Shakespeare not an absent spouse, study proposes

What happened

William Shakespeare was not an absentee husband living in an unhappy marriage to Anne Hathaway, as the couple has been portrayed for the past 200 years, a British scholar argues in a study published Wednesday in the journal Shakespeare. Instead, Matthew Steggle of the University of Bristol said, a letter fragment discovered in 1978 suggests the Shakespeares lived together in London during a fruitful decade in which the Bard wrote some of his most famous plays, including "Hamlet" and "Othello."

Who said what

Steggle's analysis "reads like a detective yarn set in the Elizabethan era," The Washington Post said. Over eight years, he followed the clues scattered through the letter to "Good Mrs. Shakspaire" of "Trinitie Lane." Steggle found that the subject of the letter, an orphan named John Butts, lived in London at the time, and there was a Trinity Lane in London — right across the Thames from Shakespeare's Globe Theater — but not in Stratford-upon-Avon, where Hathaway was traditionally believed to be "stashed" in a cottage while her husband was "living large as a lodger in swinging 1600s London," the Post said.

"For Shakespeare biographers who favor the narrative of the 'disastrous marriage' — in fact, for all Shakespeare biographers," Steggle said, the letter "should be a horrible, difficult problem."

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What next?

Steggle provides "plenty of plausible evidence" but "no smoking gun," James Shapiro, a Shakespeare scholar at Columbia University, told the Post. It will likely "take some time for the smoke to clear and a new scholarly consensus" to emerge, but "if Steggle is correct," this "will overturn many accepted beliefs."