Shakespeare's Wife

by Germaine Greer

Little is known of the wife of England's greatest playwright. In play after play Shakespeare presents the finding of a worthy wife as a triumphant denouement, yet scholars persist in believing that his own wife was resented and even hated by him. Here Germaine Greer strives to re-embed the story of their marriage in its social context and presents new hypotheses about the life of the farmer's daughter who married our greatest poet. This is a daring, insightful book that asks new questions, opens new fields of investigation and research, and rights the wrongs done to Ann Shakespeare.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Shakespeare, Biography, Feminism, Historical, British Literature

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Germaine Greer is an Australian born writer, journalist and scholar of early modern English literature, widely regarded as one of the most significant feminist voices of the later 20th century.

Greer's ideas have created controversy ever since her ground-breaking The Female Eunuch became an international best-seller in 1970, turning her overnight into a household name and bringing her both adulation and criticism. She is also the author of Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility (1984), The Change: Women, Ageing and the Menopause (1991), and most recently Shakespeare's Wife (2007).

Reviews

[Naomi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am always surprised by Greer's actual writing. Her public persona is so contentious and brash. Previous to this book I had only read Greer's feminist writing (i.e. 'female eunich' and 'the whole woman'). Particularly in this book, she has a very measured and well supported style that weaves a cross stitch of fact and speculation into an enjoyable tale. She makes sure that the reader knows when she is fictionalising. Her main argument is that in the absence of documentary evidence why are Shakespearean scholars so willing to believe that Ann Hathaway/Shakespeare was a viper tongued, ugly, unlovable woman who Shakespeare couldn't wait to abandon after having been prodded to the alter at the end of a shotgun? In the process of making sense of what documents that do survive from the late 16th century on William and Ann themselves and using other sources unconnected to the Shakespeares, she covers a very interesting period in the economic and spiritual life of the family in Stradford. I enjoyed particularly Greer's analysis of what activities a housewife would be engaged in both in terms of keeping home and hearth but also in contributing to the family income as well. In terms of an analysis of academic prejudice Greer manages to get the reader thinking once again about what kind of woman Ann Shakespeare might have been and assessing our own social moors.

To quote the last paragraph in the book... 'all this, in common with most of this book, is heresy, and probably neither truer nor less true than the accepted prejudice. Ann Shakespeare cannot sensibly be written out of her husband's life if only because he himself was so aware of marriage as a challenging way of life... The Shakespeare wallahs have succeeded in creating a Bard in their own likeness, that is to say, incapable of relating to women, and have then vilified the one woman who remained true to him all his life, in order to exonerate him. There can be no doubt that Shakespeae neglected his wife, embarrassed her and even humiliated her, but attempting to justify his behaviour by vilifying her is puerile. The defenders of Ann Hathaway are usually derided as sentimental when they are trying to simply be fair. It is a more insidious variety of sentimentality that wants to believe that women who are ill treated must have brought it upon themselves. The creator of Hero, Desdemona, Imogen and Hermione knew better. Ann might say like Lady Macduff: I have done no harm. But I remember now I am in his earthly world, where to do harm is often laudable, to do good sometime accounted dangerous folly. Why then, alas, do I put up that womanly defence to say I have done no harm? (IV. ii. 75-80)'.


A satisfying conclusion to a satisfying book.

[El · Rating 2 out of 5]

Such a disappointment.

There's admittedly little actually known about William Shakespeare, and even less is known about his wife, Ann Hathaway. (No. Not that Ann Hathaway.) Greer's intention was to shine light on the life of the woman, their marriage, and to rage against all the misogyny in other historical accounts of Shakespeare's life. But... but... because there's little known about these people, anything that gets put into historical accounts are pure supposition. Greer's evident disgust at historians like Stephen Greenblatt is amusing at times, but her entire book is filled with statements like "Perhaps Ann..." and "Ann could have..." and "She probably..."

Uh, no.

You don't know, so don't pretend that you do. You're not doing much better than Greenblatt or other historians who wrote Hathaway out of most of the history entirely because there's so little basis to anything written here.

I give this two stars because there is a wealth of other information here about the lives of women especially in Tudor and Jacobean eras. That's the real meat of this book; unfortunately, Greer uses that information to tie in this entirely made-up stuff about Hathaway, and also used Shakespeare's own words to try to glean more about his wife's life from that. Ultimately this made the entire book murky and clunky and, honestly, boring.

So, two stars for the history that's based on real stuff. Had this truly been just about Greer's fantasies about what Hathaway's life must have been like, it would have been completely unreadable.

