Greer, Germaine, Shakespeare’s Wife (London: Bloomsbury, 2007)

Women are too often defined by men. This is the central contention of Germain Greer’s Shakespeare’s Wife, which reappraises the enduring aspersions cast over Ann Shakespeare’s worthiness of her husband. The book serves as a rescue mission in its attempt to balance the history books through an initial scoping of a neglected literary trend – that is, with the exception of certain protestant reformers, the wives of great authors from Socrates thereafter are ignored or vilified by virtue of their marriage.

“Until our own time, history focused on man the achiever; the higher the achiever the more likely it was that the woman who slept in his bed would be judged unworthy of his company.”

Greer acknowledges that the scant available evidence from which to paint a complete picture of the woman who supposedly trapped William Shakespeare in a union he resented cuts both ways. Just as the unflattering representations of Ann that come down to us over the centuries rely in part on artistic licence to fill in the gaps, so too does Greer indulge in a degree of interpretive heavy lifting to argue Ann’s case from a position of parity.

“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.”

No new evidence is revealed to us, no unknown archive unlocked to categorically dismiss the assertion that an unfavorable age differential, or educational divide, led to a dysfunctional relationship. But neither is such a discovery required in order to inject our largely circumstantial understanding of the Shakepeares’ domestic life with some level-headed pragmatism. Is it too much to say that in the social context of Elizabethan Warwickshire a union between Shakespeare and Hathaway was less unusual than assumed; or that an 18-year-old William may have wooed and won a 26-year-old Ann, rather than the other way around?

The book has a remarkable ability to turn established, prejudicial thinking on its head with a straightforward line of questioning: the effect of trailblazing revisionism is achieved simply by re-walking a well-trodden path with a different perspective. The result is a volume that champions the right for women both past and present to be given a fair hearing. Deborah Hicks of the University of Alberta concludes her review as follows: “This excellent portrait of an early modern woman in all of her richness and complexity belongs in academic and larger public libraries.” As such, you can find a copy in the EFL at PR2906.G74 GRE 2007.

References:

Hicks, Deborah, “Shakespeare’s Wife (Book Review)“, Library Journal, 133 (2008), pp. 83