Michael Hart, as also to many of his Stratford friends and companions, no mention compliments or enriches Anne Hathaway, save that single line interpolated after the will had been completed, and which simply says: "I give unto my wife my second-best bed, with the furniture." By inference we are placed in the double dilemma of imagining either that the wife had been forgotten by her husband, while so many others had been remembered, or had been purposely punished thus for shrewish practices which lingered in her liege lord's memory. Men do not so easily forget their wives as to leave them only an interlined mention in their wills, and of the two hypotheses that which writes down Mrs. Shakespeare as a shrew has some semblance of foundation.
A clear case of bearding the lion in his den was made out when the second wife of Sir Edward Coke, the British lawyer, undertook, and most successfully, the systematic henpecking of her since illustrious husband. Lady Hatton, the woman in this case, proved herself more than a match for Coke's none-too-lamb-like temper, and worried everything but his life out of him during a long-drawn-out term of nearly forty years. In fact, his persistency in not dying was, itself, an aggravating feature; as is proved by her return, with every mark of disappointment, from a journey undertaken suddenly, one day, when the report of his death had stimulated her hopes of capturing his mansion and other effects. When eighty years old this resplendent victim of the matrimonial confidence game "felt himself alone on the earth, suspected by his King, deserted by his friends, and detested by his wife." What a melancholy and humiliating confession from the lips of one who had been Lord Chief Justice of England—and all because of his marrying a shrew!
Dr. Andrew Bell, who endowed with £120,000 an institution for the education of youth in the city of St. Andrews, receives the following "first-rate notice" of his domestic life and connubial infelicities from the pen of Thomas de Quincy, the opium eater: "Most men have their enemies and calumniators. Dr. Bell had his, who happened, rather indecorously, to be his wife, from whom he was legally separated—divorced a mensâ et thoro. This legal separation did not prevent the lady from persecuting the unhappy doctor with everlasting letters endorsed outside with records of her enmity and spite. Sometimes she endorsed her epistles thus: 'To that supreme of rogues, who looks the hang-dog that he is. Doctor (such a doctor!) Andrew Bell.' Or, again: 'To the ape of apes and the knave of knaves, who is recorded to have once paid a debt—but a small one, you may be sure, it was that he selected for this wonderful experiment—in fact, it was 4½d. Had it been on the other side of 6d., he must have died before he could have achieved so dreadful a sacrifice.' Many others, most ingeniously varied in the style of abuse,