Also, two stars for the phrase "multifarious shakespeareanising" on page 190. That's just... I can't even. I love it.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I was in college, I was fortunate to spend a semester abroad in London. On one of our trips around the U.K., we spent a weekend at Stratford. I remember being impressed by Shakespeare's birthplace and seeing Jonathan Pryce in Hamlet, but my favorite part of the trip was a visit to Ann Hathaway's cottage (which, Greer points out, was never hers). It was a sunny afternoon in fall, and after our tour, we got to roam around the grounds. I remember a lot of windfall apples lying about. I also remember wondering what it would have been like to grow up in that house.

Greer spends much time ripping apart moldy old assumptions about the relationship between Ann Hathaway and her husband. Many scholars, apparently, assume that Shakespeare spent so much time away from his wife because he couldn't stand her, or because he loved someone else, and Greer asks, "Why would you think that?" She delves into the lives of Ann's neighbors and builds many other possibilities for her -- businesswoman, brewer, lender, landlady, and, just possibly, publisher. Greer is a great champion for this mysterious woman who must have had an influence on some of the greatest writing in our language.

The book is filled with wonderful turns of phrase, some of which I wrote in my progress notes on this book. An example from late in the book: "The idea that she might be entitled to some of the credit for the preservation of her husband's work is apparently too ridiculous to contemplate, which is why we shall now contemplate it." Awesome.

And at the end, she sums things up nicely writing, "All this, in common with most of this book, is heresy, and probably neither truer nor less true than the accepted prejudice. Ann Shakespeare cannot sensibly be written out of her husband's life if only because he himself was so aware of marriage as a challenging way of life, a 'world-without-end bargain'."

I can recommend this book to anyone interested in this shadowy figure or in small-town domestic life during the Elizabethan era.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love the idea of this book. To give Ann Hathaway some credit instead of her being seen as the nagging wife back in Stratford whilst Shakespeare was being a genius in the theatre world and fleshpots of London.

Ann Hathaway was eight years older than William Shakespeare when they married. This has led her to be stereotyped as having trapped him into marriage and then to becoming old and unattractive and a burden to him. Germaine Greer writes very well of how the age difference was not so unusual in the 1500's and how she was from the 'better' family and may very well have helped him advance his career. Not only that but Ann was a successful business woman in her own right not to mention a mother and that there is actually no evidence other than supposition that she and William were not happily married. After all he returned to Stratford to be with her in his last years.

It is often cited that Shakespeare left Ann their 'second best bed' in his will and he did so deliberately as a snub and insult to her lack of sexiness. Actually at the time beds often cost as much as some houses and the best bed might be reserved for guests so the second best bed was the marital bed and his bequeathing it to her may be a celebration of their love. She would have inherited nearly all Shakespeare's household goods by default with no need for them to mentioned in a will.

Germaine Greer makes a great case for Ann. The only problem is we simply don't know that much about her. We actually know not much about her husband apart from his work. This is a problem in a book of 356 pages! It's three times too long. A hundred and twenty page, punchy book would have been enough.

Will they at some time get Anne Hathaway to play Ann Hathaway? Surely that's irresistible?

[Cece]

I admit that I only lasted about 50 pages, but when it appears an author has taken every theory going,loaded them in a shaker, given them a good tumble then poured them out and published as they fell, I lose patience quickly. Too many "she might have beens" and "she probablys" all mixed together, along with finger-shaking at previous Shakepeare scholars for treating Anne (or Ann, or Agnes) so unfairly. I am aware that little real evidence exists. I know that Greer is known for impeccable research-so if anyone is going to be able to link obscure facts into a picture, it might be she. But her style is dry and staccato-like an older collge professor droning along, ignoring the hands raised to ask questions about his convoluted lecture.

[Adnamy · Rating 2 out of 5]

It says read twice
More accurately tried twice at least
Accurate I’m sure, but also turgid
I tried

[Ana · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you've read Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, I'd recommend reading this book next. I need to stress that in both books there is too much speculation for either one to be held as historical fact, but I really like the Germaine Greer's courage in going against the grain by using her skill for impeccable research. A lot of writers have written negative judgements about Ann's character, given her age when marrying 'The Bard', taking advantage that she never had a chance to tell her own story. Greer takes them all to task.

Her writing is a little dry and scholarly, but there are infusions of humor and analysis of Shakespeare's works relating to women that keep the book interesting. Also, given how little attention is given to women's lives in the history books I've grown up with, I found it pleasant to find so many interesting facts about women's lives and prospects in Elizabethan England. The footnotes to historical sources were a real comfort.

