Few endeavors would appear as arduous and maddening to a responsible scholar as a biography of Shakespeare's wife, Ann Hathaway. We have almost no solid facts about Mrs. Shakespeare's life, and we know almost nothing about the Shakespeares' marriage. We know that the playwright could have brought his wife to live with him in London and did not, though we don't 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 put it. Rather than inhibiting biographers, the lack of information seems to have freed many of them to project their own fantasies onto the relationship. The prevailing image of Ann Hathaway is that of an illiterate seductress who beguiled the young Shakespeare, conceived a child and ensnared him in a loveless union. Germaine Greer's task in her ingenious new book, “Shakespeare's Wife,” is to expose the construction of this fantasy, tracing its evolution from early biographers like Thomas de Quincey through the work 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 sifting through records of lives that ran parallel to the young Shakespeares', Greer contends that in their time and place there was nothing unusual in a baby's being born six months after a marriage. She also demonstrates that an unmarried woman in her mid-20s would not have been considered exceptional or desperate. Ann Hathaway, Greer argues, was likely to be literate, and given the relative standing of their families in Warwickshire, she may very well have been considered a more desirable match than her husband. Though generally appreciative, several Shakespeare scholars have found Greer's approach “stridently ... combative” and full of “scattergun assaults.” But for those accustomed to Greer's feminist provocations, “Shakespeare's Wife” will seem extremely sober and restrained. Rarely have the possibilities of the conditional tense been so fully exploited: the entire book is written in elaborately tentative lines like “she may have permitted herself the odd grim little smile” and “he might have read them out to her.” Greer has a doctorate in Elizabethan drama from Newnham College, Cambridge, and she is almost showy in her research into parish registers, in her dry apprehension of fact. Germaine Greer, it turns out, is an unusual type, with both a polemicist's vision and a scholar's patience. In spite of her flamboyant reputation, she has never resorted to the easy or the doctrinaire. “The Female Eunuch”, her brilliant analysis of women's oppression, was mischievous, restless, wide ranging, unpredictable. Of the nonfiction classics of 1970s feminism, hers alone eluded the imaginative limits and rigidity of good politics. “Shakespeare's Wife” similarly transcends the drab conventions of much academic excavation of lost female figures. Even within the context of Shakespeare studies, however, Greer's speculations are, for the most part, surprisingly responsible. Many of her more fanciful theories, like the possibility that Shakespeare died of syphilis, are shared by more mainstream scholars. Because so little about the playwright's life is known, prejudice and desire assume a greater role than in most biography. The biographer is forced to create his or her own version of Shakespeare, and Greer is no exception. Inevitably, in imagining the Shakespeares' marriage, Greer draws heavily on archetypes from her own work. Her Ann Hathaway is unusually independent and hard-working. She is almost too good to be true, and she is certainly too good to be interesting. “Though Ann Hathaway had been living manless for nearly 30 years,” Greer writes in a chapter on Shakespeare's return from London around 1611, “no breath of scandal ever attached to her name, which, given the evidence of the surviving records of the Vicar's Court, is itself remarkable.” In Greer's view, Shakespeare did not support his wife financially, and during his long absences she devoted herself to running a malt business or otherwise taking care of her children. If Greer consistently romanticizes anything, it is female independence. While acknowledging the complexity and drama of sex, Greer has long celebrated the woman who lives apart, who somehow evades the ordinary encumbrances of a man in her daily life. She devotes an entire section of “The Female Eunuch” to alternatives to the oppressions of the nuclear family and quotes a sociologist from the '30s: “For a male and female to live continuously together is ... biologically speaking, an extremely unnatural condition.” One can hear Greer's feminist interpretations beneath her descriptions of Hathaway's life. Ann “could have been confident of her ability to support herself and her children, but not if she had also to deal with a layabout husband good for nothing but spinning verses,” she writes in a chapter suggesting that Ann may well have encouraged Shakespeare to go to London. Her observation that “when her husband died Ann was 60, and free for the first time in a third of a century” evokes another line from an earlier book, “The Change”: “To be unwanted is also to be free.” One suspects that Greer is writing more about an idea of freedom than about any historical woman. Toward the end of “Shakespeare's Wife,” Greer makes the implausible case that Ann was responsible for the publication of the First Folio in 1623. Here one may recall Tom Wolfe's account of a younger Greer at a dinner party, getting bored and setting fire to her hair. And yet it often seems that Greer is slyly drawing attention to the novelist's endeavor, that she is self-consciously pointing out the element of fiction writing inherent in any effort to understand Shakespeare's life. She playfully begins each chapter with summaries reminiscent of 19th-century novels. And she writes that the book is “heresy, and probably neither truer nor less true than the accepted prejudice.” Does it matter if Greer's theories are true? In spinning her version, she has opened up the story; she has laid bare the fantasies, uprooted the assumptions. It's unlikely that hereafter the shadowy figure in the corner of the great house in Stratford will be treated with the same easy contempt. One might wonder why this book, filled with mundane accounts of business deals, wills and birth records, is so riveting. It may be that one senses the passion in the archives, in the artifacts of daily life that Greer meticulously uncovers. In her research into the life of another widow in Stratford, Greer finds: “In all, her possessions were worth £17 10s 2d, of which £4 was in wheat and barley. She too owned her own pewter and brass as well as a cow and a heifer, two geese and a gander, 12 hens and a cock. It seems that right up to her last days Elizabeth supported herself by selling her butter and eggs and bacon.” The details - so rare, so tangible - have the bareness of poetry. The world of Elizabethan England is so completely lost to us that these hard facts glow a little in the darkness. In “A Room of One's Own,” with its famous riff on Shakespeare's sister, Virginia Woolf wrote that when one tries to picture the life of an Elizabethan woman, “one is held up by the scarcity of facts. One knows nothing detailed, nothing perfectly true and substantial about her. History scarcely mentions her. ... What one wants, I thought - and why does not some brilliant student at Newnham or Girton supply it? - is a mass of information; at what age did she marry; how many children had she as a rule; ... did she do the cooking; would she be likely to have a servant? All these facts lie somewhere, presumably, in parish registers and account books; the life of the average Elizabethan woman must be scattered about somewhere, could one collect and make a book of it. It would be ambitious beyond my daring.” And now the book written by a brilliant student from Newnham, dreamed of by Virginia Woolf in the last century, exists: lively, rigorous, and fiercely imagined. - NYT __
