Beyond the Ball and Chain

Shakespeare's Wife, by Germaine Greer (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), reviewed by Julie Phillips. Published in Dutch translation in Trouw, Amsterdam, January 12, 2008.

Germaine Greer leads a double life. We know her best as a tricky, funny, impossible feminist provocateur, liable to stand up at any moment and announce that contraception is bad, female genital mutilation is acceptable in an African context, or that Princess Diana was a “devious moron.” But she’s also a professor of literature who wrote her Ph.D. thesis, at Cambridge, in 1967, on Shakespeare’s comedies. In 1986 she published an eloquent literary essay titled simply “Shakespeare.”
     The roles of gadfly and Shakespeare scholar might seem difficult to combine, but the resourceful Greer has found a way. The wives of famous men, she points out, do not always receive kind treatment from posterity. Biographers prefer stories about an artist whose brilliance went unappreciated by a difficult or foolish spouse. So Greer—who is the kind of writer who thinks in disagreements—has decided to write a biography of her own. Her goal in “Shakespeare’s Wife” is to rehabilitate the much-maligned Ann Hathaway.
     “Biography” may be too big a word here, since we know almost nothing about the career of England’s greatest playwright, let alone the woman who, Greer says, “left a wife-shaped void” in his life story. They were both born in Stratford-upon-Avon, she in 1556, he in 1564. They were betrothed in 1582, and by 1585 had had three children. He then disappears from the records until 1592, when he turns up on the London stage. In about 1613 he returned to Stratford, where he died three years later at the age of 52. Aside from one mysterious book dedication, he never wrote anything in his own voice. No letter survives from his hand.
     Aside from the many theories that Shakespeare didn’t actually write his plays (none of which Greer believes), the blank page of his life has also generated wild speculations about his marriage. The assumption that it had always been an unhappy one is largely based on the fact that for most of his life, he and his wife lived apart. It also has to do with the circumstances of their marriage: she was 26 and he only 18 when they wed, and their daughter Susanna was christened only six months after the ceremony. Ever since this last fact was discovered in 1836, Greer writes, biographers have assumed that an older woman, “past her sell-by date,” seduced a handsome boy who, after their “roll in the hay,” was marched off to church. In the 20th century, when male artists were warned not to get tied down with the “ball and chain” of marriage, it was easy to picture for Shakespeare a life full of “disappointment, frustration, and loneliness.”
     And yet, Greer says, “Shakespeare is above all the poet of marriage.” The marriage plot, in which a couple find each other through all kinds of hindrances—mistaken identity, parental interference, foolish choices, even the gratuitous meddling of fairies—is Shakespeare’s stock-in-trade. It is, Greer argues, largely his invention. Of course, a writer of romantic comedy doesn’t have to be happily married—look at Jane Austen, who wasn’t married at all. But the (equally unpartnered) Greer argues that Shakespeare writes too sensitively and with too much understanding about the married state to have actively disliked his wife.
     So Greer decides to play what might be called “angel’s advocate.” If others can speculate on the disasters of the marriage, she’ll counter, tongue lightly in cheek, by imagining it in the best possible light.
     In his time, Greer points out, Will was a little young for marriage, but Ann was by no means too old. Middle-class Tudor couples, like their modern equivalents, were expected to marry well into their twenties, after they had learned a trade and saved enough money to set up a household. In addition, betrothed couples were allowed and even expected to sleep together before the wedding and be expecting at the altar. There’s no reason to think Ann’s pregnancy was an accident. And even if they did live apart for many years, he bought a large house in Stratford—where she presumably lived—and returned to spend his last years with her.
     Could Ann read Will’s work? Nowhere did she sign her name, but according to Greer, we shouldn’t assume she was illiterate. Many women who couldn’t write did read. Along with the Bible, they were active consumers of the chick lit of their time, half-penny romantic ballads that were sold by the sheet and sung over the spinning wheel. Greer imagines William teaching Ann her letters, and comments, “In his plays he is very well aware of the erotic dimension of the teaching situation.”
     So what was she doing while he was away in London? Greer believes she was busy overseeing his financial affairs, restoring his house, and supporting their family: “Tudor women enjoyed a measure of economic independence that would not be equalled again until our own time.” In “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf called for a history to be written of Elizabethan women’s lives, as a way of discovering the fate of the woman she called “Shakespeare’s sister” who never got a chance to write. For much of the book, Greer does just that—but not to show how women’s writing got lost. She uses Ann’s life as a frame on which to hang an enormous accumulation of information on what Elizabethan women did instead, from spinning wool, birthing babies, and brewing beer to lending money and organizing protests against landowners.
     In her later feminist books, Greer has celebrated the joys of pre-industrial life, and some part of her clearly would like to be Ann, the sturdy farmer’s daughter who doesn’t need a man. (Celibacy for older women is part of Greer's feminist program.) Other familiar Greer ideas reappear in “Shakespeare’s Wife.” In “The Whole Woman” (1999), Greer criticized the “patriarchal medical establishment,” so it makes sense that she dislikes Ann and Will’s son-in-law, a Cambridge-educated doctor who, she claims, rode around the countryside physicking the rich while “experienced women like Ann Shakespeare attended childbeds and deathbeds and gave preliminary treatment.
     How does all this information add up? It doesn’t. Adding up isn’t what Greer does. She can write a wonderful, wise, funny sentence, and she can make an excellent point, but she has never been good at either building a narrative argument or telling a story. The Greer of “Shakespeare’s Wife” is not the maker of outrageous remarks, but a learned and engaging professor who occasionally goes on too long about her passion for genealogy.
     Every once in a while, Greer lets Ann Hathaway be more than just a collection of facts and averages. She misses her beloved Will, “especially in the long dark winter evenings, when she sat working by the dying fire as her children slept.” She keeps her tongue when the Stratford gossips inquire after her missing husband. She blushes when young Will reads aloud from his erotic poem “Venus and Adonis.” During his final illness, she reads to him from her Bible.
     But every time Ann and Will start to become characters in a story, Greer quickly pushes them back again behind a scrim of “if”s. She refuses to pretend that she knows who they are. She reminds us again and again that we don’t know, that all we can do is look at what was possible for men and women in Elizabethan England. Oddly enough, this is an important part, not only of the book’s, but of Greer’s own appeal. Greer the feminist is opinionated; Greer the scholar doesn’t pretend to have a lock on the truth. When she’s being a diva, she’s impossible. When she’s excited about the 16th century, and not her latest life crisis, she’s still erratic and untrustworthy, but also witty, enthusiastic, and passionate about literature.

A Pre-industrial Paradise
Germaine Greer (Melbourne, Australia, 1939, moved to England in 1964) received her Ph.D. from Cambridge in 1967 with a thesis titled “The Ethic of Love and Marriage in Shakespeare's Early Comedies.” At the time she was a self-professed anarchist whose own marriage, in 1968, lasted three weeks, during which she was unfaithful several times. In her later feminist books, particularly “Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility” (1984, written after she discovered, to her disappointment, that she couldn’t have children) and “The Whole Woman” (1999), she appalled many of her colleagues by fantasizing about pre-industrial society as a paradise for women. She now lives in a farmhouse in Essex where she keeps dogs, geese, and doves. She also appears frequently on television in the UK, where she is loved (and reviled) for her combination of wit, vitriol, and disarming charm.