Anne Whateley daughter of the well-known seafarer Anthony Jenkinson. She was living a secluded life among the nuns of the Order of St. Clare when she met Shakespeare. They fell in love, and Anne was about to leave the order to marry him when Hathaway revealed her pregnancy. Her authorship can be deduced from the sonnets, which she wrote as gifts to Shakespeare. They describe the history of her spiritual relationship with him. Hathaway is the Dark Lady of the sonnets, while Shakespeare himself is the Fair Youth. Their intimate friendship continued after his marriage to Hathaway; its deepening spirituality is explored
Anne Whateley the wedding of "William Shagspere and Anne Hathwey". The entry in the register was discovered in the late nineteenth century by Reverend T.P. Wadley. Various explanations were offered. Initially it was assumed that Whateley was an alternative surname for Anne Hathaway herself. Wadley believed that it was probably an alias, used by Hathaway in order to keep the date of the marriage secret to obscure the fact that she was already pregnant. Another suggestion was that Anne Hathaway might legitimately have used the name, either because her father Richard Hathaway was in fact her step-father, her mother having previously been