Blessed is the womb .sx In the early summer of 1585 , a short time after celebrating his twenty-first birthday , William Shakespeare left home .sx Forsaking his wife and young family - or so his wife Anne felt - Shakespeare was quitting the crowded provincial home in Henley Street where they had been living with his parents and brothers .sx He might never return .sx But Anne would be well provided for by her mother-in-law , while not much more than a mile away , in Shottery , her brothers and half-brothers ( her father had died four years before ) were as concerned as ever for her safety and well-being .sx They had on a previous occasion , in 1582 , pledged large sums - half the value of a fair-sized property - as surety when their twenty-six-year-old kinswoman was betrothed to the eighteen-year-old Stratford yeoman's son who had made her pregnant .sx Now , while he was away , they would guard her progeny as well as her honour .sx The eldest son of Mary and John Shakespeare had a highly complicated nature .sx William had many feminine traits which had not , unusually at that time in a young man's upbringing , been suppressed .sx Having borne and lost two daughters before he was conceived , his mother Mary had in large part expected - dreaded as well as hoped - that her third child would be a girl .sx Like Henry VIII , John Shakespeare , a glover , having fathered two female offspring , was impatient for a male heir .sx William at his birth was acclaimed and embraced by his father , while his mother wished on him a residue of the guilt , grief and longing she felt for her lost daughters .sx These feelings became powerfully and unconsciously embedded in his nature :sx no wonder that later the poet will cry for lost children , at the very end for lost daughters .sx Each time his mother was pregnant again , on some five occasions at least after his own birth , the son had strongly identified with her , almost as if the child were his own .sx His father , on the other hand , vigilant for signs of effeminacy in his son , had applauded every manifestation in William of aggressive , competitive behaviour ; masculine drive , warlike vigour ; cynicism and cruelty bred of the extremes of success and failure .sx Until he was twelve years old William did not experience directly any of the pain and woe of the decline in his family's fortunes , but he had seen and heard their effects ; had seen his mother's modest inheritance whittled away by his father's prodigal behaviour and his reckless transactions , however often these stemmed from a good and helpful nature .sx Dwarfed by his father's overreaching , William had stood often in his shadow , observing his effect on others , especially on his mother .sx The family was reduced to the status of outcasts , although not forced from the Henley Street home , and William , at twelve or thirteen the eldest son , had placed on him an even heavier burden of expectation than before :sx to recoup the family's wealth and restore its broken honour .sx So when , after a three or four years' absence from home , this warm-blooded and lusty " mother's glass " ( in the words of Sonnet 3 ) , who called back for his father the lovely April of his Mary's prime , had responded to that father's desperate need for help by getting big with child the daughter of their old friend and neighbour Richard Hathaway , John Shakespeare saw it as an act of betrayal .sx Once when he was in debt John Shakespeare had shored up that same Hathaway ; now , considering Anne's advanced age , what William had done seemed a further and unnecessary deed of charity .sx Crushed by the growth in his father of a dangerous , self-pitying invective , by his mother's silent reproaches , William's nature had become rawly exposed .sx A " sensual fault " had ambushed his young days , and he was suddenly and overwhelmingly " shamed by that which I bring forth " .sx In the extreme sensitivity to guilt which had been awoken , he saw his mother's virtue " rudely strumpeted " , for which he took the blame .sx Guilt from this first pregnancy had stuck to William Shakespeare , although he tried later and unceasingly to detach it from him , or dissolve it .sx It was as well he did not manage this , even when , twenty years later , he wrote Measure for Measure , in which he was able to tackle the premature pregnancy head-on .sx Denied , or perhaps ultimately uninterested in , confession to a priest , he came over the years to turn his plays into secret and disguised confessionals , in which he could play both confessor and penitent .sx In Measure for Measure he could play the Duke , the " great member " , whose phallic justice is shown at the end of the play as re-entering the female city of Vienna with the power of vaginal penetration .sx He could play the fornicator Claudio , encountering darkness as a bride ; and the puritan hypocrite Angelo , unshaped and rendered " unpregnant " by the act of copulation .sx He could play Isabella , owner of herself , paragon of virtue , who will not compromise with Angelo's pent-up lust even to save her brother's life .sx But joy mingled with shame in Shakespeare's dual nature .sx He could live simultaneously at both ends of the same experience .sx Anne's first pregnancy and the birth of their daughter Susanna had been joyful , too :sx he had found self-approval in being a husband , with a wife and child .sx For Shakespeare , women were absolutes , like elements in nature :sx revealed or hidden , forward or retiring , their natures might be evil or good , but still were absolutes .sx It was men who changed .sx And best men were moulded out of faults .sx With Anne a nursing mother for the first three years of their marriage Shakespeare had felt secure , as the childhood feelings he had had about his mother's pregnancies were reawakened .sx Anne was nurtured and protected by both Shakespeare and his mother as few women were in Elizabethan times .sx Even before he was aware of its creative implications , Shakespeare had absorbed the whole mythology , as well as practical aspects , of child-bearing .sx He suffered from womb-envy to some degree , and in his future writing there was always , underlying his creative effort , a connection with the huge , physically creative act of