I really like to compare and contrast the two books, mostly because they are the only two biographies related to Shakespeare's life that I've read so far, but I'll probably read more.

[Dana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Though at parts, I enjoyed Greer's style of disparaging previous historians who have assumed that Shakespeare hated Ann, I also find that Greer did much the same thing, just while being on the side of Ann. She's still assuming, but just in Ann's favour, and that began to rub me the wrong way. It was also very full of figures; I didn't particularly need to know how each widow divvied up her belongings, or how the commons were being encroached on. A brief mention, summary, of what was happening would have been sufficient, rather than pages and pages with little mention of Ann's part in it. But it was interesting to read a different perspective, since I've never heard anything great about Ann. In the end, we can never really know what happened, since record keeping was not exactly good in these times, and records are our only real hard evidence. Everything else is conjecture, but that can usually make for an interesting read as well!

[Melaszka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inevitably, like all Shakespearean biographies, this is one part general social history, one part misguided attempt to read the plays and poems as a roman a clef, and one part wild, baseless speculation, but I wouldn't have expected anything else, given how little hard evidence there is.

At least it's a counterbalance to much of the misogynist speculation that has become the received wisdom about Hathaway and there are some sensible suggestions in amongst the extended flights of fancy - in particular, Greer seems to understand the pitfalls and limitations of 16th/17th century parish registers better than many Shakespearean scholars. Her suggestion that the Joan Shakespeare baptised in Stratford in 1558 may not be a shortlived elder sister of the playwright, as is almost universally assumed by scholars, but the daughter of an unrelated John Shakespeare who moved away will seem a rational deduction to most experienced genealogists.

The gynocentric nature of Greer's musings throws up some interesting suggestions - e.g. that the increased risk to both mother and babies in a twin birth makes it possible that Hathaway contracted an infection which made her infertile and it could be that, not, as is usually assumed, sexual estrangement from her husband, which explains why they had no more children after 1585 and that Hamnet, the weaker twin, might have been disabled.

Greer's fresh analysis of Shakespeare's own financial situation and that of his parents is also used to make a compelling case that it was Hathaway, not Shakespeare, who was the better catch in their relationship and that Hathaway probably had to support herself when her husband left for London to act.

So, yes - overegged, speculative and full of padding, but still a fascinating read and thought-provoking in places.

[Cynda · Rating 4 out of 5]

4☆ for the new interpretations of Anne Hathaway Shakespeare's and thus William Shakespeare's life. Greer starts by pointing out that traditionally women were not considered important in the least. If anyone asked what would become of a young family when the father died, the speaker of the question was considered "womanish." I'm thinking that is an adult version of being called a "girl" or a "sissy." Among the classes lower than the gentry, married women and children had no rights to their husbands' or fathers' income. So Anne Hathaway Shakespeare had to do something to support her children. Greer speculates and then proposes that Anne managed a lucrative business. A player and writer would have no need for New Place with its rundown buildings and all its outbuildings. The home-based business Anne owned and operated benefitted from the location and all the various outbuildings. Perhaps Anne bought New Place.
Greer says that the major (men) biographers tend to think that Shakespeare threw Anne away and her survival and her children's survival are not important. She does stop short of saying they would call each other "womanish" if any of them paid too close attention to Anne. That'said okay Greer will do tell us about Anne.
The book is about Shakespeare's wife, so much of the book is not directly about Ann. So a good number of play scene bits and sonnets, including others, indicate the life experience of women below the gentry class.
Worldview Expanding.

[GraceAnne · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a great read this was. I absolutely love Greer's vivid, sly, and fierce intelligence and her ways of making argument.
Greer takes the same sources that have engendered a vision of Ann Hathaway, Shakespeare's wife, as plain, old, mean, harsh etc. and reinterprets them to their opposite number. There is not much documentation about her, so when that fails Greer tells us, in copious detail, about people like her. For example, she details the ages people in Stratford got married, and to whom, how marriages were arranged, children's living arrangements, how women whose husbands worked elsewhere supported themselves, and what kind of town Stratford was to live in. It is brilliant and fascinating.

One of the things I learned and enjoyed most was how slippery even naming can be. Agnes (pronounced Annis) and Ann were the same name, essentially, in Shakespeare's time. Greer is at pains to try to separate one family from another, as much as possible, from Stratford records. Sometimes it feels as though the whole town shared only seven given names.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I picked up this book, I thought that I had never really thought about Ann Hathaway before. As I got deeper into it, I realized that in actuality I had internalized all those ideas of Shakespeare scholars that she was an ugly shrew, that she tricked William Shakespeare into marrying her, that she drove him out of her home and into the arms of prostitutes, etc. etc. etc.

