- Paperback: 416 pages
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC; Export ed edition (3 Sep 2007)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0747591709
- ISBN-13: 978-0747591702
- Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 15.4 x 3.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 2.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
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- #65 in Books > Biography > Novelists, Poets & Playwrights > Shakespeare, William
Shakespeare's Wife
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Product Description
Review
'Greer dares to think the unthinkable ... this is a bold and imaginative book' Independent 'Excellent ... a marvellous imagining of the life of Shakespeare's wife and a devastating exposure of the misogyny of the male biographers who have disparaged her' Sunday Telegraph 'This is a spirited, voluble, scholarly book which gives some depth and some dignity to the marginalised Mrs Shakespeare' Guardian 'A refreshing corrective to the usual portrait ... Greer is impressive when it comes to detailing their Stratford life and times ... It's robust, lively stuff' The Times
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Product Description
Little is known of the wife of England's greatest 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 Shakespeare there were few comedies or tragedies of wooing and wedding. Tragedies were not about loving 'not wisely but too well' but about the fall of illustrious men. Comedies were not about the pitfalls that lay in wait along the path of true love but about getting away with adultery. In play after play Shakespeare presents the finding of a worthy wife as a triumphant denouement. Again and again in Shakespeare's plays constant wives redeem unjust and deluded husbands, but scholars persist in believing that Shakespeare's own wife was no help to him and even that he hated her. Social historians have avoided becoming embroiled in the Shakespeare industry and Shakespearean scholars have steered clear of social history.In Shakespeare's Wife Germaine Greer combines literary-historical techniques with documentary evidence about life in Stratford, striving to re-embed the story of Shakespeare's marriage in its social context. Her book presents a new and more fruitful set of hypotheses about the life and career of the farmer's daughter who married our greatest poet. Though the suggestions made in this book are certainly daring, against such a carefully researched background they appear less improbable than the prejudices so freely expressed by Shakespearean scholars. Shakespeare's Wife is a compelling, insightful book that already goes some way to right the wrongs done to Ann Shakespeare. Greer steps off the well-trodden paths of orthodoxy, asks new questions and opens new fields of investigation and research.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
28 of 32 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I found this a very convincing portrait of a forgotten life and of an often unfairly villified woman. Before I read this book I hadn't realised I fell into the category of what Greer calls 'Bardolaters', people who assume that Shakespeare was such a genius and that his wife was an illiterate cunning woman who trapped a gullible boy into a marriage that he hated and couldn't wait to get away from. Throughout the book, Greer gives Ann her proper title - Ann Shakespeare. I have never seen her referred to as anything other than Ann Hathaway by other writers. This is a powerful statement that puts the author on Ann's side and enables the reader to re-evaluate what they think of Ann and her life and marriage.
Greer rightly praises Ann's achievements, unnoticed until now: she bore and brought up 3 children through plague and famine on her own, she lived in the same small town all her married life without a hint of scandal and she seems to have not only lived, but prospered, keeping herself and her family with no help from her husband.
Greer also points out that Ann cannot have felt abandoned by her husband as there was a legal process for claiming abandonment for wives in that situation and Ann did not initiate that proceeding.
Much of the book is taken up with accounts of women contemporary with Ann as a way of extrapolating what her life might have been like and this can become confusing and occasionally a bit tedious, which is why I've given the book 4 stars and not 5.
If you want a balanced and compassionate look at the life of a woman who has had a very bad press since the 17th Century, you won't find a better book than this. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in how ordinary people lived at that time and how this extraordinary woman might have lived as well.
Greer rightly praises Ann's achievements, unnoticed until now: she bore and brought up 3 children through plague and famine on her own, she lived in the same small town all her married life without a hint of scandal and she seems to have not only lived, but prospered, keeping herself and her family with no help from her husband.
Greer also points out that Ann cannot have felt abandoned by her husband as there was a legal process for claiming abandonment for wives in that situation and Ann did not initiate that proceeding.
Much of the book is taken up with accounts of women contemporary with Ann as a way of extrapolating what her life might have been like and this can become confusing and occasionally a bit tedious, which is why I've given the book 4 stars and not 5.
If you want a balanced and compassionate look at the life of a woman who has had a very bad press since the 17th Century, you won't find a better book than this. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in how ordinary people lived at that time and how this extraordinary woman might have lived as well.
10 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A very good book. Yes, in parts it must be fancy, as little is known of the man himself never mind Mrs.S. But Greer puts the pieces together into a more than adequate whole.
A good read, and I'm using parts of this in the classroom to flesh out the life of Shakespeare.
A good read, and I'm using parts of this in the classroom to flesh out the life of Shakespeare.
16 of 27 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Sadly, a rather embarassing performance, this, in the long tradition of half-baked and almost entirely fanciful Shakespearean speculation (A.L. Rowse etc). Greer presents suppositions as fact, and her assertive tone is really jarring, hectoring and trying to compel, rather than drawing the reader in; and there's a nastily dismissive approach to fellow critics and historians (which she isn't). Greer's scholarly work on the seventeenth century writers is sure-footed and interesting. By contrast, this book will be quickly forgotten, I hope. And of course, it's unlucky in that it appears shortly after three genuinely excellent books on Shakespeare: Charles Nicholl's The Lodger, Shapiro's 1599, and Frank Kermode's little book on Shakespeare's Language.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Where is Shakespeare's wife?
Boring and full of mights, shalls, woulds, mays and the like. No information, much speculation.
Published 18 months ago by BuarqueIsGod
Shakespeare's Wife by Germaine Greer
Found this book too bogged down in detail, and although interesting at times ewspecially with regard to how people lived in the Elizabethan era but it felt as if I was reading her... Read more
Published on 2 July 2009 by Mrs. S. Shearsmith
A con
Where here the blunt Aussie frankness that Germaine Greer has celebrated and been respected for all of her life? Read more
Published on 1 Nov 2008 by J.M.R.
Dire
Although interested in social history and women, this book was a great disappointment. As one reviewer has said (favourably! Read more
Published on 16 April 2008 by Anna
shoddy scholarshio
This is simply a flight of fancy on Ms Greer's part.She sneers dismissively at the work of other scholars, sometimes in quite an insulting tone, while putting forward her own... Read more
Published on 22 Jan 2008 by W. Mahon
Germaine Greer's: Shakespeare's Wife
This is awesome. Something of the giddy pace and intensity of a dream bordering on nightmare seems to drive this restless inventory of inventories. Read more
Published on 24 Sep 2007 by Ian Caughlin
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