Book Review: "Shakespeare's Wife"

Few endeavors would appear as arduous and maddening to a responsible scholar as a biography of Shakespeares wife, Ann Hathaway. We postulate well-nigh no solid facts about Mrs. Shakespeares life, and we write out almost nothing about the Shakespeares marriage. We hold out that the playwright could have brought his wife to live with him in London and did not, though we dont know how often he made the three-day trip back to Stratford. We know that in his will, he left his wife only his second-best bed. From this slender evidence, along with liberal and dubious readings of the plays and sonnets, scholars have created a robust portrait of the Shakespeares unhappy domestic life - a marriage of evil auspices, as one scholar rig it. Rather than inhibiting biographers, the lack of information seems to have freed many of them to come out their own fantasies onto the relationship. The prevailing image of Ann Hathaway is that of an illiterate seductress who beguiled the teen Shakespeare, conceived a child and ensnared him in a loveless union. Germaine Greers job in her ingenious new book, Shakespeares Wife, is to expose the construction of this fantasy, trace its evolution from early biographers like Thomas de Quincey through the bat of respected modern scholars like Stephen Greenblatt.

The Shakespeare wallahs, she writes, have succeeded in creating a Bard in their own likeness, that is to say, incapable of relating to women. After sift through records of lives that ran parallel to the young Shakespeares, Greer contends that in their time and shoes there was nothing unusual in a infants being born six months after a marriage. She besides demonstrates that an unmarried woman in her mid-20s would not have been considered exceptional(a) or desperate. Ann Hathaway, Greer argues, was likely to be literate, and given the relative stand of their families in Warwickshire, she may very well have been considered a more desirable match than her husband. Today in Culture... If you neediness to get a full essay, order it on our website: Orderessay

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