Married to the myth

王敖

&lt;iframe title="Advertisement" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" src="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/html.ng/Params.richmedia=yes&amp;spacedesc=cookie&amp;site=Books&amp;section=110738&amp;country=usa&amp;region=ct&amp;city=new haven&amp;bandwidth=t1&amp;rand=3439249" frameborder="0" width="0" scrolling="no" height="0"&gt;&lt;/iframe&gt;&lt;iframe title="Advertisement" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" src="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/html.ng/Params.richmedia=yes&amp;location=top&amp;spacedesc=banner&amp;site=Books&amp;section=110738&amp;country=usa&amp;region=ct&amp;city=new haven&amp;bandwidth=t1&amp;rand=3439249&amp;tile=(none)" frameborder="0" width="468" scrolling="no" height="60"&gt;&lt;/iframe&gt;<br /><br /><font face="Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif" size="5"><b>Married to the myth</b></font><font face="Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif" size="3"> <p>Charles Nicholl admires Germaine Greer's spirited attempt to defend Ann Hathaway, Shakespeare's Wife</p></font><font face="Geneva,Arial,sans-serif" size="2"><b>Charles Nicholl </b><br /></font><font face="Geneva,Arial,sans-serif" size="2"><b>Saturday September 1, 2007</b><br /></font><font face="Geneva,Arial,sans-serif" size="2"><p><b>Guardian</b></p></font><font face="Geneva,Arial,sans-serif" size="2"><b>Shakespeare's Wife</b><br />by Germaine Greer <br />406pp, Bloomsbury, &pound;20 <p>Ann or Agnes Hathaway was a farmer's daughter from Shottery, near Stratford. Born in about 1556, she was 26 years old when she married William Shakespeare, a glove-maker's son eight years her junior. It seems he was already a budding poet. An early sonnet, written in jaunty octosyllabics and concluding with a laboured pun (hate away /Hathaway), is thought to have been a courtship poem. Ann was pregnant when they married, and six months later, in late May 1583, the first of their three children was born - a daughter, christened Susanna. </p><p>While her husband found fame and fortune in London, Ann's life remained firmly rooted in Stratford. In 1598, when she was in her early 40s, the family moved into a large house on the edge of town, New Place, bought, presumably, on theatrical profits. Shakespeare returned there when he could, which was probably not often. The outlines of Ann's career as a wife and mother are inscribed in the parish register - the baptisms of her children; the death of her only son, Hamnet, at the age of 11; the weddings of her daughters; the birth of her first grandchild, Elizabeth, in 1608. Shakespeare died in the spring of 1616, having made his will a few weeks earlier, including its notoriously brusque bequest: "I gyve unto my wief my second best bed with the furniture". Ann died, in her mid-60s, in August 1623. </p><p>Apart from the sonnet, which tells us nothing about her, what we know of Ann is more or less what we know of hundreds of middle-class Elizabethan and Jacobean women - a skeleton of documentary fact, mostly familial. It is Germaine Greer's laudable aim in Shakespeare's Wife to rescue this woman seemingly condemned to the shadows at the edge of her famous husband's life, to retrieve some kind of individuality for her, and to "re-embed" the story of their marriage "in its social context". </p><p>In part her book succeeds in this mission. She gives a robust account of Ann's origins and formative family experiences: she finds the Hathaways "a frugal, no-nonsense people", and notes the Puritan leanings of some of the family. She writes informatively, en passant, about various aspects of a provincial Elizabethan woman's life and choices. We hear of the costs of wet nursing, the routines of light agriculture, the contents of a visiting pedlar's pack. This is enjoyable, if sometimes self-defeating, as it tends to make Ann exemplary rather than individual: an identikit housewife of the period. </p><p>But this would not be a book by Germaine Greer if it did not also include a generous dollop of controversy. Her book has an agenda. Its thesis is broadly twofold - that Ann has been consistently undervalued, for what she meant to Shakespeare and for what she contributed to his work; and that this downgrading has been the product of generations of blinkered, misogynistic, male biographers. Ann has "left a wife-shaped void in the biography of William Shakespeare, which later bardolaters filled up with their own speculations, most of which do neither them nor their hero any credit". From Edmund Malone to Sir Sidney 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". Greer rightly condemns "bardolatry", though she must herself stand accused of arrant "bardography" - ie the frequent and irritating use of "The Bard" as a name for Shakespeare. </p><p>That the Shakespeare marriage has been viewed negatively cannot be denied. The age difference, the shotgun wedding, the long months apart while Shakespeare worked in London, and above all that crabby-sounding legacy to "my wife", which gives neither her name nor the formulaic adjective "well-beloved" - all these have contributed to an impression that Shakespeare entered the marriage unwillingly, and exited from it bitterly, that it was at best semi-detached and at worst cold and loveless. </p><p>Greer is quite right to challenge all this, but her oppositional approach tends to affect her historical acuity. Analysis gives way to a rhetoric of female empowerment, and argument to the familiar sound of special pleading. She claims that as part of their downgrading of Ann's intelligence, commentators have ignored the "curious fact" that she was related to a minor Elizabethan dramatist, Richard Hathway. But there is no such curious fact - only the more boring one that the dramatist has no known connection with the Hathaways of Shottery. Elsewhere she says sternly, "We can find no evidence of Shakespeare having supported his family, especially during the lost years [ie 1585-91, when there is no documentary record of his circumstances]". This conveniently casts Ann in a heroic feminist mould of fending for herself while looking after three children. But what kind of evidence would we expect to find of Shakespeare's financial support? </p><p>In her chapter "Of Ann's Reading of the Sonnets", Greer casually states that the first edition of the sonnets (1609) was a piratical publication done without Shakespeare's consent. There is no evidence for this, but again it is convenient for her argument - it would mean that the published sequence of the sonnets has no authorial imprimatur; and if the sequence is random it becomes more possible that some of the sonnets which are apparently addressed to the "Fair Youth" are (as Greer believes) addressed to Ann. Greer's crowning idea - that Ann was a behind-the-scenes promoter and financier of the First Folio - seems fanciful. </p><p>The best way to learn more about Ann Shakespeare would be actually to discover something new about her - a formidable task which Greer does not attempt. She refers to her theories as "daring", and "heresy", and to herself as "the intrepid author", yet in the end she offers just a different set of unsupported hypotheses. At its best this is a spirited, voluble, scholarly book which gives some depth and some dignity to the marginalised Mrs Shakespeare, but it is marred by a tendency to play ideological ping pong with her reputation. Charles Nicholl's The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street is to be published by Allen Lane in November.<font face="Times New Roman" size="3"> </font></p></font><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"> </font><center><font face="Geneva,Arial,sans-serif" size="1">Guardian Unlimited &copy; Guardian News and Media Limited 2007</font></center>