Shakespeare's Wife (Hardcover)

by Germaine Greer (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
SignatureReviewed by Marilyn French
Given the hysterical responses of some British critics to Germaine Greer's new book about Ann Hathaway, one expects wild-eyed surmises about that woman's life. Instead, Greer offers a richly textured account of the lives of ordinary women in Stratford and similar towns in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. We know very little about Shakespeare's life, and even less about his wife's, but this has not deterred generations of critics from inventing a narrative for them. In general, they aver that Ann, being eight years older than Shakespeare, was an unattractive woman who seduced and trapped him in an unwanted marriage, from which he escaped as soon as possible. His abandonment of his wife and three children supposedly without support is generally regarded as their just desserts, as is his will, leaving her with nothing but his second-best bed. Greer questions these critical judgments, but her real interest lies in tracing how the Shakespeare family could have survived. She meticulously traces the members of the Shakespeare and Hathaway families, their acquaintances, relatives of their acquaintances and notable people in Stratford. She reminds us of facts other critics have ignored: for instance, in the late 15th century, almost half the children died in their early years, often from malnutrition. Ann Shakespeare's children survived-the two girls to adulthood, and the boy, Hamnet, until 11-so she must have been able to feed them. Greer shows that no one else would have been likely to step in to help Ann feed her family: she would have had to do it herself. Given a list of Ann's possessions at one point in her life, Greer theorizes she was a maltster: many women made decent livings by making ale. Greer's details of how ordinary people lived in this period are extremely interesting-the contents of their houses, the value of their clothes, the number of rooms they occupied. These facts are also quite moving because death was omnipresent. Her theory about Shakespeare's relation with his wife is original and persuasive: she imagines there was real love between them, at least at some point. She cites the desire depicted in "Venus and Adonis" (about an older woman and a younger man) and suggests that some of the sonnets were written to Ann. She offers theories and not, she is careful to state, a definitive narrative. The theory that seems most to have inflamed British critics is the idea that Ann may have paid to have Shakespeare's plays printed after his death. Since many wives do publish their husbands' work after their death, I'm not sure why this is considered so heretical, but Greer knew it would be. (Apr. 8)
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From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Elaine Showalter

In her classic feminist essay "A Room of One's Own," Virginia Woolf imagined what might have happened if Shakespeare had had a sister as extraordinarily gifted as himself, "as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was." A female Shakespeare, she concluded, would have run away to London, become the mistress of an actor, gotten pregnant and killed herself, without ever writing a word. It would not have been possible for a woman to write the plays of Shakespeare "in the age of Shakespeare."

While Shakespeare's sister is the heroine of a feminist parable, Shakespeare's wife, Ann Hathaway, really lived in Stratford, although little is known about her beyond the infamous will in which he left her his second-best bed. 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.

According to Greer, "no one has ever undertaken a systematic review of the evidence against Ann Shakespeare, while every opportunity to caricature and revile her has been exploited to risible lengths." Greer sums up a long list of these malicious and mistaken "Shakespeare wallahs," from Thomas Moore, who declared that Shakespeare hated his wife, to James Joyce, who imagined her in "Ulysses" as an ugly old woman. Greer holds up to scorn Shakespeare's biographers, mostly male, and attacks their "nonsense," "ignorance and prejudice," almost to the point of calling them conspirators who are "eager to traduce" Hathaway and "want her, need her to have had no inkling of the magnitude of her husband's achievement." On the basis of almost no historical evidence, she charges, they have concluded that Hathaway was illiterate, an older seductress who got pregnant and forced 18-year-old William into a shotgun marriage, and a shrewish companion he came to despise.

Greer is both a polymath and a polemicist, and it's invigorating to read her fierce rebuttals of the most august Shakespearian scholars. Get back, Stephen Greenblatt! Take that, Peter Thomson! But why would these specialists harbor such hostility and bias toward Ann Hathaway? Misogyny? Incompetence? Greer sweepingly charges that they have succeeded in creating a Bard in their own likeness," i.e., "incapable of relating to women." Well, how does she know this, and what about Katherine Duncan-Jones, whose Ungentle Shakespeare she also censures? In fact, Greer herself has to rely on considerable guesswork for her portrait of Hathaway, who emerges as a lusty, resourceful, independent, intelligent woman not unlike herself. On nearly every page, Greer has to qualify her account -- "we can only imagine," "if our suspicions . . . are correct," "for all we know." She even insists -- call it intuition -- that Ann Hathaway loved her husband, "in default of evidence to the contrary."

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.

