Shakespeare's Wife

[poliphilo]

Shakespeare's Wife, Germaine Greer  (Bloomsbury 2007) 

Who was Ann Shakespeare? We really don't know. Not even her birth date is secure. Generations of Shakespeare scholars have blackened her reputation to make her absentee husband look good. Germaine Greer thinks this in grossly unfair. And quite right too.

Trouble is there's no evidence either way . Greer dervives a high doctrine of marriage from the plays and argues that certain of the more deeply felt sonnets were written by Shakespeare to his wife. And that's it really- a couple of chapter's worth of solid, literary scholarship. The rest is conjecture and social history- Anne may have done this, she may have felt that.  I ploughed laboriously through the first chapter- an almost unreadable chronicle of ancestral Hathaways- their hatchings, matchings and despatchings- and decided this was a book for skimming.

Comments

[saare-snowqueen.livejournal.com]

One of the few books I have ever physically damaged - I THREW it against the wall was an earlier piece of drivel by the same Ms Greer. I think she is one of the most offensive and fraudulent writers around. a reviewer - in the Groaniad, I think, once wrote that she changes her politics to suit her pocket book. The woman and her work are repugnant to me in the extreme. I'm amazed you were even able to skim the trash.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

O dear.

I'm rather fond of her myself. I like it that you never know quite what she's going to say.