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The Shakespeare Conspiracy
For fifteen years Anne Hathaway kept a diary. It was no ordinary diary, as Anne, an excellent writer of poems and songs in her own right, was also the wife of the world's most famous poet and playwright, William Shakespeare. In its pages she reveals the man she knew and loved and their shared life full of triumph and tragedy. Pulitzer-prize nominated poet Sandra Hochman's imagining of Mrs. Shakespeare is both a thoughtful take on one of the greatest mysteries in Western literature and the story of two people who would change the English language forever.
- GenresNovels
272 pages, Paperback
Published February 27, 2018
1 person is currently reading
30 people want to read
About the author
Sandra Hochman
42 books21 followersAmerican poet, novelist, journalist and filmmaker. Hockman's first husband was concert violinist Ivry Gitlis, and in 1965 she married Harvey Leve, an international lawyer with whom she has one daughter and who she later divorced. Hochman took her undergraduate degree from Bennington College in 1957 and then studied at the Sorbonne. She has been poet-in-residence at Fordham University and City College of New York. She received the Yale Series of Younger Poets award for Manhattan Pastures (1963).
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
March 17, 2018
A study of William Shakespeare, what he wrote and his poems. His wife Anne was his loyal help mate and she also wrote poems.
He discusses his fellow writers and playwrights, often very critical of Tilley, Burleigh and Decker.
His goal in life was to be presented to the Queen of England, which he was able to do.
King James was not his favorite nobility.
As Shakespeare’s King Lear was finished, Wills life was in danger because of jealous playwrights.
An attempt was made on Wills life, he was wounded in the leg.
Shakespeare died at age 52 with the scent of flowers that filled his home.
This story was taken from Anne Shakespeare’s diary.
He discusses his fellow writers and playwrights, often very critical of Tilley, Burleigh and Decker.
His goal in life was to be presented to the Queen of England, which he was able to do.
King James was not his favorite nobility.
As Shakespeare’s King Lear was finished, Wills life was in danger because of jealous playwrights.
An attempt was made on Wills life, he was wounded in the leg.
Shakespeare died at age 52 with the scent of flowers that filled his home.
This story was taken from Anne Shakespeare’s diary.
February 27, 2018
A Different View of Shakespeare and His Wife
A young poet strolling in the cemetery of the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon is accosted by an ancient gardener. He offers to sell her Anne Hathaway’s, Mrs. Shapespearse’s, diary. Realizing that she may be duped, the poet buys the diary, has it translated and begins to read.
The diary, which the poet is having authenticated by scientists, reveals Anne Hathaway as a talented writer and poet in her own right. Far from being the older wife, hidden away in the country, Anne clips her hair, dons men’s clothing and lives with Shakespeare as his cousin. In her male role, Anne collaborates with her husband on the plays and adds poetry of her own. Together they experience the excitement of the London theater and the court, including a conspiracy against Shakespeare founded in jealousy and lust.
The book is fiction, but the imaginings follow what is known about Shakespeare. Anne is a delightful character, an independent woman, who collaborates with her husband in a way no one expects. The book gives a fascinating picture of London at the time seen through the eyes of someone intimately engaged in the exciting theater world.
I am not a Shakespeare scholar, so I can’t comment on how closely the book follows history or the known facts of Shakespeare’s life. However, it’s a good read and an interesting hypothesis. If you enjoy historical novels based on real characters, I think you’ll enjoy this book. I did.
I received this book from Turner Publishing for this review.
A young poet strolling in the cemetery of the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon is accosted by an ancient gardener. He offers to sell her Anne Hathaway’s, Mrs. Shapespearse’s, diary. Realizing that she may be duped, the poet buys the diary, has it translated and begins to read.
The diary, which the poet is having authenticated by scientists, reveals Anne Hathaway as a talented writer and poet in her own right. Far from being the older wife, hidden away in the country, Anne clips her hair, dons men’s clothing and lives with Shakespeare as his cousin. In her male role, Anne collaborates with her husband on the plays and adds poetry of her own. Together they experience the excitement of the London theater and the court, including a conspiracy against Shakespeare founded in jealousy and lust.
