Title: Anne Hathaway (wife of Shakespeare)
Content:  Anne Hathaway (1556 – 6 August 1623) was the wife of William Shakespeare, the English poet, playwright and actor. They were married in 1582, when Hathaway was 26 years old and Shakespeare was 18. She outlived her husband by seven years. Very little is known about her life beyond a few references in legal documents. Her personality and relationship to Shakespeare have been the subject of much speculation by many historians and writers.
Title: Shakespeare (surname)
Content: Anne Hathaway (wife of Shakespeare) (c. undefined 1555–c. undefined 1623), his wife ; Richard Shakespeare (1490–c. undefined 1561), his paternal grandfather ; John Shakespeare (c. undefined 1531–1601), his father ; Mary Shakespeare (c. undefined 1537–1608), his mother ; Gilbert Shakespeare (1566–c. undefined 1612), his brother ; Joan Shakespeare (1569–1646), his sister ; Edmund Shakespeare (1580–1607), his youngest brother and an actor ; Susanna Shakespeare (c. undefined 1583–1649), his daughter ; Judith Shakespeare (c. undefined 1585–c. undefined 1662), his daughter ; Hamnet Shakespeare (c. undefined 1585–c. undefined 1596), his son 
Title: Anne Hathaway (wife of Shakespeare)
Content:  career in the theatre. 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". Germaine Greer argues that the age difference between Shakespeare and Hathaway is not evidence that he was forced to marry her, but that he was the one who pursued her. Women such as the orphaned Hathaway often stayed at home to care for younger siblings and married in their late twenties. As a husband Shakespeare offered few prospects; his family had fallen into financial ruin, while Hathaway, from a family 
Title: Anne Hathaway (wife of Shakespeare)
Content:  Hathaway married Shakespeare in November 1582 while already pregnant with the couple's first child, to whom she gave birth six months later. The age difference, added to Hathaway's antenuptial pregnancy, has been employed by some historians as evidence that it was a "shotgun wedding", forced on a somewhat reluctant Shakespeare by the Hathaway family. There is, however, no other evidence for this inference. 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, 
Title: Sexuality of William Shakespeare
Content:  At the age of 18, Shakespeare married the 26-year-old Anne Hathaway. The consistory court of the Diocese of Worcester issued a marriage licence on 27 November 1582. Two of Hathaway's neighbours posted bonds the next day as surety that there were no impediments to the marriage. The couple may have arranged the ceremony in some haste, since the Worcester chancellor allowed the marriage banns to be read once instead of the usual three times. Hathaway's pregnancy could have been the reason for this. Six months after the marriage, she gave birth to a daughter, Susanna. Twins, son Hamnet and daughter Judith, followed almost two years later. Stephen Greenblatt argues that Shakespeare probably initially loved Hathaway, supporting this by referring to the theory that a passage in 
Title: Anne Whateley
Content:  Anne Whateley is the name given to a woman who is sometimes supposed to have been the intended wife of William Shakespeare before he married Anne Hathaway. Most scholars believe that Whateley never existed, and that her name in a document concerning Shakespeare's marriage is merely a clerical error. However, several writers on Shakespeare have taken the view that she was a real rival to Hathaway for Shakespeare's hand. She has also appeared in imaginative literature on Shakespeare and in Shakespeare authorship speculations. Shakespeare's biographer Russell A. Fraser describes her as "a ghost", "haunting the edges of Shakespeare's story". She has also been called "the first of the Shakespearean Dark Ladies".
Title: Anne Hathaway (wife of Shakespeare)
Content:  the day of her husband's funeral. 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 romantic comedy film Shakespeare in Love provides an example of the negative view, depicting the marriage as a cold and loveless bond that Shakespeare must escape to find love in London. 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. A similarly loveless 
Title: The Beard of Avon
Content: William Shakspere – A lad of Stratford. In his early thirties. Simple, honest, very appealing fellow. Possessor of hidden gifts. Poses as a playwright under the stage name "William Shakespeare". ; Geoffrey Dunderbread – The Company's slutty Boy player, and leading lady of the Globe Theatre. Shakspere's confidante. Plays the roles of Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra, Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, and Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew. ; Edward De Vere - 17th Earl of Oxford. in his forties. Wicked, charming, sexy, brilliant. A closet writer. In a "secret" homosexual affair with Henry Wriothesley ; Henry Wriothesley – 20s. Young and beautiful. Third Earl of Southampton. ; Anne Hathaway – Shakspere's wife. Lively, illiterate, promiscuous. When abandoned by her husband, she goes to London disguised as a whore. She seduces de Vere and becomes Shakspere's "Shadow woman". ; Queen Elizabeth I – Queen of England. Between forty and sixty. A sacred monster. Wants a boyfriend. ; John Heminge – manager of an acting company ; Henry Condel – partner of Heminge 
Title: Anne Hathaway (wife of Shakespeare)
Content:  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". Frank Harris, in The Man Shakespeare (1909), argued that these documents are evidence that Shakespeare was involved with two women. He had chosen to marry one, Anne Whateley, but when this became known he was immediately forced by Hathaway's family to marry their pregnant relative. Harris believed that "Shakespeare's loathing for his wife was measureless" because of his entrapment by her and that this was the spur to his decision to leave Stratford and pursue 
Title: Dark Lady (Shakespeare)
Content:  Jonathan Bate in his The Genius of Shakespeare (2008) considers the case for both Lanier and Luce, before suggesting his own "pleasing fancy" that the unnamed, "low-born" but "witty and talented" wife of Italian linguist John Florio (and sister of poet Samuel Daniel ) was the Dark Lady, the lover of not only Shakespeare but also of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, who was at the time the patron of both the linguist and the playwright. Bate acknowledges the possibility that the sonnets may be no more than Shakespeare's "knowing imaginings", rather than allusions to actual events. Aubrey Burl, a fellow of the Society 

Question: what was shakespeare's wife called?
Answer: Anne Hathaway.