Very convincing, compassionate and scholarly
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I found this a very convincing portrait of a forgotten life and of an often unfairly villified woman. Before I read this book I hadn't realised I fell into the category of what Greer calls 'Bardolaters', people who assume that Shakespeare was such a genius and that his wife was an illiterate cunning woman who trapped a gullible boy into a marriage that he hated and couldn't wait to get away from. Throughout the book, Greer gives Ann her proper title - Ann Shakespeare. I have never seen her referred to as anything other than Ann Hathaway by other writers. This is a powerful statement that puts the author on the Ann's side and enables the reader to re-evaluate what they think of Ann and her life and marriage.
Greer rightly praises Ann's achievements, unnoticed until now: she bore and brought up 3 children through plague and famine on her own, she lived in the same small town all her married life without a hint of scandal and she seems to have not only lived, but prospered, keeping herself and her family with no help from her husband.
Greer also points out that Ann cannot have felt abandoned by her husband as there was a legal process for claiming abandonment for wives in that situation and Ann did not initiate that proceeding.
Much of the book is taken up with accounts of women contemporary with Ann as a way of extrapolating what her life might have been like and this can become confusing and occasionally a bit tedious, which is why I've given the book 4 stars and not 5.
If you want a balanced and compassionate look at the life of a woman who has had a very bad press since the 17th Century, you won't find a better book than this. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in how ordinary people lived at that time and how this extraordinary woman might have lived as well.
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Dire
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Although interested in social history and women, this book was a great disappointment. As one reviewer has said (favourably!), this book is just reams of anecdotal information that may, possibly, could be relevant interspersed with inflamatory judgements against other scholars. The book demonstrates no editorial control whatsoever and exists on a presumption that it will sell because of the author and a nice cover. As a broad reader who enjoys serious books based on facts and well constructed argument this was a very unusual disappointment. That said, I buy the argument she made but think it could have been argued a lot cleaner and better. I pity the teacher who will use it in class to stimulate her Shakespeare students as unless carefully used, it could have exactly the opposite effect!
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Jarring and fanciful
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Sadly, a rather embarassing performance, this, in the long tradition of half-baked and almost entirely fanciful Shakespearean speculation (A.L. Rowse etc). Greer presents suppositions as fact, and her assertive tone is really jarring, hectoring and trying to compel, rather than drawing the reader in; and there's a nastily dismissive approach to fellow critics and historians (which she isn't). Greer's scholarly work on the seventeenth century writers is sure-footed and interesting. By contrast, this book will be quickly forgotten, I hope. And of course, it's unlucky in that it appears shortly after three genuinely excellent books on Shakespeare: Charles Nicholl's The Lodger, Shapiro's 1599, and Frank Kermode's little book on Shakespeare's Language.
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shoddy scholarshio
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This is simply a flight of fancy on Ms Greer's part.She sneers dismissively at the work of other scholars, sometimes in quite an insulting tone, while putting forward her own ideas, most of which can have little basis in fact. She insists that they provide proof for their conclusions while then, often in the next sentence, putting forward an outlandish idea for which she has no proof! She contradicts herself, sometimes as blatently as from page to page. Like the rest of us, she knows very little hard facts about Ann Hathaway, so she looks at what other women of the time did and imagines that Hathaway did them all- from money lending to growing a mulberry tree plantation to brewing beer to being a medicine woman, with plenty of other options in between. However, apart from her rather Mills & Boonish take on the Shakespeares' married life, the most annoying thing about this work is the rubbishing of others' research while replacing it with a house of cards. As a scholar, Ms Greer has let her past work down very badly.
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Not sure how much I can add
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A very good book. Yes, in parts it must be fancy, as little is known of the man himself never mind Mrs.S. But Greer puts the pieces together into a more than adequate whole.
A good read, and I'm using parts of this in the classroom to flesh out the life of Shakespeare.
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