The book is fiction, but the imaginings follow what is known about Shakespeare. Anne is a delightful character, an independent woman, who collaborates with her husband in a way no one expects. The book gives a fascinating picture of London at the time seen through the eyes of someone intimately engaged in the exciting theater world.
I am not a Shakespeare scholar, so I can’t comment on how closely the book follows history or the known facts of Shakespeare’s life. However, it’s a good read and an interesting hypothesis. If you enjoy historical novels based on real characters, I think you’ll enjoy this book. I did.
I received this book from Turner Publishing for this review.
January 18, 2018
[Note: This book was provided free of charge by Edelweiss/Ingram Publisher Services. All thoughts and opinions are my own.]
When one is a bardophile to the extent that I am [1], one reads a lot of crazy books about Shakespeare. This book at least has the good sense to consider its plausible tale as a novel, rather than writing implausible tales of mistaken or falsified identities as nonfictional, as is the case with writing by Oxfordians and Baconians. The author here is a Stratfordian, and one who writes a novel in the vein of revisionist history. I feel somewhat ambivalent about this work, but when it comes to the author's view of Shakespeare I find much to agree with. The author has some sound arguments in defense of Shakespeare's marriage as well as his crypto-Catholicism and has a sound look at his relationships with other playwrights in the intensely competitive London world of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. If the book suffers from some flaws and is at times unpleasant and uncomfortable to read, it is at least a book that as a characterization of Shakespeare that I can get behind, by and large.
In almost 300 pages the author writes a frame story of considerable interest. The frame is that the narrator comes into the possession of a supposed diary of Shakespeare's wife that shows her to have been a full partner in his creative excellence, not least through her voracious reading of sources and her own gift of poetry as well as her perspective as an independent woman who faced the fate of spinsterhood before being rescued by Shakespeare when he was a youth. Much of the novel is spent showing how Shakespeare's wife disguises herself as his male cousin in a pants role designed to allow her greater access to the world of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama in the court and in the theaters. The book also goes on at some length about a supposed conspiracy against Shakespeare that is founded in envy and jealousy and lust, something that is believable, at least. This is a book that takes advantage of what little is known about Shakespeare's life and character and turns that into an advantage by working within the bounds of plausibility because a great deal is plausible when one looks at Shakespeare's life. The fact that this book makes a strong anti-snobbish statement about the ability of people to educate themselves through voracious reading is certainly a statement this reader can support wholeheartedly. The book's ending is pure wish fulfillment about how the imaginary diary would permanently explode the claims of those who think that a grammar school educated provincial like Shakespeare could not have written his deep and profound dramas, and that is a wish I certainly share with the author.
Even so, this is not a perfect work. There are some minor issues here with the chronology of Shakespeare's plays that seem a bit dodgy and a bit too conveniently written. The suspense about whether or not Shakespeare will retire from the London scene and the doubt of authorship over Henry VIII also detract a bit from enjoyment of the plot. In many ways, though, this book's greatest strengths are also its weaknesses. The book is self-evidently the work of a contemporary writer who is deeply concerned with questions of class, identity, sexuality, and gender roles. To be sure, these were all issues at the time of Shakespeare, but they are not explored as someone in that time would have viewed them, but are rather viewed from the light of a cosmopolitan and not particularly morally upright contemporary perspective that I found offensive and sometimes off-putting. It did not feel that we were fully getting into the perspective of Shakespeare's wife, but rather that we were seeing a contemporary feminist perspective that was using her as an empty vessel to fill with all kinds of contemporary notions about the role and place of women, something which I obviously found less pleasant to read than a more honest and less anachronistic portrayal would have been.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014...