which he would never be capable .sx When in his later self - projection as the Duke in Measure for Measure he proposes to Isabella that she join his plan to " frame " Mariana in bed with Angelo , he thinks , instinctively , in terms of conception and child-bearing .sx Will she be able to " carry " this , he asks Isabella .sx At the end of the play the " motion " the Duke has towards Isabella which imports her good , so that " What's mine is yours , and what is yours is mine " , is significantly sexual as well as matrimonial .sx The medical terminology of the time linked the brain to the womb :sx cavities in the brain were little wombs or bellies - ventricles .sx For 'teeming' Renaissance minds it was natural to relate the speculative enquiry as to man's nature to wider religious accounts , notably that of Genesis , but also to stories of the Hellenic gods , most spectacularly to the birth of Athene , goddess of Wisdom , from the head of Zeus .sx Works of literature were likened to newborn children , but with the difference that they were born with the immediate power of speech .sx " My brain I'll prove the female to my soul " , says Richard , son of the Black Prince , conceiving his brain as a woman ready to receive sperm in the act of coition .sx Shakespeare had encountered , during the first weeks of Anne's pregnancy with first-born Susanna , intimations of all the future black ink of shame and stress - as well as some relief at authorizing his trespass .sx But he had also felt resentment at being 'hooked' by an older woman .sx With her second pregnancy the strong emotions he had felt were doubled ; the creative ventricles of his brain had been stretched to bursting point .sx Yet as the belly of his spouse swelled abnormally large with visible evidence of twins , Shakespeare had also felt terror .sx Without modern medical knowledge as reassurance , his apprehension at the prodigality of nature deepened as the moment of birth approached .sx For each pregnancy there had been compensations .sx They had then none of the puritan or later Victorian inhibitions about intercourse during pregnancy , and this was a time when Anne's sexuality had matched her procreative energy - although she also had a two-year-old tugging at her attention .sx In The Winter's Tale Hermione's pregnancy is to her a source of acute erotic sensation , into which Leontes' jealousy feeds .sx William had taken great delight in Anne big-bellied , like a sail with the wanton wind , both in bed and watching her " rich with my young squire " , as she waddled about " pretty and with swimming gait " .sx The seed-bed of his fancy was by now thoroughly sown with wonder at the demesnes that lie adjacent to a woman's " white thighs " .sx His adolescent feelings would be perpetuated in fancies , thick and swarming with sexual implication and ambiguity , when not with specific and concrete images .sx Not by any means the first man to be so fascinated , Shakespeare would never lose his near-obsession with woman's procreative equipment .sx So besotted with creativity had he grown during Anne's second pregnancy that , had anything gone wrong , it might seriously have jeopardized , through shock , his whole future life .sx Even Mary Queen of Scots , surrounded with the care and panoply of majesty , had miscarried of twins when twenty-five .sx That the twins were not untimely ripped by miscarriage from their mother's womb is evidence both of Anne's strength and the security of the Stratford home .sx The safe delivery of their twins was Anne's greatest gift to Shakespeare's future fertility of wit :sx he came to impregnate his own characters so that , themselves duplicating cells , they grew autonomous in their power of augmentation , of hatching plots as well as extending themselves through their own progeny .sx " My muse labours,/And thus she is delivered , " says Iago .sx " 'Tis very pregnant , " says Angelo .sx " The jewel that we find , we stoop and take't .sx " Shakespeare had not been disappointed .sx Childbirth was a rich pleasure .sx He called what he considered his first major literary effort , Venus and Adonis , the " heir of my invention " .sx " New plays and maidenheads are near akin " , was almost the last sentiment he uttered as a tired and worn-out writer .sx After his death , when describing their editorial function , his editors Heminges and Condell likened his plays to orphans which they were offering to the reader " cured and perfect of their limbs as he conceived them " .sx The safe delivery of the twins was a miracle .sx And perhaps even more extraordinary , on a par with the most unusual expression and oddity of the Renaissance spirit , was the rare , baroque differentiation in their sexuality .sx Similar though they were in appearance :sx " One face , one voice , one habit , and two persons , / A natural perspective , that is and is not " , they bore different sexual organs .sx Here was the greatest paradox of all .sx Within the astonishing similarity resided an even more startling difference .sx " How have you made division of yourself ?sx " asks Antonio of Sebastian in Twelfth Night .sx Close to his heart Shakespeare could nurture a living contradiction :sx his twins Hamnet and Judith made him aware both of the essential unity of nature , and yet how , with the addition or subtraction of one feature , the nature of being could be transformed into its opposite .sx But now , the sweetest consummation of his marriage over , Shakespeare was called to the wars .sx " No man's too good to serve's prince , " says Feeble in Henry IV Part Two :sx " he that dies this year is quit for the next .sx " Shakespeare was levied to fight , and perhaps he might be looking to make as many holes in the enemy's " battle " as he had done " in a woman's petticoat " .sx Rage and swell .sx " I'm grateful for the fact that we know so little about his life , " says the director Jonathan Miller , who likens knowing about Shakespeare to the situation of having the playwright present at rehearsal :sx " There is a certain sense where the presence of the author is inhibitory :sx " The novelist Margaret Drabble calls the factual vacuum , the lack of documentation , a need of the poet's :sx " I feel he didn't want one to know about him .sx "