Shakespeare's Wife. Germaine Greer. HarperCollins. 406 pages. $26.95.
Readers familiar with the ardent feminist Germaine Greer, author of 1970's provocative international bestseller The Female Eunuch, might not be aware that Greer spent much of her academic career as a Shakespeare scholar. In her fascinating new book on the Bard's wife, she attempts to portray Ann Hathaway in a fresh, fair and far more balanced way than she has seen before.
''There's such a tradition of being rude to wives of geniuses,'' Greer has remarked, admitting she could not have written a book about this ''silent woman'' when she was part of the Shakespeare establishment.
Greer's book, which relies on research done during work on her dissertation, aims to be a corrective for centuries of Hathaway being reviled and caricatured by 'bardolaters,' misogynistic male scholars who left ''a wife-shaped void'' in Shakespeare's biography, which they filled inaccurately with their own speculations. ''All biographies of Shakespeare,'' Greer writes, ''are houses built of straw,'' adding that the same ''evidence'' that shows Hathaway, who married Shakespeare in 1582, in a bad light is ``capable of other, more fruitful interpretations.''
While Greer is often brilliantly imaginative in filling out the details of Hathaway's life, most of the enjoyable parts of her biography are of necessity speculative, as few hard facts about Hathaway remain. Bereft of fact, Greer peppers her speculations with an ocean of probablys, might have beens, shoulds, coulds, may haves and ''strong hints.'' Wives of great authors, she explains, were generally 'invisible . . . obliterated from history. . . . Those wives who managed to be remembered, like Socrates' Xanthippe or Aristotle's Phyllis, are vilified.'' Until recently, history deemed that ``the higher the achiever the more likely it was that the woman who slept in his bed would be judged unworthy of his company.''
To Greer, Hathaway, a farmer's daughter seven years older than Shakespeare and mother of his three children, was the woman who ''redeemed'' Shakespeare. Greer sees the Bard as the ''poet of marriage.'' His plays involved wooing and wedding, and someone who simply could not have written what he did had he been in a loveless marriage. She reads his love for Hathaway into several of her husband's sonnets and especially plays, ``where women were shown time and time again to be constant in love though months and years of separation.''
Greer's book is absolutely riveting when she sticks to facts. On marriage: ''A wife left at home could not set off on her own and go to find him without his express permission. . . . As long as he was living with her, her husband had a right to anything she owned or could earn.'' She's equally pithy on childbirth; funerals; female employment in Tudor England (``the lady of leisure was a creature of another era''); social mores and a variety of harrowing health issues (syphilis, the danger of giving birth to twins as Hathaway did) in Shakespeare's day.
In one of her few criticisms of Shakespeare in this otherwise worshipful book, Greer laments his indifference to the poor of Stratford in his will (he left them 10 pounds). She rethinks the problem of Hathaway being left only an old bed in Shakespeare's ''lopsided'' will, so that, suddenly, one sees Ann's prospects as a widow as ``rather more interesting, worthier of Shakespeare's oldest truest love.''
Greer boasts that most of this book is heresy, ''and probably neither truer nor less true than the accepted prejudice. . . . There can be no doubt,'' she concludes, ``that Shakespeare neglected his wife, embarrassed her and even humiliated her, but attempting to justify his behaviour by vilifying her is puerile.''
Susan Miron is a writer in Newton, Mass.
