Portrait of Anne Hathaway a year before Nicholas Rowe published the first biography of Shakespeare in which her family name was given. Park Honan also takes the view that the drawing "is less likely to be an authentic portrait than a playful sketch of Anne Shakespeare in her Elizabethan cap and ruff." Portrait of Anne Hathaway The only surviving image that may depict Anne Hathaway (1555/56 - 6 August 1623), the wife of William Shakespeare, is a portrait line-drawing made by Sir Nathaniel Curzon in 1708, referred to as "Shakespear's Consort". It was probably traced from a lost Elizabethan original. The drawing is currently
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