Books

We don't know much about the private life of William Shakespeare. We have records of christening and marriage and death, a few documents pertaining to real estate transactions and some legal matters, some evidence of which theatrical companies he belonged to, and a handful of mentions by his contemporaries. But we know even less about his wife, Ann (or Anne or even Agnes) Hathaway Shakespeare.

We know that she was born in 1556 and died in 1623 (outliving him by seven years), that they married in 1582, when she was 26 and he was 18, and that their first child, Susanna, was born six months after the wedding. They had two more children, the twins Hamnet and Judith, in 1585. And that's pretty much it, except that in his will, Shakespeare left her his "second-best bed."

Countless biographies of William have been spun out of slender stuff, so it's not really surprising that Germaine Greer can write 400 pages about Ann. Ms. Greer's 1970 book The Female Eunuch was a key text in the women's movement of the '70s, and in her new book her target is the sexism of scholars (mostly male) who think that Shakespeare was trapped in a marriage to a woman he didn't love.

They cite the disparity in age between William and Ann, and infer that he may have been forced to marry her, even lured into doing so, because she was pregnant. They note that he left her in Stratford to take care of the kids while he went off to make it big in London, three days' journey away. And they suggest that his bequest to her was a final gesture of contempt.

One way to put together a portrait of Ann Shakespeare might be to mine her husband's plays and poems for allusions to their marriage. Ms. Greer does touch lightly on passages in the plays to reinforce evidence she has found elsewhere. She also examines the sonnets for evidence that Ann is referred to in them, but she mostly takes them (even their suggestions that the poet had affairs, both gay and straight) to be variations on the conventional themes of Elizabethan love poetry.

Instead, she uses public records and contemporary accounts of everything from the ordeal of childbirth to the making of ale to fill out her picture of the life of women in Elizabethan Stratford-upon-Avon. She musters information about marriage customs to counter the "shotgun wedding" theory and examines inheritance laws and furniture prices to suggest that the bequest of the second-best bed may have been both generous and sentimental.

Some of what she tells us is fascinating, and some of it is tedious and tendentious, such as a gruesome section on syphilis and its treatment, in service of the gratuitous speculation that Shakespeare might have contracted the disease in the brothels of London.

Ms. Greer concludes not only that Ann may have been a spirited, independent woman, but also that she and her husband may have loved (or at least respected) each other. And even some of the book's more outlandish speculations (for example, that Ann may have provided the manuscripts and even some of the financial backing for the First Folio) are, well, provocative. But often she just waffles.

"If Ann Shakespeare had both skill and business acumen, she could have become a wealthy woman in her own right," she asserts. Then she gives an authorial shrug of the shoulders: "So far we don't know that she did, but we don't know that she didn't either." Ms. Greer may feel that she's discovered the real Ann Shakespeare, but she doesn't leave the reader filled with much confidence that she has done so.

Charles Matthews is a writer and editor who lives in Northern California.

Germaine Greer

(HarperCollins $26.95)

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