Germaine Greer
SHAKESPEARE’S WIFE
406pp. Bloomsbury. £20.
978 7475 9019 4
It is remarkable how private a man Shakespeare was. We have no letters of his
or of his wife’s; there are no terms of endearment in his will or elsewhere.
The plays contain much about courtship and dysfunctional marriage but
nothing substantial about functioning marriage. Literary scholars have
struggled to make what they can of the few pieces of documentation that
survive about Shakespeare’s married life with Ann Hathaway. Their
intellectual world and the world of social history (which can illuminate the
conditions of the Shakespeares’ life together, if not its inner meaning)
have long been kept distinct. Germaine Greer wants to bring these two worlds
together.
Her project, bravely undertaken, is to challenge the disparagement she says
that biographers have heaped on Ann Shakespeare for more than 200 years, and
Greer is as tireless in pursuing historical archive material as she has been
in her previous early modern researches. Seeking to provide a convincing and
coherent account of the Shakespeares’ marriage, using much intuition and
inference, she tells her story chronologically, beginning with the local
standing of the two families, respectively from Stratford-upon-Avon and the
nearby village of Shottery, the courtship in 1582 and the birth of three
children, Susanna, and the twins Hamnet and Judith, by 1585. Greer closes
with William’s death in 1616. Her style is confident, arresting, at times
bombastic. “All this is probably neither truer nor less true than the
accepted prejudice”, she writes on the final page, in one of many disarming
sentences in a book which often seeks to disarm by its sheer verve. In spite
of that disclaimer, we are given a ringing declaration to end with: “there
can be no doubt that Shakespeare neglected his wife, embarrassed her and
even humiliated her”. Yet, in terms of the meagre historical record, there
is considerable doubt about whether he did any of these things.
Much of Shakespeare’s Wife is closely observed, vivid and fully documented
local history, describing life in Stratford. From 1594 to 1597, as Greer
shows, serious disorder threatened the town, because three catastrophic
harvest failures in a row coincided with two disastrous fires, which
destroyed 120 houses and cast 400 more people than usual on the poor rates
and neighbourly support. A Corporation petition begging exemption from a
national prohibition on malt making, to ensure that grain reached the
markets and prices were controlled, needs more context than Greer gives it
here. The county of South Warwickshire was a land of mixed husbandry. The
historian Joan Thirsk has shown how the arable crops of the district,
barley, wheat and peas, were used mainly to fatten cattle and pigs, while
sheep were folded on the much-treasured common fields. Stratford’s highly
specialized economy made it susceptible to the scarcities which could follow
sudden price inflation. The town had “no other special trade” but malting,
the Corporation’s petition pleaded, which its citizens had lived by “time
beyond man’s memory”. The Stratford families Greer writes of, like the
Quineys and the Sadlers, were those with whom the Shakespeares undoubtedly
had dealings, but the kind of terms they were on are often intractably
obscure in the unyielding papers that she uses.
Her picture of the bustling market town, where Mary Arden came from nearby
Wilmcote to live on her marriage to William’s father John Shakespeare, is
colourful. But Greer draws too sharp a contrast with life in the villages
around Stratford. Tudor market towns were part of the countryside. Cows were
milked there; butter, cheese and eggs would not, as she suggests, have been
brought to Mary but purchased after a few minutes’ walk to the marketplace;
Greer is not right about there being bakeries in every street: most families
still had their own bread oven.
The author mixes literary and historical evidence throughout her account. The
plays themselves, and situations in them, are drawn on by allusion to allow
her to speculate about the Shakespeares’ marriage when, as so often, the
historical record proves deficient. She is combative towards other literary
scholars, but essentially her book is built on three kinds of historical
material: the Stratford Borough records, which she has mined very
thoroughly; contemporary medical, religious and social tracts; and the
recent secondary literature. Exploiting the ballad literature about youth
makes sense. The argument that there was nothing unusual in Ann being
unmarried at twenty-six when she and William, then aged eighteen, apparently
met is sound enough. At the same time, girls this far beyond puberty were
believed to be greensick, that is longing for fulfilment of the role
allotted to them in God’s scheme of things, of conception and motherhood. In
the poem “Coridon’s Song”, from the miscellany Englands Helicon (1600/1614),
a lovesick maid, with “a longing tooth that makes me cry”, spies a young man
who might cure her wound. Greer cites this as well as the ballad “I can, I
will no longer lie alone”. She might have explained their significance in
terms of the contemporary understanding of young womanhood.
