Shakespeare is often thought of as the great playwright of love, but his actual view of romance is far bleaker than the popular image suggests. His plays celebrate the feverish, all-consuming passion of new love—especially in the comedies and in Romeo and Juliet—but almost never depict happy, long-term marriages. The marriages that do appear in his works are, with very few exceptions, miserable, marked by suspicion, silence, or outright violence. This pattern is striking enough that it raises a question: what is Shakespeare actually telling us about love and commitment?
Shakespeare’s Own Marriage
When Shakespeare was 18, he married Anne Hathaway, who was 26, in Stratford-upon-Avon. Multiple pieces of biographical evidence suggest the marriage was not a happy one:
They had three children in rapid succession and then no more, which was unusual in a period when families typically had as many children as possible, especially given high child mortality.
Shakespeare moved to London to pursue his theatrical career but did not bring his wife and children with him—unusual for men in the theater world at the time, who typically relocated their families.
His will, drafted when he was gravely ill, initially left nothing to his wife and addressed her without any term of endearment, in stark contrast to the language found in other wills of the period. An interlinear addition left her only “the second best bed.”
The famous sonnets—among the greatest love poems in the English language—are addressed to a young man and a “dark lady,” not to Anne Hathaway.
His gravestone carries a curse against anyone who disturbs his bones, which some speculate was intended to prevent his wife from being buried with him, though this interpretation is contested.
Counterarguments exist: perhaps the couple simply could not have more children, perhaps Anne refused to move to London, perhaps the second best bed was their shared marital bed kept for sentimental reasons, and perhaps the legal convention of the widow’s share made it unnecessary to name her explicitly in the will. Scholars like Germaine Greer have argued for a happy marriage, but the cumulative weight of the evidence points the other way.
What Shakespeare did do consistently was send money back to Stratford and invest in real estate there, including New Place, the second-best house in town, for his wife and parents. This suggests he was not simply abandoning his family, but the emotional distance remains notable.
The Pattern in Shakespeare’s Plays
Shakespeare’s comedies end in marriage, but the marriages themselves are almost never shown in their aftermath. The plays are about the thrill of falling in love—the pursuit, the obstacles, the desperate desire—not about what comes after the wedding.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream: the lovers are literally drugged by a love potion, and their attachments are portrayed as fungible and arbitrary.
As You Like It: the brilliant, witty Rosalind ends up with Orlando, who is considerably less intellectually gifted—Shakespeare gives the audience no reason to believe this mismatch will be resolved happily.
Twelfth Night: the subtle, complex Viola marries the neurotic Orsino, with no indication this will work long-term.
Julius Caesar: Brutus shuts his wife Portia out of his inner life, and their marriage is represented as strained and unhappy.
Othello: Othello murders Desdemona, the woman he loves, driven by jealousy.
The Winter’s Tale: Leontes destroys his marriage by wrongly accusing his wife Hermione of infidelity, for no rational reason.
The few marriages that are depicted as genuinely intimate are troubling in their own way:
Macbeth: Macbeth and Lady Macbeth share a deeply intimate bond—they call each other by affectionate nicknames, share their darkest secrets, and conspire together. It is arguably the most fully realized long-term marriage in Shakespeare, but it is a marriage built on shared criminality and it disintegrates under the weight of their crimes.
Much Ado About Nothing: Beatrice and Benedick begin as mutual antagonists who constantly mock each other, and the play suggests that a marriage built on friction and intellectual sparring might actually sustain itself over time—a rare note of cautious optimism.
Romeo and Juliet stand out as the one case where Shakespeare seems to encourage the audience to believe that two people have found their one irreplaceable match. The play’s extraordinary love poetry elevates the relationship from ordinary romance to something mythic. Yet it is a tragedy—they die before the marriage can be tested by time. Stephen Greenblatt notes that he personally experienced this feeling of meeting someone who was “not fungible, absolute, once and for all,” and that he happens to be married to that person, but he acknowledges this is rare.
