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
(1971), her brilliant analysis of women’s oppression, was mischievous, restless, wide-ranging, unpredictable. Ofthe 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 hardworking. 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 asociologist from the 1930s: “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.” At times, 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 nineteenth-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 Female Eunuch
(1971), her brilliant analysis of women’s oppression, was mischievous, restless, wide-ranging, unpredictable. Ofthe 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 hardworking. 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 asociologist from the 1930s: “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.” At times, 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 nineteenth-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
Similar Books
The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey Into the Minds of Sexual Predators
Stephen G. Michaud, Roy Hazelwood
