It is impossible to think of two minds more different than Germaine Greer’s and Shakespeare’s. The leading quality of Greer’s mind is opinionatedness, whereas Shakespeare, so far as we can tell, had no opinions. He vanished into his plays, and trying to retrieve what he thought on any subject is like harvesting shadows.

This is frustrating for Greer, since her aim in her new book is to pin down Shakespeare’s opinion about marriage, specifically his own. Only the barest facts are known for certain. When he married Ann Hathaway, a local farmer’s daughter, in 1582, he was 18, she was 26, and three months pregnant. They married by special licence, which two of her father’s friends obtained. Susanna, their first child, was born in May 1583, and twins, Judith and Hamnet, in February 1585. Before or soon after that Shakespeare probably left Stratford, and by 1592 he was already well known as an actor and dramatist in London, where he spent most of his married life. When he made his will in March 1616, a month before his death, his wife was not mentioned at all in the first draft, and a redraft left her his second-best bed.

Some scholars (most of them, Greer notes accusingly, male) have taken these facts to mean that Shakespeare was trapped into marriage by a designing older woman; that he was frogmarched to the altar by her family; that, like many women of her class, she was probably illiterate, and certainly unable to appreciate her husband’s greatness; and that his insulting bequest signifies his lifelong alienation from her. Greer is convinced that, on the contrary, Shakespeare wooed Ann not vice versa; that she proved a good, true wife, enjoying her husband’s love and respect; and that she took a keen interest in his writing, and was quite possibly instrumental in getting the first folio of his works printed after his death. Since there is little or no evidence to support these claims, their furtherance calls for considerable ingenuity on Greer’s part.

She suggests that The Comedy of Errors, with its moving depiction of wifely loyalty, reveals Shakespeare’s “attitude to marriage”, so he would be unlikely to have treated Ann in the way her denigrators allege. The weakness of such arguments is obvious – you might, with just as little cogency, select The Taming of the Shrew as showing Shakespeare’s attitude to marriage – so most of Greer’s book takes a different tack, and contends that Ann was a highly successful woman in her own right, so Shakespeare should have been proud of her, even if he was not, though he probably was. Exactly what she was successful at is difficult to decide. Greer thinks she might have been a successful moneylender. The one surviving document that may give a clue to her business activities, if she had any, is the will of the Hathaway family’s shepherd, which says she owes him 40 shillings. This does not sound like successful moneylending, but perhaps, Greer thinks, the shepherd entrusted the money to Ann’s safekeeping, which could mean she was a successful banker. Alternatively, she might have been a farmer or a cheese maker, a mercer or a haberdasher, a basket weaver or a lace maker or a stocking knitter. An official document records that New Place, the big house in Stratford that Shakespeare bought in 1597, contained malt for brewing, so probably, Greer reckons, Ann was in business as a brewer. Or maybe as a silk farmer. The mulberry tree that Shakespeare is supposed to have planted at New Place was, Greer suspects, the survivor of a plantation established by Ann to rear silkworms. Wherever Ann’s success lay, she made enough money, Greer thinks, to bring up her family without her husband’s help (though why he should not have helped her if she enjoyed his love and respect is not quite clear) and probably accumulated a lot more besides. Quite possibly, in Greer’s view, Ann, not Shakespeare, bought New Place. It is true that no papers relating to Ann’s remarkable career have come down to us. But then, Greer reminds us, paper was scarce, and old documents were used for all sorts of menial purposes, and there were a lot of mice about.

The uncertainty of the whole situation allows Greer to fill her book with vast amounts of extraneous material. There are lengthy digressions on Elizabethan farming, cheese-making, haberdashery and Ann’s other supposed occupations, packed with archival detail about the pigs, hens, household effects and genealogies of a great many people who, as Greer is perfectly willing to accept, may have nothing to do with Ann or Shakespeare at all. In the same spirit there are sections on Elizabethan cottages, in case the Shakespeares ever lived in one, though they probably did not, and a stomach-churning excursion on venereal disease and its treatment, on the off chance that Shakespeare suffered from it, although there is no evidence he did. Threading this maze of blind alleys is the sort of reading experience that brings vividly to mind the many more useful and enjoyable things you might be doing.

Given Greer’s interest in the denizens of Shakespeare’s Stratford and the lives they lived, it is intriguing to speculate what they would have thought of her if some miraculous time warp had allowed her to materialise among them. They would have been terrified at first, of course, just as they would have been by the appearance of a jet fighter, or any other product of our advanced civilisation. Very likely they would have shut her away in a quiet room with some good man of the church, in an effort to restore her wits. But I think they would have soon perceived that she was perfectly harmless, and, indeed, that she had decent, conventional, Christian ideas about how people should treat each other. Before long they would have felt quite safe in bringing their little children to look at her.

What prompts this conclusion are the traces of Greer the romantic novelist that keep peeping out from behind her rigorous absorption in archives and statistics. She likes to think that William spent long hours teaching Ann to read as she watched her cows grazing on the common. She pictures him writing Venus and Adonis at the kitchen table, and reading out passages to make her blush or laugh, and she imagines Ann “enjoying the poem’s lightness of touch, even as she shrank from its rampant sexuality”. When Shakespeare’s sonnets were published, Ann, Greer fancies, would have read them with a “grim little smile”, recognising many of them as poems that, in their original versions, Will had written to her. “Then she would have tucked the little book deep inside the coffer where she kept her own possessions, opened her Bible and prayed for them both.” She was sober, industrious, patient and loving to the end, and nursed her husband tenderly in his last illness. Fictitious though all this undeniably is, it seems reassuringly old-world and good-hearted, and should do something to correct Greer’s reputation as a revolutionary thinker and disturber of the peace.

Home alone

Greer’s evocation of Ann Hathaway’s emotions when her husband was roistering in town, leaving her in Stratford with the kiddies, deserves to be quoted in full. “If Ann loved Will, and we shall decide in default of evidence to the contrary that she did, she must have missed him terribly, especially in the long dark winter evenings, when she sat working by the dying fire as her children slept.” A touching scene. But one which, just possibly, casts more light on Greer than on Hathaway.

Shakespeare's Wife by Germaine Greer
Bloomsbury £20 pp416
Buy the book here at the offer price of £xx (inc p&p)

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