Those types of suppositions have little if any factual basis, and Greer does a good job of examining how and why they came about in the first place. What she cannot do, working from the same dearth of primary documents that all Shakespearean scholars face, is construct a factual account of Ann Shakespeare's life in Stratford. The theories she puts forward are just as shaky as those negative assumptions from other scholars, but she acknowledges that they can only be theories, and offers them up as a kind of redemption for Ann Shakespeare, as a more positive "could-have-been" than we usually see.

What the book does offer is a good portrait of what it was like to be a wife and mother in a sixteenth century market town, particularly with an absent husband. She examines their legal rights and responsibilities, the economics of being a woman left alone to raise children, and the type of work that women like Ann Shakespeare could have done. It is a fascinating social history about the lives of women, using one unjustly maligned woman as its focus.

[Kathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shakespeare’s Wife
By Germaine Greer
Originally Reviewed January 15, 2010
Revised October 6, 2019


I bought this book mistakenly thinking it was a work of historical fiction. Once I got it home and started looking it over, however, I realized it was a non-fiction work, an attempt to flesh out the mysterious wife of the Bard of Avon – Ann Hathaway.

Very little is known of the Bard himself. There is enough to let us know he really existed and is not the figment of someone’s imagination, but there are enough gaps in that knowledge that even some of the best-meaning biographers have had to indulge in more than a little imagination to fill them. Worse still, these same gaps have led to conspiracy theories revolving around the authorship of those wonderful plays and sonnets that comprise the complete works of William Shakespeare.

And if we think our knowledge of William Shakespeare the man is sketchy, when it comes to his wife the information about her is almost non-existent. In the case of Ann Hathaway, this lack of substance has allowed her reputation to become, shall we say tarnished? All too often, Shakespeare’s biographers – many of whom strike me as suffering from severe cases of hero worship (Greer refers to them as “bardolaters”) – have made negative assumptions about the woman based on, at best, an odd item in the Bard’s will.

To them, she was a shrew, an over-the-hill older woman who seduced an innocent lad, got herself pregnant, and forced him to marry her. Their marriage became so unbearable (in spite of the birth of more children, suggesting that if nothing else they were still engaging in carnal relations), that Shakespeare finally ran off to London, rarely coming home to Stratford until his final years.

Throughout this book, Ms. Greer sweeps away myth and misconception. She has researched primary records and documents – parish records, Corporations records, chancery records and more -- and presents us with a plausible and realistic image of what kind of woman Ann Hathaway Shakespeare might have been.

Some Myths…busted:

Myth – At age 26, Ann Hathaway was over the hill and desperate to marry.

False. Contrary to popular misconception that people were married off at very young ages during the 16th and 17th centuries, Ms. Greer’s examination of marriage records demonstrates differently. It turns out that the average age for marrying was in the mid-20s.

Myth – Households were often multi-generational, and it was common for a young man to bring his bride to live in his parents’ home.

False. Young men were expected to provide their brides with a household of their own, and not add to the parents’ burden. This meant having to wait and save enough money to buy or lease a place to live, leading to the older marrying age.

Myth – The idea of a young boy marrying an older woman was nothing short of disgraceful.

False. While it may not have happened every day, such relationships were not uncommon, and in fact were often celebrated in plays and poetry – including some written by WS himself, and often in a positive light. And think about it. How many of you have known of instances where a boy in his late teens falls in love with an older woman? Today we consider it unseemly at best if such a relationship is consummated, but it wasn’t necessarily so back then. Also, there were no distinctions between children, teens and adults. You were either a child…or an adult. At age 18, Shakespeare would definitely been considered an adult.

Myth – Ann Hathaway’s being three months pregnant at the time of her marriage to William Shakespeare was a scandal.

Both true and false. While some might have considered it a scandal, the truth is that according the records Ms. Greer consulted, nearly one third of all women marrying in Stratford and surrounding area at this time were pregnant at the time of their marriages, and as long as the marriage was solemnized before the baby was born, nobody thought the worse of it. It was also not uncommon for babies to be born out of wedlock, and Ms. Greer does a great job of documenting this as well.

Another point I learned while reading this book is that when Shakespeare married Ann Hathaway, he was in fact “marrying up.” By the time they married, the Shakespeare family had fallen on hard times. This made me wonder if, in fact, it was William who went about seducing Ann with the idea of marrying her and thus improving his own circumstances.

