Shakespeare’s wife
January 31st, 2008
Most of you will know Ann Hathaway, whether it be from a biography of Shakespeare, from education, popular literature or the internet. The image most people have of her is based on a few facts. When they married, for example, William was eighteen while Ann was twenty-six and several months pregnant. In his will, William left Ann his second-best bed. In the words of Germaine Greer, she “left a wife-shaped void in the biography of William Shakespeare.”
Shakespeare’s Wife convincingly shows how biographers have filled this void with their own ideas of what Shakespeare’s wife would have been like. In the popular imagination, she or her parents and friends forced the young Shakespeare to marry her after a roll in the hay at Shottery. A few years later, Shakespeare escaped to London and led a wild life among the brothels in Southwark. Here, for example, is a quotation from the page on Ann’s life on the website of Michael Wood’s In Search of Shakespeare:
At 26, Anne knew the way of the world while William was still a troubled youth, unsure of his path and coping with the collapse of his father’s businesses and the uncertainty of the times. After William turned 21, there would be no more children for Anne and him. There would instead be long absences as William later toured the country and set up home amongst the theatrical community in London. There would be extramarital affairs and head-turning passions for the poet, and he would encounter much more of the world than Anne in rural Warwickshire ever could.
The great thing about Germaine Greer’s biography of Ann Hathaway is that she challenges the representations of Ann that are commonly taken for granted, even (or perhaps especially) among academics. In a podcast she says that it was her reading of Stephen Greenblatt’s biography Will in the World that made her want to write this book, but her biography includes revealing quotations from many other works besides Greenblatt’s.