Overall, the reader has to be impressed by her rich command of the plays and poems, her argumentative gusto and her tireless quest to investigate Shakespearean legends. Did he plant a mulberry tree in his garden? No. Did he have syphilis? Maybe. Was the second-best bed a deliberate insult? Well, perhaps not. If you properly understand the inheritance options of an Elizabethan widow, Ann Hathaway might have had everything else by default. Greer also suggests that she earned her own money and may have helped with the publication of the First Folio.

Greer admits that she has been obsessed by her subject, to the point of haranguing even "the odd taxidriver" over the years and disarmingly confesses that her book is "probably neither truer nor less true than the accepted prejudice." Shakespeare's Wife is a rousing defense of the wives of the poets, a much-maligned and exploited group of women, indeed. But while Woolf wanted contemporary women to work toward a future when a female Shakespeare would have the chance to fulfill her genius, Greer's motives are not so clear. Ann Hathaway, after all, never wanted to be a writer, did not kill herself and, if Greer is correct, did just fine, even with the second-best bed.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Harper; First Edition. 1 in number line edition (April 8, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061537152
• ISBN-13: 978-0061537158
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #505,912 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant but flawed revisionism, March 25, 2008

By	Kay Kirkpatrick (Cambridge, MA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Shakespeare's Wife (Paperback)

This book, ostensibly about Ann Hathaway Shakespeare (1556-1623), is packed with fascinating research, but a lot of it is not about Ann directly, and some of the connections are a bit tenuous. Because of this, I found it a difficult book to get into; but having finished it, I think it was worth the effort--it is important, provocative, and very informative, especially about the lives of Stratford women who were peers and contemporaries of Ann. It also sheds a little light on the mysterious woman who was Shakespeare's wife.

Greer aims to rescue Ann Hathaway from the traditional view that she coerced William Shakespeare into marrying her, that he consequently left her and the children to seek his fortune in London, and that he ultimately slighted her in his will. Greer examines the evidence (or lack thereof) for each of these points, and advances (sometimes many) alternative interpretations, often based on meticulous details about similar women.

Against the first point, Greer persuasively argues that Ann didn't entrap Shakespeare by pregnancy, but rather he wooed her, although Ann had "good reason to resist Will's advances: he was too young; he had been trained to no trade that we know of, and his family, having nursed pretensions beyond their means, had run into serious financial trouble." He probably stood to gain more from the match that she did: "Will was certainly young and witty, possibly handsome, but he had nothing else to offer the kind of girl, who, as a sober, industrious, patient, frugal wife, would help him repair his family's ruined fortunes." The young lovers probably weren't forced into marriage, but instead followed the tradition of handfasting (a family wedding ceremony), then consummating the union, and upon pregnancy going to church to solemnize the marriage. By the end of Elizabeth I's reign, the Anglican church would have (mostly) ended this practice, but handfasting was still common in 1582, as borne out by the examples and statistics that Greer musters.

After William went away to London, but before he became successful, Ann must have supported herself and her children, probably by brewing ale, curing bacon, and baking bread, with perhaps some haberdashery on the side. She may also have been instrumental in the brilliant match of their eldest, Susanna, to the physician John Hall. Greer suggests that a condition of the match may well have been making Susanna the sole heiress of William Shakespeare's estate. If so, then Will leaving Ann only the "second best bed" in his will would not be a slight, as it is usually interpreted. Aside from the bed (which was probably their marriage bed and quite valuable) and a possible dower right of one-third of the estate, Ann would have been able to choose things from their personal effects before his death. Some of Will's papers, revisions of the plays and so forth, were conceivably among those things; and Ann (probably literate, as Greer argues early in the book) could have been an important part of the First Folio project.

In the process of rehabilitating Ann, Greer sometimes goes too far, I think, in the other direction, disparaging Ann's husband (and some of his biographers, like Stephen Greenblatt). In addition to the often sarcastic references to "the Bard" and "the bardolators," she reverses the usual interpretation of his leaving Stratford as escaping his wife:
"Ann Shakespeare could have been confident of her ability to support herself and her children, but not if she had also to deal with a layabout husband good for nothing but spinning verses . . . When the chance arose to send him off to London in the train of some dignitary or filling in for someone in a group of players, she could well have jumped at it and sent him south with her blessing."

In spite of the shortcomings of her book, Germaine Greer should be applauded for this fascinating and important study about the woman who was Shakespeare's wife.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Will Loves Ann?, May 28, 2008

By	J. Moran (Illinois, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Greer is well known as a significant feminist writer (The Female Eunuch) and general social critic. She also holds a doctorate in English literature and enjoys a less generally known reputation as a competent literary scholar. She has a long-standing interest in Shakespeare and his works. Here she takes on a difficult task: Telling the story of Ann Hathaway's life and her marriage to Shakespeare.