The treatment of the issue of whether Ann was fully literate nicely
illustrates Greer’s method. She cites three social historians and two
Elizabethan commentators to make her case that, in a staunchly Protestant
family, Ann would have been taught to read. Greer’s reminder that ballad
singers, like Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, gathered crowds who bought as
well as listened to ballads is apt, but the assertion that these ballad
sellers were themselves often women is controverted by Margaret Spufford’s
work on petty chapmen, which Greer appears to have missed. Certainly many
more women could read than write fluently at this time, though Greer surely
exaggerates when she states that most of the people, men and women, who
could read were unable to write. She triumphantly produces two women in the
play Westward Hoe who were taught to write; she refers to Malvolio’s account
of Olivia’s writing skills in Twelfth Night; then she suggests, as the
denouement of this chapter, that the grammar schoolboy William used the
mystery of writing as a courtship stratagem to win his Ann. “Obviously
teaching a woman to write”, Greer claims, “is sexy.”
Greer’s book is not persuasive because it is too opinionated. Almost all the
way through, Ann’s perfection as a wife is contrasted with William’s
inadequacies. Greer only relents in the moving vignette she presents of the
death and burial of Hamnet, at the age of eleven, in 1596, when she supposes
that both parents suffered from searing grief. The suggestion is in line
with everything we know about parental feelings in this period about the
loss of children between infancy and adolescence. Ralph Josselin, not many
years later, poured out his grief in his celebrated diary when children of
his died.
It is unfortunate that Greer so constantly overstates her case, declaring for
instance that the Shakespeares “seem to have lived most of their married
life apart, unable even to communicate with each other”. This is perverse.
She admits that we do not know where Shakespeare was, for some time after
his twins were christened in 1585. She is right that it was not acceptable
in this society for a man to live apart from his wife, but there was nothing
unusual about a man making his way in the world and coming home at
intervals. It is a pity that she makes nothing of the famous attack on
Shakespeare by his fellow dramatist Robert Greene, from which it is clear
that, by 1592, Shakespeare was well established in the London theatrical
world. He had presumably by then begun to earn money, which he sent or
brought home. The really problematic “lost years” that Shakespeare scholars
worry so much about are actually seven in all, in a marriage of nearly
thirty-four.
Greer’s weak account of Shakespeare’s London career seeks to minimize his
earnings, which, with his long association with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men
from 1594, clearly soon became substantial. In 1597, he bought New Place,
reputedly the second largest house in Stratford. Thereafter there is no
evidence of much commitment to his living, though we sometimes know where he
lodged, in London. From 1597 until his death in 1616, Shakespeare was a very
visible and it seems much-respected member of the Stratford community,
investing substantially in property there: £320 paid for 107 acres in Old
Stratford and £440 for a share of the local tithes. Ann, as Greer argues
convincingly from the listing of Shakespeare as a major holder of malt, had
probably become a competent housewife, who brewed and perhaps sold ale,
raised pigs on the spent malt, cured her own bacon and baked her bread.
Greer says that New Place was tumbledown and that it was Ann who restored
it. She also wants us to believe, although there is no evidence for this,
that – a stalwart substitute for a wastrel husband – it was Ann who provided
for her children out of earnings from the local textile industry. It is
plausible that this marriage was an effective partnership, but the notion
that Ann earned sufficient to buy property or land herself is far-fetched.
Greer’s denigration of Shakespeare reflects her constant drive to bring his
wife to life. It is at its most striking when it comes to his death and
burial. Greer seeks to dismiss the sensible suggestion that in his will the
playwright expected Ann to be cared for through her dower right, beside
receiving the celebrated “second best bed”. Greer is reluctant to accord
Shakespeare any standing and repute in Stratford, presumably because this
would detract from her argument that his wife had always carried the family
burdens, while he was being unfaithful to her in London. When Greer comes to
Shakespeare’s tomb in Holy Trinity, she cites David Cressy’s work on burial
customs yet ignores his point that the cost of burial inside a church
usually indicates family wealth and considerable local status. John and
Susanna Hall, whom we might wish to see by this time as the caring daughter
and son-in-law, achieve no such standing in Greer’s account. The learned
Hall indeed, with his medical knowledge, proves ripe for the slur that he
managed the well-known doggerel on Shakespeare’s monument, in order to
ensure that exhumation of his bones would not reveal to the world the
lesions which would prove that the playwright died of terminal syphilis.
Greer’s jaunty style does not conceal the hollowness of much of her analysis.
We learn a lot about life in Stratford between 1580 and 1616 from this book,
but we come no nearer to unlocking the secret of the private life of William
and Ann Shakespeare.
Anthony Fletcher is Emeritus Professor of English Social History,
University of London. He is the author of Gender, Sex and Subordination in
England 1500-1800, which was first published in 1995.
