Shakespeare’s Wife

Germain Greere: Shakespeare’s Wife. Harper Collins, New York, 2007

My public library is, to put it mildly, rather dilatory about getting in new books with any claim to scholarship higher than the latest political tell-all. So this book, a biography of Ann Hathaway (Dr. Greer prefers to Ann to Anne, Annis or Agnes) is a pleasant surprise–brand new!) Just for that reason I would have checked it out.

It is also true that among academics, my first choice of author would not be Germaine Greere. That Germaine Greere. But I’ll never pass up the chance to read something that looks interesting about English history or literature, especially when it has to do with Shakespeare–on whom Greere did her PhD work. So preparing myself for scads of feminist writing, I sat down to read. After all, I knew next to nothing about Ann Hathaway.

Having finished the book, I can now say I know next to nothing about Ann Hathaway. However, this is not the fault of Dr. Greere, who seems to have compiled every possible fact about Ann Hathaway, her family, and Shakespeare’s family and neighbors available to modern scholarship and found a place for it in this biography. What is known about Ann can probably be written down in a page or less; Dr. Greere fills up most of the rest of her book with a detailed description of what Stratford and the people of Stratford were like in Shakespeare’s day, and in particular how the women of Stratford lived, loved, mothered, housewived, carried on business, and in due course, died–detailed enough, that anyone with an interest in Elizabethan history, society or literature, should read this book. In places, it might be too detailed: I didn’t really want to know that much about how Elizabethans treated syphilis. She does this by the simple technique of proposing alternative scenarios through the many phases of Ann’s life that are ill documented. Thus, in considering how Ann might have supported herself and her children while her husband was carrying on his theatrical life in London and the shires, she goes through all the means by which women in Stratford are known to have earned themselves money. Except prostitution, which she treats briefly in the context of London and the places where Shakespeare might have been exposed to syphilis which he might have died from. (There are reams of speculation in this work, but almost all of it is clearly designated as speculation by Dr. Greere.) At the end we have no clear idea of how Ann did support herself, but we do have a clear idea of how women in need of money in Stratford supported themselves.

In the main she does not adhere to any specific alternative among all these different possibilities she presents, merely emphasizing the documentation that exists and the even greater mass of documention that has not come to light (chief of which, in this case, are the papers setting out the marriage settlement for elder daughter Susannah and Ann’s own will), and she pays firm obiesance to the rule that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But sometimes she forgets. Thus we are treated to the image of Ann attending her son’s funeral in a certain dress, when Dr. Greere has firmly planted in our minds the fact that not only do have no idea of what Ann’s dresses were like, but we have no firm documentation that she actually participated in the funeral, however obvious that idea seems. And sometimes the alternatives she leaves out are puzzling. She discusses various reasons for the death of Hamnet Shakespeare, all involving longstanding or sudden sickness (among the ideas she proposes is that Hamnet suffered from cerebral palsy), then closes the chapter by musing on what Hamnet’s father might have felt, using the apropos scene of Arthur’s death in King John. Yet Dr. Greere never considers the possibility that Hamnet dies by a fall or other accident, despite the fact that Arthur’s death itself is due to a jump from a high place and not by sickness.

There is of course a feminist agenda in this book. It is not however concerned in the main with establishing How Bad Things Were For Women in Elizabethan England. On that aspect, Dr. Greere is content to let the facts speak for themselves. Her target in this book is what she calls Bardolatry, and A Patriarchal Agenda That Has Forced Ann Hathaway Into The Role of Bad Wife. It is quite true that Ann has received bad press over the years, and often for reasons that, when Dr. Greere turns the microscope on them, turn out to be untenable. She was, the image goes, an older woman who trapped Our Hero into marriage by becoming pregnant. Dr. Greere first shows that in terms of Elizabethan lifestyle Ann was far from being “an older woman” desperate to be married, and then shows in detail that William Shakespeare, apparently a ne’er do well teenager whos father was busily going bankrupt, was not an obvious choice for a woman looking for a husband. Our Hero hurried off to London to get away from his harridan old wife, but generously supported her and the kids once he began to prosper as a playwright. Dr. Greere shows a variety of reasons for supposing that William went off to London with the approval of Ann and her relatives, and left her to support herself for the next two or three decades because acting and playwrighting were not careers for people who wanted to prosper. (In fact, she disposes of the idea so thoroughly that one is left to wonder where Shakespeare did get the money he undoubtedly have to buy a house in Stratford, invest in property in London and tithefarming in Stratford–some of it may have been Ann’s but not all of it.) She aims to depict Ann as the ideal wife, patiently working to house and feed herself and her children while practically abandoned by her husband. There is very little evidence to contradict this idea. Unfortunately, there is very little evidence to support it, either. Dr. Greere’s portrait of Ann is as much a house of cards as any of the portraits that offend her. And in the end, even Dr. Greere can not escape the lure of Bardolatry. The first half of the books seems to think of William as something of a cad, an unfeeling husband and father who had little to do with his family in Stratford. Midway, there is a change of tone: William is treated as a man who respects his wife, loves her despite his own infidelities, and attempts to support her to the best of his means. The change comes when Dr. Greere appraised the sonnets, and dwells at some length on the idea (not her invention) that if the sonnets are a psychodrama, one of the main components of that drama is the Shakespeare marriage, and that many of the sonnets are actually addressed to Ann. It is an intriguing possibility.

Tags: Ann Hathaway, biography, Elizabethan era, Germaine Greere, history, literature, Shakespeare, Stratford