By the end of this book, I came away with the thought that maybe it was Shakespeare himself who was the despicable one. Traditional thinking says that if he abandoned his wife for long periods of time, and left her a measly second-best bed in his will, then she must have done something to earn this shabby treatment. Yet this shrewish woman is the same person who nursed Shakespeare during the last four months of his life.

This got me to wondering…what if it was the other way around? What if Shakespeare was the boorish husband who loved hobnobbing in London, putting his own wants and desires above his wife’s? What if he was a gentry wannabe? It’s known that he had applied to be granted the status of “gentleman”, something to which he was not entitled, and later in life cozied up to those same members of the gentry at the expense of those of his own class? What if he had used Ann to help him get a leg up in the world? Just because he was a brilliant writer does not mean he could not have harbored baser thoughts. After all, he was a man, not a demigod as some of the “bardolaters” would prefer to have it.

There is so much food for thought in this book, and in addition to getting a closer look at what life would have been like for the Hathaways, the Shakespeares, their neighbors and kin, you also get a good dose of the local politics of the day.

In the end, we will never know what Ann Hathaway was really like. Maybe she was after all a shrew, and maybe she wasn’t. I doubt we’ll ever know, but it’s good to reassess the evidence from time to time, and examine it from a different perspective. Somewhere in the middle of the two, we just might stumble upon the truth.

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is tough book to read. Very dense with many many footnotes and constant references to Shakespeare's and others' plays from the time. It is not for the average reader looking for an entertaining read. I was forced to skim a lot of it. Still very interesting to a history major and there's much to learn in it.

[Will · Rating 2 out of 5]

Though best known for her feminism, Germaine Greer speaks astutely and with insight on her specialism and passion: the works of Shakespeare. Her writing on the topic, too, has been fresh and incisive (see her book on Shakespeare). Therefore as a fan it disappointed me to find her book Shakespeare's Wife somewhat dull and inconsequential.

Asserting Ann Shakespeare's role in the Bard's life and agency in his work, Greer's enterprise is a worthy one, dense and rigorously researched (two stars for that), but the end product hardly makes for worthwhile reading. The book is necessarily speculative given the paucity of direct evidence concerning its subject, so what ensues is a rambling tome only a fraction of which is actually about Shakespeare or his wife. What we get instead of heartwarming marital anecdotes are endless lists of women's belongings, the contents of interminable wills, ceaseless details of random disputes, family trees, prices, fines, dates etc. There's an entire insufferable chapter devoted to the symptoms suffered by syphilitics, one of whom Shakespeare may have been ... or not. Winding Shakespeare's sonnets into this turgid morass with only her relentless supposition to cohere the lot Greer even manages to make the greatest love poems of English literary history seem like snoreworthy data.

I can't count the number of times I've fallen asleep while reading this book!

To label it either scholarly or unscholarly might be a tad generous: the copious end notes and references are no less formidable than we might expect from Dr Greer, but the result is not an authoritative account. Yet nor is it a compelling narrative. It could have been a much slimmer volume or even a long chapter; perhaps better still it could have been half of a dual narrative juxtaposing what we think we know about Shakespeare running parallel or back to back with Greer's notions about his wife.

Truthfully I forced myself to read it, and the month it took me to do so broke a hitherto good run of reading when I had averaged more than a book per week. What Greer has created here would be forgivable — after all, there are plenty of writers out there with agendas of one kind or another who are far less tenacious and reliable than this one, not to mention plenty of boring books — except that this book has signally failed to inspire me to want to read anything more about Shakespeare or his wife for a long time or less still, and thus unforgivably, to return to his writings.

[Louise Culmer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite an interesting book in which Germaine Greer attempts to piece together the life of Anne Hathaway. She is rightly critical of the many scholars who have assumed, based on no evidence at all, that Shakespeare disliked his wife. The trouble is that there is h ardly any information available about Anne Hathaway, and almost anything said about her must be only conjecture. Greer for example takes it for granted that Shakespeare did not support his family during his years in London, pointing out that there is no evidence that he did. But neither is there any evidence that he didn't. It is interesting to read about the social.conditions of the time, the various ways a woman could earn a living for example. Greer assumes Anne had to work to support her self and her children, which may have been the case. Or it may not. It's the same throughout the book. Greer criticises other writers for making unproven assumptions about the Shakespeares, then makes equally unproven assumptions of her own (a whole chapter for example on what Shakespeare may have died of). But there's quite a bit of interesting information to be picked up along the way about the goings on in Stratford in that era (a lot of trouble about enclosures for instance), and about the many and varied skills expected of the Elizabethan housewife. There's plenty to enjoy here if you can overlook all the assumptions made.

