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LONDON — Fresh analysis by a British scholar of a long-forgotten fragment of a letter addressed to the "Good Mrs Shakspaire" suggests that the renowned playwright William Shakespeare might not have been such a distant husband at all - and that he and his wife, Anne Hathaway, may have lived together in London during a period when the Bard wrote some of his greatest plays, including "Hamlet" and "Othello."
The study represents a major reworking of not only the life of Shakespeare, but also the "lives of the Shakespeares" as a married couple - with the wife assuming more presence and agency.
The scholar, Matthew Steggle, presents new evidence of where the playwright and his wife might have lived in early-17th-century London, on what is today Little Trinity Lane in the central city, a street that still exists, just across the Thames from the reconstructed Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, where his plays are still performed.
And while the exact address is unknown and the home long gone, if the research holds, it may offer future pilgrims a new waypoint to imagine the life and times of the playwright and his partner. The former Shakespeare home is today a Westin hotel.
The new work reads like a detective yarn, set in the Elizabethan era, with all the twists and turns, blind alleys and surprise reveals of a lively novel.
Steggle, a professor of early modern English literature at the University of Bristol, told The Washington Post he spent eight years trying to piece together the story. It serves as a counterpoint to an older narrative that imagines the couple mostly living apart in an unhappy marriage, with Anne - thought by many historians to be illiterate and uncultured - stashed out in Stratford-upon-Avon, while her husband, Will, was living large as a lodger in swinging 1600s London.
Scholars have long speculated about the relationship. There is a single Shakespeare sonnet that appears to contain an enigmatic reference to Anne.
The traditional interpretation of the marriage, mostly embraced for the past 200 years, is based in part on the lack of any evidence that the couple ever resided together in London - bolstered by Shakespeare's "mean will," in which he left his wife the "second best bed."
In Steggle's new analysis, published in the journal Shakespeare on Wednesday, the anniversary of Shakespeare's celebrated birthday in 1564, the scholar concludes: "For Shakespeare biographers who favour the narrative of the ‘disastrous marriage' - in fact, for all Shakespeare biographers - the Hereford document should be a horrible, difficult problem," referring to the town where the letter was found.
Shakespeare scholars are calling the research revelatory and important.
"It's a very significant piece of analysis. Very careful. Very judicious. The story it tells is very plausible, and the implications are huge," said Laurie Maguire, professor of Shakespeare at the University of Oxford, who did not participate in the study.
James Shapiro, an English professor at Columbia University and author of "1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare," said that if Steggle turns out to be right - and the Shakespeares lived together in London - "it will overturn many accepted beliefs."
But, Shapiro cautioned, "There is no smoking gun here - but plenty of plausible evidence, connecting dots."
As told by Steggle, the story begins with a fragment of a 17th-century letter addressed to a "Good Mrs Shakspaire," concerning her husband's dealings - likely as a trustee - for a fatherless apprentice named John Butte or Butts.
The subject was money. Though some of the lines are lost, Steggle said that the letter essentially read, "Your husband owes us some money and if he doesn't pay, you should."
Steggle found that a John Butts is recorded in church records, as a fatherless apprentice, in London in 1599 and 1607.
The letter suggests the couple "dwelt in trinitie lane." There was a Trinity Lane in London at the time but not in Stratford.
Steggle points out that the unknown author of the letter does not ask Anne to intercede with her husband, but actually to do the paying herself: "like Adriana in ‘The Comedy of Errors' who undertakes to pay a debt on her husband's behalf, even though she was previously unaware of it: ‘Knowing how the debt grows, I will pay it.'"
The letter was found in two pieces with script on both sides and was originally discovered in 1978 in the binding of a very old book in the Hereford Cathedral Library by the honorary librarian, F.C. Morgan, who "published a dry and understated note" about his find, Steggle said.
The fragmentary letter was found preserved inside a 1608 book by Johannes Piscator, an almost 1,000-page tome dissecting biblical texts.
The letter was not tucked into the pages as bookmark or memento but was part of the book's very construction, as strips of wastepaper deployed as padding to prevent the text block from chafing against the binding.
The Shakespeare letter, therefore, was saved from the bin and recycled, and even more remarkable, in Steggle's telling, the Piscator book was originally published by Richard Field, who was Shakespeare's neighbor in Stratford and his first printer.
The analysis assumes the letter, as scrap, might have found its way - somehow - from Anne's possession to a book binding.
In his report, Steggle adds that "the handwriting expert Guillaume Coatalen has suggested to me, based on a fresh look at the handwriting and spelling of each hand, a most likely date range from around 1590 to 1620."
Could the letter turn out to be one of the "most exciting documents in the Shakespeare world," as Maguire, the Oxford professor, imagines?
Shapiro, the professor at Columbia, said: "I suspect that it will take some time for the smoke to clear and a new scholarly consensus to be arrived at. If Steggle is correct - and that this Mr. and Mrs. Shakespeare are indeed Anne Hathaway and William Shakespeare - it will overturn many accepted beliefs."
But he would like to see more corroborative evidence of London residency - from a house of worship or a tax collector, maybe.
Still unknown or unanswered: Did Anne come to London with the couple's two daughters, or did they try that most modern of compromises - the commuter marriage?
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