BETTER HALF OR BITTER HALF ?

BETTER HALF OR BITTER HALF ?
(On the wives of some famous men)





When we first joined college, my friends and I greatly enjoyed the anecdotes that we heard about great writers and statesmen. Some of these jokes concerned the wives of these great men. One was about Milton. “Milton got married and then wrote ‘Paradise Lost’. Later his wife died, and he wrote ‘Paradise Regained.’

Older Wives
Shakespeare as a young man of eighteen was courting Anne Whately who was sixteen. He visited her every day. Her house was at the end of a lane, and to reach it he had to pass the house of Ann Hathaway, who was twenty six. The buxom lady kept watching the strapping youth passing her house everyday. And then she started giving him the glad eye. The lusty Elizabethan responded, and doused the passions roused by Whately in the arms of Hathaway. They were discovered, and he was forced to marry the lady. They seemed to have adjusted well, and Shakespeare once proudly said, “Anne Hathaway, she hath a way.”

After hearing about this we started debating whether it was better to find wives older to ourselves. Some of my classmates who were sixteen or seventeen years old started eyeing girls in the final year BA/BSc, who would have been about nineteen or twenty. The girls ignored them and that was that. Not all women could be Ann Hathaway nor all Intermediate students William Shakespeare (or Villivakkam Shesappa Iyer as we called him).

Sir.Thomas More’s wife was seven years older to him, but she was not the Hathaway type. When More was in prison because he refused to fall in line with despotic rulers, his wife seemed to take the other side, urging him to give up his principles, and then walking off in a huff. She didn’t relent even when More went to the gallows.

True Companions
Dr.Livingstone’s wife insisted on accompanying him on his various hazardous journeys. She died during one such trip and Livingstone was shattered. “I tried to bow to the blow as from the Heavenly Father, who orders all things for us” he said. “I shall do my duty still, but it is with a darkened horizon that I again set about it.”

Thomas Carlyle and Michael Faraday had very happy and contented married lives. Carlyle said of his wife: “For forty years she was the true and ever-loving helpmate of her husband, and by act and word unweariedly forwarded him as no one else could.” Faraday said his wife had given him “the clear contentment of a heart at ease.”

Some wives have shown great resourcefulness in helping their husbands. The wife of Grotius insisted on sharing his prison cell when he had been sentenced to life imprisonment for opposing the government. She was permitted to go into town twice a week to get him books to read. The books grew in number until it was necessary to have a large chest to hold them. The sentries checked the chest very carefully and finding nothing but books, allowed it to be carried in and out of the prison. This led Grotius’ wife to plan a method of releasing him. She made him conceal himself in the chest. The chest was carried out of prison and the prisoner escaped into a neighbouring country.

When we read such anecdotes we were struck by the smartness of these wives. But our teenage minds also wondered whether these women were beautiful or not. We came across the line “Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder”. As Edmund Burke said of his wife, “She is not made to be the admiration of everybody, but the happiness of one.”

Everyone wants to get the right wife. But even there something may go wrong. Red Skelton, the actor, made this belated discovery on stage. “I married Miss.Right. I just didn’t know her first name was Always.”

You can’t get over this by saying “What’s in a name”.

J.