What Shakespeare Is Actually Saying About Love
Shakespeare is not issuing a warning against passionate love. He is not telling audiences to be moderate or cautious. Instead, he is doing something more complex:
He is capturing the overwhelming, irrational, transformative experience of falling in love—an experience so powerful that there is no comparable feeling in life.
He is also being honest that this feeling does not reliably survive the transition to long-term domestic life. In his cultural context, this was almost inevitable: most marriages among the propertied classes were arranged, divorce was virtually nonexistent, and people were expected to simply endure whatever union they were in.
His implicit advice, insofar as there is one, is: when you feel that passionate love, do not overthink it. Indulge in it. You are lucky to feel it. You have no choice but to submit to it. Do not waste the experience by worrying about what the marriage will look like decades later.
The absence of depicted happy marriages is not a moral lesson but a reflection of Shakespeare’s artistic focus. He is drawn to the moment of maximum intensity—the threshold experience—not to the long, slow work of sustaining a relationship.
Women, Men, and the Source of Marital Failure
Shakespeare’s women are frequently portrayed as more capable, more sober, and more morally grounded than the men they are paired with. Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, Desdemona in Othello, Portia in Julius Caesar, and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing are all in various ways superior to their male counterparts.
Yet the marriages still fail, and the failure typically originates with the men. Greenblatt argues that Shakespeare believed there was something fundamentally disturbed in men when it came to long-term intimate relationships:
Leontes’s jealousy is irrational and self-destructive.
Othello’s insecurity makes him susceptible to Iago’s manipulation.
Brutus’s emotional repression poisons his marriage.
Macbeth’s ambition, triggered in part by Lady Macbeth’s sexual taunting, destroys them both.
Lady Macbeth is an interesting case: she is portrayed as the more masculine of the two, urging her husband to manhood and violence. One could argue that the villainy in Macbeth comes from the masculine side of their partnership, or alternatively that their unusually close marriage is precisely what makes their shared destruction possible—they are both on the same page, and that page is catastrophe.
Shakespeare’s Sonnets and His Patron
Shakespeare’s sonnets include a sequence of love poems addressed to a young man, widely believed to be dedicated to his patron, the Earl of Southampton. The language is intensely romantic:
“Nay, if you read this line, remember not / The hand that writ it, for I love you so, / That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot, / If thinking on me then should make you woe.”
Greenblatt argues that this language reflects genuine romantic and erotic feeling, not merely conventional male friendship. While men in Elizabethan England did write affectionately to one another and shared beds without stigma, the intensity of Shakespeare’s sonnets goes well beyond the norm. Comparable language appears in King James I’s letters to his favorite, the Duke of Buckingham.
Homosexuality was technically a criminal offense punishable by death in Elizabethan England, but prosecutions were virtually nonexistent. Greenblatt suggests that same-sex romantic and physical relationships were far more common and less stigmatized in practice than the official moral code would indicate, especially before the hardening of attitudes in the post-Victorian era.
Shakespeare’s Departure from His Family
Shakespeare left his wife and three young children in Stratford when he was approximately 19 and moved to London to pursue his career in the theater. Greenblatt resists the word “abandoned”:
He sent money back consistently and invested in property for his family.
There is no evidence that Anne Hathaway and the children were destitute; they eventually moved into New Place, one of the finest houses in Stratford.
Greenblatt is reluctant to make a strong moral judgment about Shakespeare’s choice. He notes that many modern professionals live apart from their families for career reasons without this necessarily indicating a bad marriage. He also pushes back against the idea that great artists must be moral role models in every aspect of their lives.
At the same time, Greenblatt acknowledges that the departure is consistent with the broader picture of an unhappy marriage, and he expresses gratitude that Shakespeare followed his creative calling rather than remaining in Stratford as a glover in his father’s shop—a fate that would have deprived the world of his works.
