father is not in consciousness but in some more primitive place before consciousness.” This is a pretty image, and Shloss embellishes it even further: “They understand each other, for they speak the same language, a language not yet arrived into words and concepts, but a language nonetheless, founded on the communicative body.”
And what about Lucia herself, petulant, mesmerizing, fragile, bratty Lucia? She liked to sleep outside under the stars, and walk around without underwear, and swim in the middle of the night. Instead she spent fifty-odd years in an institution. There is no poetry, no glory, in this story, no secret communion, no mystical collaboration, no intangible collusion, between father and daughter, only pointless, run-of-the-mill human suffering. Instead of the subtle literary pas de deux between Joyce and his daughter, the truth is more painful and nonsensical: a woman’s life was wasted. Books like this give a dishonest, literary gloss to what isa form of illicit voyeurism; they free us from the difficulty of literature into the easy glamour of being vaguely associated with it, and deploy the language and cachet of feminism to celebrate those moments when women are not writing or painting or otherwise creating.
Reclaiming the Shrew
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 blooming 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 toexpose 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-twenties 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
And what about Lucia herself, petulant, mesmerizing, fragile, bratty Lucia? She liked to sleep outside under the stars, and walk around without underwear, and swim in the middle of the night. Instead she spent fifty-odd years in an institution. There is no poetry, no glory, in this story, no secret communion, no mystical collaboration, no intangible collusion, between father and daughter, only pointless, run-of-the-mill human suffering. Instead of the subtle literary pas de deux between Joyce and his daughter, the truth is more painful and nonsensical: a woman’s life was wasted. Books like this give a dishonest, literary gloss to what isa form of illicit voyeurism; they free us from the difficulty of literature into the easy glamour of being vaguely associated with it, and deploy the language and cachet of feminism to celebrate those moments when women are not writing or painting or otherwise creating.
Reclaiming the Shrew
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 blooming 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 toexpose 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-twenties 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
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