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The Review - BOOKS
Published: 13 September 2007
 
Behind every great playwright...

Germaine Greer, the controversial feminist and best-selling author
of the Female Eunuch, has turned her attention to ‘defending’ Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway. Sara Newman reports.


Shakespeare’s Wife, by Germaine Greer, Bloomsbury, £20.

UNLIKE Anne Hathaway, the unacknowledged wife of William Shakespeare, Germaine Greer was a woman under the spotlight at the launch of her book, Shakespeare’s Wife in Bloomsbury Theatre.
Seated on a high stool, dressed in a black smock, her back as straight as a board, her belligerent chin delivering a resounding up-yours to the world of half-truths, Greer perched like a wise matriarch – ever fascinating, ever fluent and engaging.
Cutting through the bull, as only Greer knows how, she dismissed the speculation of renowned literary scholar Professor Stephen Greenblatt that Shakespeare had a physical revulsion to his wife’s body.
“It’s like Tina Brown writing about Diana’s orgasms. How did you know, Tina?” she challenges dryly. “Did you ask James Hewitt?”
In the tradition of all great social commentators, historians and academics, Greer has rewritten history – but this time it’s ‘her-story’.
Using sparse facts, gleaned from the parish register, of the baptisms of Anne Hathaway’s children, the death of her 11-year old son, Hamnet, the weddings of her daughters and the death of Shakespeare in 1616 – who Hathaway outlived by seven years – Greer pads out the tale with a generous helping of her own imagination.
Anne Hathaway was a farmer’s daughter from Shottery, near Stratford. She was already pregnant when she married the teenage Shakespeare, and was eight years his senior.
Greer suggests this is an unacceptable life story – to historians and literary scholars at least – for the wife of a genius. “Don’t forget our culture is pedophilic,” Greer reminds us scathingly.
Greer imagines Anne was austere and quiet and perhaps even forbidding.
Further, by virtue of her double labour and the grief of losing her son, continues Greer, Anne would also have been incredibly resourceful and strong.
This may seem like Greer is running away with herself a little but she would be the first to say so.
There is a tendency for historians to illuminate their own epoch, she admits.
No science is inductive.
But she did not make Ann in her own image.
Greer told the audience: “I’m not a wife, I’m not patient and long-suffering and I’m not a business woman. I think she would have disapproved of me enormously.”
Anne – a single mother who made a living knitting or perhaps making malt, as a lender, or was it as the promoter and financier of the First Folio – let the syphilitic, grieving Shakespeare go. He did not abandon her.
Greer called upon the archaeologists to get digging and prove her right.

‘I have no objection to segregation’ – Greer


WHEN asked to comment on the 25-year-old women’s centre now operating under one roof at the Old Kilburn Library, Greer likened their policy of not admitting men to times of yore when men were not allowed in the birth room and women would congregate at “gossips feasts” to play games and drink together.
Unmarried women did not belong to this freemasonry of women but they might go to a fair together.
“It was organic,” she said of this division of the genders.
“I have no objection to segregation. I think women find it hard to operate sometimes when they are around men. Women-only spaces are one of the few places I can hear women laughing, fit to burst.
Going to the pub, on the other hand, you hear women laugh but they are laughing at men’s jokes. They are more constrained and conscious. Inside her own four walls, however, it’s pandemonium.
Although Thomas Greene, Shakespeare’s cousin, the solicitor and town clerk of Stratford-upon-Avon was a dear friend of Anne Hathaway’s Greer believes that most important to Anne would have been her “gossips”.
 
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