[Lucie Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good read but slightly disappointed. Usually love Greer’s punchy commentaries but this one is a little frustrating.
Perhaps it is because she sheds no new light on Shakespeare’s history apart from discounting the biographies of her predecessors, the “bardalators” , who wrote about the life of Shakespeare and his family with unsupported hypotheses.
Loved the chapter on disease and 16th century medicine as she surmises on what actually killed Shakespeare. But which disease he really had is just speculation. Some say he died of complications associated with siphylis.
As she states, her theories are “daring” and “heresy” as Greer insists that Ann Shakespeare has been much maligned in past bios on Shakespeare. She says that misogynistic male writers have said that Ann “left a wife- shaped void in the biography of William Shakespeare, which later bardolators filled up with their own speculations, most of which do neither them nor their hero any credit”.
From Edmund Malone to sir Sydney lee to Stephen greenblatt, these “Shakespeare wallahs” have “succeeded in creating a Bard in their own likeness, that is to say, incapable of relating to women, and then vilified Ann in order to exonerate him”.

[Carolyn Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating biography of Anne Hathaway that places her and her daughters within the context of the social history of Stratford-upon-Avon. Greer's conclusions are necessarily speculative because so little is known about Shakespeare's personal life and his relationship with his family. Nevertheless, her analysis is a welcome counterpoint to longstanding assumptions that Shakespeare was pressured into his marriage and left town as soon as possible. In addition to examining how Anne Hathaway's experiences compared with that her neighbours, Greer also examines portrayals of marriage in Shakespeare's plays, especially The Merry Wives of Windsor. Like the author, I hope that new sources concerning Anne Hathaway will emerge, providing more details of the life she led in Stratford-upon-Avon.

[Niccy · Rating 4 out of 5]

a shame we’ll never know who wrote it…

[Leelan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book. Could have been better. Greer does a great job of bringing Anne out of her husband's shadow. And makes the point that they may not have had an unhappy marriage as every other (male) Shakespeare biographer takes for granted. It was the Elizabethan age. Divorces were not allowed for commoners. But it was a litigous time in England's history. There are many instances of women prosecuting their husbands for abandonment. There is no record of Anne doing so. Husbands and wives did sometimes live apart for economic reasons. Stratford was a small country town in Warwickshire. Not much call for a poet or a playwright. So William went to London where he acheived reputation but not fame. Fame came generations after his death. In those days (theater as an industry had just begun) players and playwrights were considered the lowest of the lowest class of citizens like prostitutes. So to say that William Shakespeare was the greatest playwright in London was the same as saying Judith So-and-so was the best whore. Players and playwrights were not the best paid professionals either. Other biographers say that William became rich by not only being the best playwright but a shareholder of the Globe and the King's Men. Greer gives evidence that Anne was the breadwinner of the family. It was Anne's industry that bought New Place. What did William need with the best house in Stratford when he spent little time there? She financed her husband's buying of a family heraldic crest. She had the money. He didn't. Several times Shakespeare was seen to owe money that he never payed. Greer says that Anne made money by lending money. Elizabethan housewives tended the houses and flocks and fields. They brewed ale. They took lodgers. There are many records of women who dies rich. Playwrights and poets not so much. Greer does not paint Shakespeare in a very good light however. She proposes that he finally died young of a venerial disease or even cancer. But admits that if William had caught the VD when he was young after the twins were born, it would explain their separation and the fact that they had no more children. But if he had caught that disease at that time he would not have lived into his fifties. So cancer might be the truer cause of death. Whatever the case, in his last years at home he may have done more harm than good to his family. As an outsider he made many choices for his family that did not end well. Read the book. Judge for yourself.
I think that Anne and William had more happiness than even Greer supposes. Look at Shakespeare's female characters. How many of them are smart, courageous and strong? How many of today's leading women love to play these parts? Where did Shakespeare get the ideas or examples for those strong women? Surely it was from the women in his life --- his mother, his wife and his daughters. Many biographers pull biographical information from Shakespeare's play and poetry. Whether they are right or wrong cannot be said. But why haven't any of them had that thought? Or applied the same measure to his family and not just to him?

