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Overview
Little is known about Ann Hathaway, the wife of England's greatest playwright; a great deal, none of it complimentary, has been assumed. The omission of her name from Shakespeare's will has been interpreted as evidence that she was nothing more than an unfortunate mistake from which Shakespeare did well to distance himself.
While Shakespeare is above all the poet of marriage—repeatedly in his plays, constant wives redeem unjust and deluded husbands—scholars persist in positing the worst about the writer's own spouse. In Shakespeare's Wife, Germaine Greer boldly breaks new ground, combining literary-historical techniques with documentary evidence about life in Stratford, to reset the story of Shakespeare's marriage in its social context. With deep insight and intelligence, she offers daring and thoughtful new theories about the farmer's daughter who married England's greatest poet, painting a vivid portrait of a remarkable woman.
A passionate and perceptive work of first-rate scholarship that reclaims this maligned figure from generations of scholarly neglect and misogyny, Shakespeare's Wife poses bold questions and opens new fields of investigation and research.
Synopsis
Little is known about Ann Hathaway, the wife of England's greatest playwright; a great deal, none of it complimentary, has been assumed. The omission of her name from Shakespeare's will has been interpreted as evidence that she was nothing more than an unfortunate mistake from which Shakespeare did well to distance himself.
While Shakespeare is above all the poet of marriage repeatedly in his plays, constant wives redeem unjust and deluded husbands scholars persist in positing the worst about the writer's own spouse. In Shakespeare's Wife, Germaine Greer boldly breaks new ground, combining literary-historical techniques with documentary evidence about life in Stratford, to reset the story of Shakespeare's marriage in its social context. With deep insight and intelligence, she offers daring and thoughtful new theories about the farmer's daughter who married England's greatest poet, painting a vivid portrait of a remarkable woman.
A passionate and perceptive work of first-rate scholarship that reclaims this maligned figure from generations of scholarly neglect and misogyny, Shakespeare's Wife poses bold questions and opens new fields of investigation and research.
The Barnes & Noble Review
Literary historians have not been kind to Ann Shakespeare, née Hathaway. She is painted as old, ugly and desperate, leading poor William astray, trapping him into a loveless marriage at age 18 (she was a ripe 26). Or maybe she was beautiful and sexually experienced and...unfaithful. Perhaps her talented husband hated her -- or lived in fear of her. In fact, little is known about William Shakespeare's wife, the mother of his three children, whom he married in 1582. "All biographies of Shakespeare are houses built of straw, but there is good straw and rotten straw, and some houses are better built than others," writes feminist icon Germaine Greer in her new book. "The evidence that is always construed to Ann Hathaway's disadvantage is capable of other, more fruitful interpretations, especially within the context of recent historiography." Greer attempts to right what she sees as a profound wrong at the hands of the "Shakespeare wallahs" who have remade the Bard "in their own likeness...incapable of relating to women" by undertaking a "systematic review of the evidence against Ann Shakespeare." Parsing parish and court records, letters, historical materials, and Shakespeare's own work, she redraws Ann as capable and independent. The portrait may be a complete fantasy, as Greer blithely admits -- "If Ann Shakespeare had both skill and business acumen, she could have become a wealthy woman in her own right," she writes in a typical passage. "So far we don't know that she did, but we don't know that she didn't either." But though Ann's image remains hazy, a detailed, compelling picture emerges of what it was like to be a wife and mother in Shakespeare's time. --Amy Reiter
Editorials
Kate Roiphe
In A Room of One's Own, with its famous riff on Shakespeare's sister, Virginia Woolf wrote that when one tries to picture the life of an Elizabethan woman, "one is held up by the scarcity of facts. One knows nothing detailed, nothing perfectly true and substantial about her. History scarcely mentions her.…What one wants, I thought—and why does not some brilliant student at Newnham or Girton supply it?—is a mass of information; at what age did she marry; how many children had she as a rule;…did she do the cooking; would she be likely to have a servant? All these facts lie somewhere, presumably, in parish registers and account books; the life of the average Elizabethan woman must be scattered about somewhere, could one collect and make a book of it. It would be ambitious beyond my daring." And now the book written by a brilliant student from Newnham, dreamed of by Virginia Woolf in the last century, exists: lively, rigorous, fiercely imagined.—The New York Times
Elaine Showalter
In this partly scholarly, partly speculative, consistently lively book, the feminist and Renaissance scholar Germaine Greer has set out to rescue Hathaway from centuries of slurs by sneering academics, biographers and what she calls "bardolaters" and to propose a much more significant and important life for her…Let's face it: No one really knows how Shakespeare's marriage worked. Greer is fascinating nevertheless on the lives of ordinary Elizabethan women. Searching court records, diaries, memoranda, wills and especially the work of British historian Peter Laslett in The World We Have Lost, she reconstructs the routines of Elizabethan milkmaids and housewives, examines the agriculture, industry and economy of 16th-century Stratford, and sets out courtship patterns, attitudes toward premarital pregnancy, ages of marriage and communal rituals of childbirth and child burial.—The Washington Post
Library Journal
Though very little is known about Ann Hathaway, the wife of England's greatest playwright, much, as Greer (The Female Eunuch) writes here, has been assumed. Greer argues that Hathaway's omission from Shakespeare's will has been misinterpreted by historians set on creating Shakespeare in their own image (namely, by assuming that he, like them, must have had difficulty relating to women) as evidence that Hathaway was homely and shrewlike and drove Shakespeare away from Stratford and his family toward London and his writing. By reinterpreting available historical evidence and offering a skillful new reading of Shakespeare's most famous sonnets and plays, Greer rescues Hathaway from the graveyard of the forgotten wives of famous men and places her firmly within her own time and social context. This excellent portrait of an early modern woman in all of her richness and complexity belongs in academic and larger public libraries.
—Deborah Hicks