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Shakespeare's Wife (Paperback)

by Germaine Greer (Author)
2.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
RRP: £8.99
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Product details

  • Paperback: 416 pages
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (1 Sep 2008)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0747593000
  • ISBN-13: 978-0747593003
  • Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.8 x 3.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 84,277 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #8 in  Books > Biography > Novelists, Poets & Playwrights > Shakespeare, William

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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

Product Description
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.

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Customer Reviews

9 Reviews
5 star:
 (3)
4 star:
 (1)
3 star:    (0)
2 star:
 (1)
1 star:
 (4)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
2.8 out of 5 stars (9 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Very convincing, compassionate and scholarly, 20 May 2008
By Meerkat (Dereham, Norfolk) - See all my reviews
  
This review is from: Shakespeare's Wife (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 the 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.
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6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Not sure how much I can add, 13 Dec 2007
This review is from: Shakespeare's Wife (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.
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8 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars Jarring and fanciful, 18 Mar 2008
By Paul Callick (manchester) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Shakespeare's Wife (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

1.0 out of 5 stars 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 8 days ago by Mrs. S. Shearsmith

5.0 out of 5 stars Combines passion and profundity
Ann Shakespeare, née Hathaway, died in 1623, seven years after her husband, and was probably born in 1556, eight years before him. Read more
Published 5 months ago by Nicholas Whyte

1.0 out of 5 stars A con
Where here the blunt Aussie frankness that Germaine Greer has celebrated and been respected for all of her life? Read more
Published 8 months ago by J.M.R.

1.0 out of 5 stars Dire
Although interested in social history and women, this book was a great disappointment. As one reviewer has said (favourably! Read more
Published 15 months ago by Anna

1.0 out of 5 stars 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 17 months ago by W. Mahon

5.0 out of 5 stars 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 21 months ago by Ian Caughlin

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