer technology to analyse millions of words written by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
The research was discussed in a 2019 BBC Four documentary, Scuffles, Swagger and Shakespeare: The Hidden Story of English, in which Culpeper suggests that the amount of neologisms (newly coined words or expressions) created by Shakespeare may not be as numerous as has been suggested in the past – probably no more than 300–400 in total.
7. Shakespeare was unhappy in his marriage
Although we will never know the true depth of feeling between the Shakespeares, William placed a great deal of trust and responsibility in Anne while he was away from home, according to Edmondson. She was mistress of New Place, managing a small staff and the household economy, as well as caring for, and arranging the education of, their three children.
“It’s long been assumed by many that the fact Shakespeare spent time in London away from his family, combined with the hasty circumstances of their marriage and a large age gap, that William and Anne had an unhappy marriage,” comments Edmondson. “But if you study Shakespeare’s Sonnets, it’s very plausible that some them are addressed to, or are about, Anne. The final couplet of Sonnet 145, for example – which was identified as referring to Anne as recently as 1971 – reads: ‘‘I hate’, from hate away she threw, And saved my life, saying ‘not you’.’
“The sonnet is written in iambic tetrameter, and not iambic pentameter, so is therefore thought to be an early poem – ‘Hateaway’ was an alternative pronunciation of Hathaway, so it could well be a marriage poem.
“Feminist scholar Germaine Greer has plausibly suggested that Sonnet 27 – which features the line ‘Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed, The dear repose for limbs with travail tired; But then begins a journey in my head’, followed by descriptions of a zealous pilgrimage made in his mind to his beloved – could well represent Shakespeare on tour thinking about his wife.” Much of the speculation about the Shakespeares’ marriage stems from the fact that, in his will, Shakespeare wrote: “I gyve unto my wife my second best bed with the furniture” – (‘furniture’ being the curtains and bedcover, which formed part of the complete bed).
Shakespeare’s last will left the bulk of his estate to the couple’s eldest daughter, Susanna. (Image by Getty Images)
“The bed Shakespeare is referring to is likely to have been the bed that he and Anne would have shared,” comments Edmondson. “Beds were luxury items and valuable heirlooms – the best bed would likely have been reserved for guests and probably displayed downstairs where it could be seen and admired. “Wills have never been documents about sentiment. We apply sentiment to bequests, and in our modern sensibility, when we see the term ‘second best’, we assume it to be a slight. But it’s a bequest that has been inaccurately interpreted. There are other examples in wills of the period where second-best beds were left to a spouse. Such bequests came with an understanding about residential rights for the widow, to make sure that she had somewhere to sleep within the freehold or the house of the deceased.
“The bulk of Shakespeare’s estate went to his daughter, Susanna, who, with her husband John Hall, moved into New Place while Anne was still there. Anne lived at New Place for another seven years until her death in 1623.”
8. Shakespeare was wealthy because he was a playwright
“Not true,” says Edmondson. “Shakespeare was wealthy because he was a shareholder in two companies and two theatres – the Globe and the Blackfriars. People did not become wealthy from writing plays; you had to be a shareholder to earn real money.”
Rare gold pound coins like these would have been a rare sight for most Elizabethan playwrights. (Image by Getty Images)
9. Some of Shakespeare’s wealth came from his father’s illegal wool dealings
“This, for me, is not as mythical as it might seem,” comments Edmondson. “We know that John Shakespeare made a lot of money from wool from the fines he had to pay for dealing in wool without a licence. The level of the fine depended on the amount of wool a person was dealing, and the financial turnover from that business. From the fines John was paying, we can ascertain that he was making quite a lot of money from wool. It’s also interesting to note that in 1602, the year after his father died, Shakespeare suddenly invested a large sum of money in land in Stratford-upon-Avon. Well, that money came from somewhere...”
10. Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, drowned
In 1596, William and Anne’s only son, Hamnet – twin to Judith – died at the age of 11. As was customary at the time, the cause of death was not recorded, and Hamnet was buried in the churchyard at Holy Trinity in Stratford-upon-Avon on 11 August.
“Various causes of death have been suggested over the years, from drowning to plague,” says Edmondson. “But the truth is, we just don’t know.”
11. We don’t know what Shakespeare really looked like
Of the many images of William Shakespeare, only two portraits purport to have been created from life: the so-called Cobbe portrait of c1610 and the famous Chandos portrait – painted between 1600–10 and the first portrait to be acquired by the National Portrait Gallery. But there are only two works of art that can be definitively identified as William Shakespeare, according to Edmondson, and both are posthumous.
Martin Droeshout’s engraving is one of only two identifiable images of the playwright. (Image by Getty Images)
“The frontispiece for the title page of Shakespeare’s First Folio, published in 1623, features a portrait engraving of the playwright by Martin Droeshout,” he comments. “The second identifiable image of Shakespeare is the bust in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, which, thanks to research by Professor Lena Cowen Orlin, we now know was probably commissioned by Shakespeare himself.”
12. Shakespeare had an illegitimate son
Poet and playwright Sir William Davenant (1606–68) was rumoured to be the illegitimate son of William Shakespeare in the playwright’s own lifetime – and he may well have been, according to Edmondson. “William was of the Davenant family in Oxford with whom Shakespeare probably stayed occasionally,” he comments. “Shakespeare would no doubt have been acquainted with William’s mother, Jane, and is even said by some to have stood as young William’s godfather.”
Davenant never denied the rumours surrounding his parentage and went on to found the Duke’s Playhouse in Lincoln’s Inn Fields after the Restoration in 1660, and was known as a theatre manager, poet and playwright, even adapting plays by Shakespeare.
13. Shakespeare died of a fever
“The earliest reference to how Shakespeare died is in the 1660s, in a notebook belonging to the vicar of Stratford-upon-Avon in which he wrote that Shakespeare had had a ‘merry meeting’ with Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton and had died of a fever that he had contracted,” explains Edmondson. “By the 18th century, this story had morphed into a tale that Shakespeare had been on a drinking bout around Stratford and woken up drunk beneath a tree somewhere in Warwickshire. We actually have a number of twigs at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust – donated over the centuries – that are said to be from the very tree under which Shakespeare awoke.
Much analysis has been done on the so-called Darmstadt Shakespeare death mask, discovered in 1842 – but most Shakespeare experts have dismissed it as a fake. (Image by Getty Images)
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“It’s quite plausible that Shakespeare did die of a fever – something that could easily happen if he had drunk some infected water. Later biographers have him dying of syphilis or typhus, but we don’t actually know how he died. The vicar who noted fever as the cause of death did so after visiting Shakespeare’s daughter, Judith, before she died. Who’s to say that the story didn’t come from her? It’s not impossible to accept oral history written down within 50 years of Shakespeare’s death, when his daughter was still alive.”
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