Hard facts about Shakespeare himself are notoriously few, but there are far fewer about Hathaway. During their lifetimes few if any people kept personal journals or diaries, letters were few and seldom contained personal revelations (for one thing, paper was quite expensive and there was no public mail). So collections of private and personal papers of any kind are simply not available, making it practically impossible to gain insight into the inner world of even public figures of the time, let alone ordinary people such as Hathaway or that "common player" Shakespeare himself. This is a monumental problem facing all who seek to portray the life of anyone who lived before relatively recent times.

Authors are driven to public records of various kinds such as court and tax records, deeds, church records, wills, charters and the like which they then supplement with more or less informed inference and, very often, speculation. Biographers of Shakespeare have done this for years (indeed for centuries) and in the process have created a very unfavorable portrait of Hathaway. She is the older and unscrupulous man-hunter who traps young Will into marriage. She contributes nothing to his life, much less to his work, and he must abandon her to realize his creative destiny. There is no hard evidence for any of this and Greer sets out to challenge it.

Greer, of course, is also constrained by a lack of hard facts, even more so because Hathaway's life left fewer traces in the records. To build her picture of Hathaway, Greer examines the records of Stratford and other relevant environs to build a picture of the sorts of lives led by women like Hathaway (and by their men) in their contemporary social context. The effort is multi-layered, deeply informed and occasionally compelling as Greer creates a rich picture of the common life of the time.

Greer argues strongly that, except for Shakespeare's unusually young age, Hathaway's marriage was not unusual in its time, that Hathaway and her clan were probably a step up for the Shakespeares, that Hathaway was neither ugly nor a shrew, that she did not drive Shakespeare away and that there was probably love between Ann and Will, at least initially. In addition, Hathaway made a living for herself and children in Stratford while Shakespeare was in London or on the road and repaired and kept up the ramshackle house (New Place) that Shakespeare bought. She was also almost certainly literate. In fact, Greer argues, Shakespeare probably wrote one of the sonnets (No. 145) for her and possibly others as well. Hathaway may also have played the pivotal roll in the publication of the First Folio.

Greer's point, as I take it, is that a "good" Ann Hathaway is at least as readily inferred from the limited evidence as is the "bad" Ann Hathaway of tradition. This point she amply demonstrates, with some strictures on the biases and carelessness of traditional biographers along the way. Greer's arguments are strong and based on great knowledge of the time and its culture and (to me at least) are persuasive. In the end, however, Greer's position too is circumstantial. Given the state of the evidence, I doubt that more is possible.

A final word: This is a good and deeply learned book, unusually so for a book intended for the general reader. It is well and clearly written, with great attention to, and respect for, evidence. It is careful in its inferences. It is neither wild nor flashy and it does not "read like a novel." It requires time and attention but will repay them.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A new Ann Hatheway, March 27, 2009

By	Linda "katknit" (CT, United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Shakespeare's Wife (P.S.) (Paperback)

For centuries, admirers of the Bard have been wondering why he married Ann Hatheway only to leave her for most of the rest of his life. Historically, scholars have almost universally blamed Ann, primarily through the mechanism of applying passages from Shakespeare's works to his wife, particularly if they are critical in content. Germaine Greer justifiably found this practice unacceptable. Using documentary evidence, the genuine tools of credible biography, Greer has written the first comprehensive overview of Ann Shakespeare's life.

Regrettably, very little documentation exists. Greer studied that which she could uncover, and thoughtfully blended it with factual information about the lives of typical, plebian women of the Elizabethan eras. The result is a plausible hypothesis about how Ann might have managed her situation as a woman left on her own to care for herself and her young children. And plunking herself down on her in-laws, as her detractors surmise, was not the option she selected. Greer presents her reader with an independent, capable Ann Shakespeare, one who was probably an astute business woman who did more than simply manage.

Greer, a Shakespeare scholar in her student days, also reinterprets passages of his writing, more favorably with respect to women and marriage. Where she misses her mark is when she overindulges in speculation, as, for instance, when she theorizes that the lengthy separation of Will and Ann could have been due to his having contracted syphilis. This is not a new idea, but Greer went overboard in imagining his medical treatment and early death, in great detail. Similarly, Greer devoted too much space to elaborating on business deals and other minutia not directly impacting Ann herself.

Flaws notwithstanding, Greer has done a service to women's history by offering the world an Ann Shakespeare who was more than a discarded wife who made miserable the life of her husband.