She is assumed to have grown up in the farmhouse that was the Hathaway family home, which is located at Shottery and is now a major tourist attraction for the village.

He died in September 1581 and left his daughter the sum of ten marks or £6 13s 4d (six pounds, thirteen shillings and fourpence) to be paid "at the day of her marriage".

For a time it was believed that this view was supported by documents from the Episcopal Register at Worcester, which records in Latin the issuing of a wedding licence to "William Shakespeare" and one "Anne Whateley" of Temple Grafton.

The following day, Fulk Sandells and John Richardson, friends of the Hathaway family from Stratford, signed a surety of £40 as a financial guarantee for the wedding of "William Shagspere and Anne Hathwey".

Harris believed that "Shakespeare's loathing for his wife was measureless" on account of this forced marriage, and that this was the spur to his decision to leave Stratford and pursue a career in the theatre.

[5] However, according to Stanley Wells, writing in the Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, most modern scholars take the view that the name Whateley was "almost certainly the result of clerical error".

Examining the surviving records of Stratford-upon-Avon and nearby villages in the 1580s, Greer argues that two facts stand out quite prominently: first, that a large number of brides went to the altar already pregnant; and second, that autumn, not spring, was the most common time to get married.

Apart from documents related to her marriage and the birth of her children, the only recorded reference to Hathaway in her lifetime is a curious bequest in the will of her father's shepherd, Thomas Whittington, who died in 1601.

Germaine Greer suggests that the bequests were the result of agreements made at the time of Susanna's marriage to Dr Hall: that she (and thus her husband) inherited the bulk of Shakespeare's estate.

[7] The National Archives states that "beds and other pieces of household furniture were often the sole bequest to a wife" and that, customarily, the children would receive the best items and the widow the second-best.

Author Stephen Greenblatt in Will in the World, suggests that as Shakespeare lay dying, "he tried to forget his wife and then remembered her with the second-best bed.

The inscription states, "Here lyeth the body of Anne wife of William Shakespeare who departed this life the 6th day of August 1623 being of the age of 67 years."

[4] One of Shakespeare's sonnets, number 145, has been claimed to make reference to Anne Hathaway: the words 'hate away' may be a pun (in Elizabethan pronunciation) on 'Hathaway'.

Emma Severn's novel Anne Hathaway, or, Shakespeare in Love (1845) portrays an idealised romance and happy marriage in an idyllic rural Stratford.

[18] By the early 20th century a more negative image of Hathaway emerged, following the publication of Frank Harris's books on Shakespeare's love life, and after the discovery that Anne was already pregnant when the couple married.

"[19] An adulterous Anne is imagined by James Joyce's character Stephen Dedalus, who makes a number of references to Hathaway.

[20] In Ulysses, he speculates that the gift of the infamous "second-best bed" was a punishment for her adultery,[21] and earlier in the same novel, Dedalus analyses Shakespeare's marriage with a pun: "He chose badly?

When Anne comes to London, the couple use the bed for wild sexual adventures, in which they engage in role-playing fantasies based on his plays.

The Connie Willis short story "Winter's Tale," which combines factual information about Anne Hathaway with a fictitious Shakespeare identity theory, also characterises the nature of the relationship as loving and the bequeath of the second-best bed as romantically significant.

Anne Hathaway appears in Neil Gaiman's comic book section "The Tempest", part of The Sandman series.

Gaiman's interpretation suggests that Anne deliberately became pregnant to force her husband to marry her, but the context implies that neither of them ultimately regret their decision.

Through her long-running solo show Mrs Shakespeare, Will's first and last love (1989) American actress-writer Yvonne Hudson has had a long relationship with both the historical and dramatic Anne Hathaway.

This allows Anne to have at least a country wife's understanding of her educated spouse's work as she quotes sonnets and soliloquies to convey her feelings.

Avril Rowland's Mrs Shakespeare (2005) depicts Anne as a multi-tasking "superwoman" who runs the home efficiently while also writing her husband's plays in a businesslike partnership with him as her promoter/performer.

The same situation occurs in Harry Turtledove's alternate-history novel Ruled Britannia (2002), in which Shakespeare seeks and actually wins a divorce from Hathaway to marry his new girlfriend.

As he finds his true calling in writing, Anne's own literary skills flower, leading to a secret collaboration that makes William Shakespeare the foremost playwright in Elizabethan England.

[citation needed] She is portrayed by Liza Tarbuck in the BBC Two comedy series Upstart Crow, which follows the writing and preparation to stage Romeo and Juliet after William has gained some early career notoriety for his poetry, Henry VI and Richard III.

A poetry anthology about Anne Hathaway, titled Anne-thology, was released by Broken Sleep Books in 2023, edited by Paul Edmondson, Aaron Kent, Chris Laoutaris, and Katherine Scheil, featuring poetry by poets such as Carol Ann Duffy, U. G. Világos, Roger Pringle, John Agard, and Imtiaz Dharker.