[Pamela · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title is misleading because, of course, nothing is known of Ann Hathaway Shakespeare's life; the book has to deal with what IS known of Stratford in that day. So, the title should have been Life in Stratford during Shakespeare's Life. The book is basically what her life could possibly have been like, but she plays a small role even in the book. There is so much research crammed into this book that reading gets very difficult. Every paragraph seems a tangent as the author weaves in other families, events, etc., of that time frame and setting that have been recorded; then a continuing strand is tying AHS to various bits and pieces of lines in Shakespeare's work. However, overall emerges a much more flattering portrait of AHS than noted by other critics--and most of Greer's suppositions really make sense. The best thing about the book, other than the obviously intense research is that Greer carefully notes when her theories are simply theories. She seldom states anything as fact as many other critics and biographers have done. For anyone intensely studying Shakespeare, this should be required reading.

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having just finished Will in the World, I was glad that Greer directly calls out Stephen Greenblatt and others on their assumptions about women, families, childbearing, and litigation from ~1580 to 1625. Great scholarship, detailed without being dry or heavy (for the most part). It's not as narrative as some, though I'll take restraint and accuracy over through line in a literary biography like this, but Greer's writing is clear and evocative, and her occasional fancies are clearly labeled as such.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a complicated but ultimately satisfying read! So little is known about Anne Hathaway, but that didn't stop Greer from poring through thousands of documents to create what Anne's life was probably like -- and help dispel some of the negative history she has been given.

[reading is my hustle]

Pedantic to the nth degree & such a missed opportunity. Tear.

[Nicole · Rating 2 out of 5]

With everything going on with Germaine Greer, I no longer want to put forth the effort to finish this book. Love the subject matter, but going to the CNF pile for me.

[Roberta · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF- not enough facts and too much conjecture put me off of this after 20 pages…

[Cristina · Rating 4 out of 5]

A spiritual if not actual response to Greenblatt’s Will in the World, and in many ways more insightful. I’m particularly relieved by the fresh dose of common sense and research applied to the subject of the Shakespeares’ marriage, the airy speculation by the scholarly fandom critics based on little more than sexist grouching and ahistorical or bad faith interpretations. Some inspired takes include the Blackfriars gatehouse acquisition and the complex arrangement of trustees Shakespeare set up (taken by most critics as attempts to prevent Anne from inheriting the gatehouse and taken by Greer as the laughable conjecture it is), as well as the second best bed bequest and the setting up of Susanna as the main heir in the will. Greer is even-handed in her exploration of multiple possibilities, even ones that contradict her own thesis, and frank in the lacunae that exist.

It’s not without its hair-tearing, though. Greer plays both sides of the Sonnet question very well and very infuriatingly for her shifting purposes, and she begs the question of the Shakespeares’ poverty too much—considering the family spent an enormous amount of effort and time to win back the Arden lands from the Lamberts, you’d think they would have some resources left to pursue that claim. Greer also indulges in fanfic-style speculation that Shakespeare might have contracted syphilis via a prostitute lover based on the number of references to the disease contained in his works (if that were the case, the question becomes not that Shakespeare died too soon, but too late. Mercury cures were particularly dangerous, and Shakespeare was still writing sharp and coherent plays well into the 1610s). At times this book felt like the wife’s argument in a contentious divorce court case: He doesn’t come home, he writes sonnets to other people, he doesn’t help me with the kids, he befriends creeps like those Combe brothers and does business with that asshole Greville, and yet I’m the bad guy here. Meanwhile I breastfed and raised my kids, acted as personal bank to the family shepherd, and gave wine to a visiting preacher once. (Fanboys truly are the worst). There is also the fact that even Greer can’t help but do as her critics and dip into Shakespeare’s own words to buttress her points. Some inferences are reasonable, taken from a general overview of the oeuvre, while others are just out there (Hamnet may have been had a deformity and may have been represented in Shakespeare’s works as...Richard III. Yikes).

We may never know if Will and Anne made it work or if there was some Kramer vs. Kramer-style convention or it was somewhere in between. Some mysteries, such as the will and the second best bed bequest, seem to have been cleared up thanks to some forensic sleuthing, but myths suggestive of juicy personal drama always die hard, unfortunately. “All biographies of Shakespeare are houses built of straw, but there is good straw and rotten straw, and some houses are better built than others,” as Greer points out (9). This is one of the good straw ones.

