Anne Hathaway’s Cottage

This photograph of Emily was taken outside Anne Hathaway’s Cottage in Shottery, a small village just outside Stratford-upon-Avon. We had come to explore the places connected with William Shakespeare, but this house tells a story from before the plays, the Globe Theatre, and the fame. It takes us back to Shakespeare as a young man falling in love.

Anne Hathaway was born around 1556 and grew up here at Hewlands Farm, the home of the Hathaway family. Parts of the house date to the 15th century, and over generations it was enlarged into the substantial timber-framed farmhouse we see today. Despite being known as a “cottage”, it eventually contained twelve rooms.

Anne was about eight years older than William Shakespeare. In 1582, when Shakespeare was only eighteen, the couple married. Anne was already pregnant with their first child, Susanna, who was born the following year. Their twins, Hamnet and Judith, followed in 1585.

Tradition holds that Shakespeare would have walked from Stratford to Shottery while courting Anne. Whether every romantic story later attached to their courtship is true is impossible to know, but this was unquestionably the Hathaway family home and part of the landscape of Shakespeare’s young life.

The house remained in the Hathaway family for centuries. Descendants continued living there until the late 19th century, when the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust acquired the property in 1892. Remarkably, members of the Hathaway family were still associated with caring for the cottage after it became a visitor attraction.

There is something particularly appealing about Anne Hathaway’s Cottage. Shakespeare’s later life would become extraordinary, but there was nothing extraordinary about the beginning of this story. There was simply a young William Shakespeare, a young Anne Hathaway, two families living near Stratford—and a relationship that began long before anyone knew that Shakespeare’s name would still be recognized more than four centuries later.