When William Shakespeare was 18 years old, he married Anne Hathaway, a woman from Shottery, who was then aged about 26. There are two unusual things about this wedding. For a started, Shakespeare was a very young man. In the sixteenth century, the average age at which man usually married was between 24 and 28. Secondly, the marriage seems to have been arranged very quickly because a special licence was obtained from the Bishop of Worcester on 27 November 1582, allowing William and Anne to marry without the usual three week' s public notice-given by an announcement in church, called 'publishing the banns'. There was a good reason for their speedy marriage: an entry in the Stratford parish registers tells us that 'Susanna daughter to William Shakespeare' was baptised on 26 May 1583. Anne must have already been three months' pregnant when they married.

From the time of their marriage until William bought New  Place in Stratford in 1597, Anne and the children probably lived with William' s parents in Henley Street. Hamnet and a daughter Judith, baptised on 2 February 1585 followed Susanna.

A BUSY HOUSEHOLD

William Shakespeare' s younger brothers and sisters would almost certainly have been living at Henley Street, too, when Anne in. Gilbert, born in October 1566, died a respectable and unmarried tradesman in February 1612. Joan, born in April 1569, outlived all her brothers and sisters, not dying until 1646. Anne, born in September 1571, had died in 1579. Almost nothing in known of Richard, except that he was born in March 1574 and died in February 1613. But Edmund, John and Mary  Shakespeare' s youngest child, born in May 1580, followed in his brother William' s footsteps, and went to London to become an actor. He died in 1607, and was buried on 31 December in the church of St Mary Overy, very near to the Globe Theatre. The service took place in the morning, presumably so that his fellow actors could attend before their afternoon performance.

THE LOSS OF HIS SON
When Hamnet Shakespeare was born, William would have been pleased that the Shakespeare family name would continue. But he died, aged eleven, and was buried in Stratford on 11 August 1596. We have nothing to tell us what his parents thought or felt when they loss their son. The bare records in the Stratford baptism and burial registers are all there is to mark out his life. The child' s mane, Hamnet, was not uncommon in Stratford at the time. But it must also remind us of another name-Hamnet, prince of Denmark and the doomed hero of one of Shakespeare' s greatest plays, probably written in 1600, just four tears after his son sets out to average his father' s murder. It is perhaps not too fanciful to suppose that when he was writing Hamlet. Shakespeare would have been painfully aware of the loss of his son, Hamnet, whose death marked the end of the Shakespeare line.

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