[Linda · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author’s aim in writing this book was to throw light onto Ann Hathaway/Shakespeare, to give her some much overdue attention in her own right, and to place her, her family, and her marriage to William in the social context of the time. Although she does succeed in giving the reader a very detailed account of Ann’s life and background, I felt that she was all too often in danger of burying her beneath an avalanche of facts and suppositions about not only the role of women during the period, but also the mores of the society in which she lived, thereby extrapolating what Ann might have thought/reacted/ been like. Whilst much of this information was interesting, I found that it all too often detracted from what should have been the main focus.
Germaine Greer’s unsurprising belief that Ann has been vilified, undervalued and generally badly served by various male biographers is the main driving force behind her writing. However, I often felt that she was so caught up in her desire to empower Ann that she ended up being just as guilty of offering unsupported theories as the “misogynist” authors of whom she was so critical. Whilst she does acknowledge that “…. most of this book is heresy, and probably neither truer nor less true than the accepted prejudice”, her constant prefaces of “if, but, maybe, could have been, possibly” etc became tiresome and irritating!
However, in her general depiction of the period, of the lives of women, the turbulent nature of Elizabethan Stratford-upon Avon and in her inclusion and analysis of some of Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays, she has written a very scholarly piece of work, and has certainly given Ann a louder voice than she is normally accorded: it is just a shame that it took her 356 pages in which to do it. “Less is more” is a mantra she would do well to adopt. Although I am interested in the writings of Shakespeare, I have little interest in reading about his (or any “celebrity’s”) personal relationships, particularly when so much of the “evidence” is hearsay and speculation! All that matters to me is that his work has survived for us to enjoy.
After reading the author’s excellent, scholarly and coherent Shakespeare: A Very Short Introduction” I had hoped for something similar, so I was very disappointed by this book.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

A marvelous book on the wife of the greatest love poet in English which examines why Anne Hathaway has such a dreadful reputation in academia and amongst Shakespeare scholars. Anne supposedly was illiterate, tricked Willy into marriage, and was adulterous. Many know Greer as a contentious feminist whose early writings like " The Female Eunuch" rocked popular culture. She is primarily,however, a Shakespearean scholar, and has turned her eye toward the myths and misrepresentations surrounding the wife of the bard. She shows it was common to sleep with your fiancé before the church marriage in Shakespeare's time because your were considered married already. Thus, its possible that Shakespeare and Anne knowingly conceived their first child. Also, Greer shows that a woman of Anne's rank almost certainly knew how to read and write. Further she effectively demonstrates that Anne may have had a strong hand in the finances of the Shakespeare family, as this was customary when husbands were away. And in fact, traveling husbands, who spent months and terms and seasons away from hometowns was common, as was the wife who would run family affairs in their absence. She notes that adultery was still a capital crime at this time, and that, especially in a small town like Stratford, no women would risk extra marital relations because the best she could hope for was expulsion from the community and loss of children, lands, and livelihood. She effectively shows which of Shakespeare's sonnets and love poetry could have been addressed to Anne Hathaway. Greer effectively spears many male Shakespeareans in her reevaluation. Stephen Greenblatt and Anthony Burgess among them. Both are some of my favorite writers on the bard, but I cannot argue with her conclusion that there is little evidence for the assertions they maintained and that she skewers. This may be dry for you in parts if you're not fascinated by Shakespeare, but for a Shakespeare geek its gold. Greer's writing lapses into common UK usage at times which might baffle the average American, but keep google handy and you'll be fine.

[Eileen O'Finlan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first biography I've read of Ann Hathaway (the wife of William Shakespeare). I have never read a biography of Shakespeare, for that matter, though I did take and enjoy a college course on his writing.

I found this book to be very informative, not only regarding the Shakespeare and Hathaway families, but also of the place and time. The author, having written her Ph.D. dissertation on Shakespeare's comedies, clearly has a strong background in the time, place, and culture of her subject as well as the players themselves.

The majority of this book is spent disputing other Shakespeare historians and biographers who, for apparently little reason, according to Greer, have decided that Shakespeare hated his wife. By backing up her own theories with weighty arguments, I thought she did a commendable job of refuting their claims, which she seems to regard as coming from the mysoginistic attitudes of these mostly male scholars. In a variety of circumstances she offers several possibilities that go beyond what previous sholars of the Bard have considered. At the same time she readily admits that it is rarely possible to prove which of her or other scholars' hypotheses, if any, are correct. This left me feeling that even after reading this book I still have no idea of the truth, though the truth is apparently impossible to know at this point and this is certainly not the fault of the author.

While I enjoyed reading this book, I felt that at times it was a bit dry. I prefer biographies to read a bit more like novels. This book, filled as it was with, statistics, inventories and the like, gave it more the feel of a social history. There is nothing wrong with this, just not my preference.

Overall, I liked this book. Certainly, I know more about Shakespeare, his family, and the everyday lives of people of the Shakespeares' rank than I did before I read it.