The Second-Best Bed

So you’ve invited a new friend or the boss or perhaps a new girl or boyfriend round to your place for the first time. There’s a knock on the front door, you open the door and invite the person in and stand to the side attempting a look of humble modesty as they come in and stare at the huge and expensive bed right in the middle of your front room. Nowadays, of course, the person would probably edge back out of the front door and run for it.

But in the 1500s and early 1600s, the position of that bed would be considered completely normal according to Alexandra Hewitt of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. I’ve no idea but perhaps Anne Hathaway was (not literally) swept off her feet by this sight as in those days the best bed was placed in the most conspicuous of places. 

Why was this? Hewitt explains that costly beds were displayed on the ground floor that was usually used for business, dining, hosting, and leisure. Beds in this space were rarely slept in. In many urban middling and gentry homes, the parlour was the primary exhibition space. It was the main room in which to receive visitors. Much like displaying your new 55 inch tv, these beds were conspicuously positioned in places where friends, family, neighbours and visitors were most likely to see them. Only the most distinguished guests were permitted to sleep in such beds, and it is unlikely that they were used by the master and mistress of the household. They would have been more inclined to sleep in the second most expensive bed in the house - the second-best bed - usually positioned on an upper floor.

Shakespeare's second-best bed

Which brings me to the point of this article as it was well known that Shakespeare left his wife, Anne, the second best bed in his last Will and Testament. Lena Cowen Orlin, author of The Private Life of William Shakespeare (OUP) is one of the scholars who has questioned this viewpoint thus:

‘One of the Shakespeare myths is that we have proof he despised his wife: when he died, he left her nothing more than “my second-best bed.” Perhaps written at Shakespeare’s deathbed, the document was full of revisions and additions. It was thought that the original revealed two guilty secrets. First, the bequest to Anne Shakespeare was inserted like a grudging afterthought. Second, she received not a brown best bed but a second-best one.

It was suspected that with the bed Shakespeare disinherited Anne, as if he had cut her off with a shilling. This Shakespeare could not do. Dower law ensured that for the length of her life Anne received one-third of all income from the substantial properties the couple had purchased during their marriage. As other wills show, dower had to be invoked in order to be revoked and, by declining to mention it, Shakespeare let it stand.

Shakespeare's will

In the wills of his time, beds and their accoutrements appeared frequently and were often pictured in loving detail. Since Shakespeare does not describe the bedframe, mattress, sheets, pillows, or coverlet, his family undoubtedly already knew which bed he meant. A best bed might have a full headboard and a mattress stuffed with feathers, while the second bed would have a half-headboard and a mattress stuffed with flocks. Since best beds were reserved for guests, it could be that Shakespeare’s second-best bed was the marital bed.’

Adam Johnson from Heritage Will Writing reports that new scientific evidence produced on the 400th anniversary of the Bard’s death including X-ray and infra-red analysis by a team from The National Archives has revealed that the clause was inserted a month before he died in April, 1616, aged 52. Experts believe this was a touching act of love by a man knowing he was dying. Specifically mentioning the second best bed where the couple slept together, made love and where his children were born is now seen by many scholars as a gift from the heart.

Anne Hathaway

'Item I gyve unto my wief my second best bed…’
(from Shakespeare’s will)

The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, cliff-tops, seas
where he would dive for pearls. My lover’s words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses
on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme
to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.
Some nights I dreamed he’d written me, the bed
a page beneath his writer’s hands. Romance
and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.
In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,
dribbling their prose. My living laughing love –
I hold him in the casket of my widow’s head
as he held me upon that next best bed.

                                                                     Carol Ann Duffy

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.