Shakespeare's Wife

By Germaine Greer

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year

A polemical, ground-breaking study of Elizabethan England that reclaims Ann Hathaway’s rightful place in history.

Little is known about the wife of the world’s most famous playwright; a great deal, none of it complimentary, has been assumed. The omission of her name from Shakespeare’s will has been interpreted as evidence that she was nothing more than an unfortunate mistake from which Shakespeare did well to distance himself.

Yet Shakespeare is above all the poet of marriage. Before him, there were few comedies or tragedies about wooing or wedding. And yet he explored the sacrament in all its aspects, spiritual, psychological, sexual, sociological, and was the creator of some of the most tenacious and intelligent heroines in English literature. Is it possible, therefore, that Ann, who has been mocked and vilified by scholars for centuries, was the inspiration?

Until now, there has been no serious critical scholarship devoted to the life and career of the farmer’s daughter who married England’s greatest poet. Part biography, part history, Shakespeare’s Wife is a fascinating reconstruction of Ann’s life, and an illuminating look at the daily lives of Elizabethan women, from their working routines to the rituals of courtship and the minutiae of married life. In this thoroughly researched and controversial book, Greer steps off the well-trodden paths of orthodoxy, asks new questions, and begins to right the wrongs done to Ann Shakespeare.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Feb 24, 2009
• ISBN: 9781551992150

Germaine Greer

Germaine Greer is a major cultural figure – a writer, an English critic, a literary and media star, and a feminist.

Reviews for Shakespeare's Wife

[lissabeth21 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

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 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.

[gothamajp · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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 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?

[bryndahlquis · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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 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.

[porius_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[ssugrimgirl_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

So far so good.. I'm only about half way in but the way Greer uses historical evidence, and literary review to reconstruct the life of Ann Hathaway is stellar. This new approach free from the bias of the great bard's trumpeters, gives us a fresh and understanding look at the woman that loved and lived with the man known to us as Shakespeare.

[gayla.bassham · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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, 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.

[panopticon2_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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

[rsubber · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

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 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.

[wenzowsa_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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 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.