When one is a bardophile to the extent that I am [1], one reads a lot of crazy books about Shakespeare. This book at least has the good sense to consider its plausible tale as a novel, rather than writing implausible tales of mistaken or falsified identities as nonfictional, as is the case with writing by Oxfordians and Baconians. The author here is a Stratfordian, and one who writes a novel in the vein of revisionist history. I feel somewhat ambivalent about this work, but when it comes to the author's view of Shakespeare I find much to agree with. The author has some sound arguments in defense of Shakespeare's marriage as well as his crypto-Catholicism and has a sound look at his relationships with other playwrights in the intensely competitive London world of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. If the book suffers from some flaws and is at times unpleasant and uncomfortable to read, it is at least a book that as a characterization of Shakespeare that I can get behind, by and large.
In almost 300 pages the author writes a frame story of considerable interest. The frame is that the narrator comes into the possession of a supposed diary of Shakespeare's wife that shows her to have been a full partner in his creative excellence, not least through her voracious reading of sources and her own gift of poetry as well as her perspective as an independent woman who faced the fate of spinsterhood before being rescued by Shakespeare when he was a youth. Much of the novel is spent showing how Shakespeare's wife disguises herself as his male cousin in a pants role designed to allow her greater access to the world of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama in the court and in the theaters. The book also goes on at some length about a supposed conspiracy against Shakespeare that is founded in envy and jealousy and lust, something that is believable, at least. This is a book that takes advantage of what little is known about Shakespeare's life and character and turns that into an advantage by working within the bounds of plausibility because a great deal is plausible when one looks at Shakespeare's life. The fact that this book makes a strong anti-snobbish statement about the ability of people to educate themselves through voracious reading is certainly a statement this reader can support wholeheartedly. The book's ending is pure wish fulfillment about how the imaginary diary would permanently explode the claims of those who think that a grammar school educated provincial like Shakespeare could not have written his deep and profound dramas, and that is a wish I certainly share with the author.
Even so, this is not a perfect work. There are some minor issues here with the chronology of Shakespeare's plays that seem a bit dodgy and a bit too conveniently written. The suspense about whether or not Shakespeare will retire from the London scene and the doubt of authorship over Henry VIII also detract a bit from enjoyment of the plot. In many ways, though, this book's greatest strengths are also its weaknesses. The book is self-evidently the work of a contemporary writer who is deeply concerned with questions of class, identity, sexuality, and gender roles. To be sure, these were all issues at the time of Shakespeare, but they are not explored as someone in that time would have viewed them, but are rather viewed from the light of a cosmopolitan and not particularly morally upright contemporary perspective that I found offensive and sometimes off-putting. It did not feel that we were fully getting into the perspective of Shakespeare's wife, but rather that we were seeing a contemporary feminist perspective that was using her as an empty vessel to fill with all kinds of contemporary notions about the role and place of women, something which I obviously found less pleasant to read than a more honest and less anachronistic portrayal would have been.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014...
July 1, 2018
(I won this book in Turner publishings free book friday contest.) I'll start by saying that this is not my normal genre of literature, and I have not read anything even related to Shakespeare since high school. (Though I do enjoy the great bards work.) This work of historical fiction is well researched and carefully written to take place in the gaps between what we know of Shakespeare's life and what we can only guess at. The story is plausible, and barring a discovery of Anne's real diary should one exist, very believable. The diary format helps keep the events in order, and the snippets of Shakespeare's works are appropriately, and beautifully, placed throughout. Conspiracies and Kings, Comedy and tragedy, Queens and commoners are all parts of the story; much like Shakespeare's plays themselves. I hope others will enjoy this trip to Elizabethan England as much as I did. p.s. their is a good list of suggested research materials too, I will be sure to add Filthy Shakespeare to my reading list also. Enjoy
February 22, 2018
I was given an ARC for an honest review. While this book is fictional, the author's imagining of Anne Hathaway, Mrs. Shakespeare, was an entertaining and thoughtful account of her partnership with William Shakespeare, and I enjoyed reading this imaginary account of their life together.
July 27, 2020
Bits and bobs and pieces of this book were really good. But as a whole it just didn't come together.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews