Book Alert / Shakespeare's Wife

Shakespeare's Wife by Germaine Greer, Harper '07, $26.95, 406 pages, ISBN #0061537152. Index, works cites, source notes, unillustrated.

Ann Shakespeare, nee Ann Hathaway, has gotten a bad rap from the (mostly male) historians, writes feminist Germaine Greer, author of the acclaimed The Female Eunuch, a circumstance Greer seeks to set right in her latest book.

Conventional wisdom has it that Shakespeare loathed his wife and mother of his children and fled their Avon home to seek refuge in London. "Ann has been described as faithless, manipulative, unattractive, and unworthy," she says, "and it is widely believed that this calculating woman trapped the naive young man into marriage." He was, in fact, several years her junior.

An accurate depiction of the Shakespeares' home life may never be possible because of the lack of documentary evidence. But, notes Greer, "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. 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."

Among the oft-debated questions Greer seeks to answer are: "Who was Ann Shakespeare really: overbearing harridan or misunderstood helpmate? Did she force Shakespeare into marriage by getting pregnant? What do his plays reveal about his feelings towards his wife? Did another man or woman inspire the Bard's most passionate love sonnets?"

But, you say, isn't the clincher the fact that the Bard leaves nothing to Ann in his Last Will and Testament? Doesn't even mention her in it? Never at a loss for words, Germaine Greer has an answer for this puzzle too, one that would be unfair to the reader to divulge.