Shakespeare's Wife

With "Shakespeare's Wife", Germaine Greer has written an exhaustive women’s history text on life in Stratford during the 16th and 17th centuries. Unfortunately for its readers, much information pertaining to the actual life of Shakespeare’s wife is purely speculative given the lack of

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historical documents that exist relating to Anne Hathaway.

I would suggest one read this book if they are interested in social history. There is much information contained about medical practices, social norms, and religious politics of Elizabethan and Stuart England. There are also invaluable insights given into the lives of other residents of Stratford who have otherwise been forgotten in history. Greer does an excellent job of writing about this time period, and, most importantly, Greer cites all of her sources (this is a rarity amongst most biographical authors).

As previously stated, there is actually very little about Anne Hathaway in this book. We do learn brief tidbits about her childhood, her relatives, her marriage, and death. Most of Greer’s other information comes from analyses of primary sources not relating to Hathaway (such as tax records and marriage records), secondary sources (in which Greer vehemently defends Hathaway from her critics) and Shakespeare’s works (“The Merry Wives of Windsor” is one she uses predominantly throughout the text). As a reader, I intensely disliked when Greer attempted to approach the emotional life of Hathaway. It felt that this was is all speculation, and that such a practice is better kept for historical novels.

This book is one that I’m glad that I’ve read, but I don’t think I’ll read again any time soon.

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Germaine Greer has little time for the generations of scholars who have derided Shakespeare's wife. Her research demonstrates that there's precious little documentary evidence of Ann Hathaway's life - no one can say with any certainty that she was a shrew and a drain on the Bard's genius, so why

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not consider the possibility that she was instead an intelligent, resourceful and independent woman?

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Greer has studied the day to day life of Shakespeare's wife and co. with a finetoothcomb. We get a very different picture of WS. She has no qualms about taking on some of the hagiographers who haven't done their homework in the way that she has done it. A must read for any students of Avon's Swan.

I didn't finish it because it just was not interesting. It seems like everything Germaine Greer is trying to say about Ann Hathaway is based on assumptions and no facts. And if it -is- based on facts, she doesn't do a good job of telling the reader that.

This would probably be a good read for

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someone who wants an indepth look at what might've been the life of a wife back in the late 1500s, but not someone who is expecting to learn about Shakespeare's wife.

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This is scholarly nonfiction that is not to my taste.
I respect Greer’s effort to vivify Ann Hathaway, the wife of William Shakespeare.
I think she went overboard a bit.
Shakespeare’s Wife is longish, considering that lots of the details of Ann’s life aren’t well documented or remain

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obscure.
For my taste, too much of this work is carefully contingent or unselfconsciously speculative. The specification of what we don’t really know is perhaps more interesting to a scholar embracing esoterica than it is to a lay reader like me.
Moreover, Greer’s text is chock-a-block with statements and implications that Shakespeare wrote about his wife and his private life in his plays and sonnets. Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t.
Finally, much of this tirelessly researched and documented book isn’t really about Ann Hathaway. There is a conspicuous offering of detail about people she knew and didn’t know, in Stratford and elsewhere, and about circumstances of life, commerce and the arts in the 16th century in the middle of England.
So, here’s what I learned: Shakespeare may or may not have loved his wife; ditto for Ann’s relationship with Bill; I don’t need to read this book again.

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I liked this quite a bit. It's true that Greer does the same thing she accuses other scholars of doing: building up a portrait of someone based on assumptions and speculations rather than facts. Yet I think this is her point: whether you think Ann Hathaway was beloved by her husband or the reverse,

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literate or not, there is as much reason to believe in a good version of her as a bad version. The book is a little long, and Ann sometimes disappears entirely beneath a swarm of detail about other Stratford women of the time (about whom Greer has more data). And Greer is no great stylist. But she has some provocative ideas, and this book serves as a useful corrective to some of the anti-Ann flights of fancy found in other books about Shakespeare (Greer likes to call their authors "bardolators"). At any rate, Shakespeare's Wife deserved better reviews than I remember it getting.

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While I love the idea of this book, taking a fresh look at Anne Hathaway Shakespeare and imagining something different than the shrew up in Stratford. However, there was, in truth, less postulating about Anne and more, agonizingly more, data compilation of people and situations near, around, or

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vaguely related to things that may or may not have happened to Anne. While I cannot find any fault or complaint with Ms. Greer's research, it was more like reading someone's very dry thesis work than an even remotely interesting work of non-fiction. I admit being spoiled by Foreman's Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and Massie's Catherine the Great. If you are looking for scholarly work on life in Elizabethan rural England, you may find this informative. If you're looking for Anne Shakespeare, you unfortunately won't find her here.

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Greer makes a much needed attempt to challenge the popular assumption that Shakespeare disliked and abandoned his supposed shrewish, overbearing, and plain wife who was stifling his creatively.

While not trying to cover up her, or Shakespeare’s own faults, this is a brave attempt to understand the

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context of Elizabeth marriage and Ann Hathaway’s role in the Bard’s life.

Unfortunately in some ways it suffers from the subject herself, in that so little is known about Ann that the book is overwhelmed by supposition, inference, and just pure guess work that drives an often circular logic.

Greer writes in the final paragraph that “…. most of this book is hearsay, and probably neither true, nor less true than the accepted prejudice.” - So I had to wonder what was the point of the previous 350 pages?

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I think Greer had a lot of fun writing this book - and I had a lot of fun reading it.
I was attracted to the book by a quote from a reviewer who said something along the lines of - Greer has been as unprovocative as she could be, but the old men of academia still reacted with outrage and venom.
Well,

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if there were to be sides - I'd be on Greer's team.
The study of Shakespeare's life and times suffers from the lack of documentary evidence. Too many academics backfill the gap with commentary inmformed by later lives and times. Greer goes back to the basics, and gives the reader a great picture of what life was like in Stratford, and for women in particular. Life was different, but the reader comes away with a sense of what life may have been likely for Ann Hathaway.
The other interesting aspect of the book, for me, was the picture of the aging Shakespeare who retired back to Avon as a man of some wealth. There's a hint here of some sort of serious decline in abilities - dementia? It's only an aside in this book, but I would love to see if others have considered the issue. Just because he was a genius at his prime doesn't mean he waasn't mortally fragile as he aged.

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