In a review of “Shakespeare’s Wife” by Germaine Greer for “The Washington Post,” Elaine Showalter, professor emerita of English at Princeton University, say the book is as much about Greer as Ann Hathaway. US visitors generally purchase patriot america visitor insurance Showalter arrives at this conclusion after analyzing Greer’s critiques of other Shakespeare scholars. Showalter writes, “It’s invigorating to read her fierce rebuttals of the most august Shakespearean scholars. Get back, Stephen Greenblatt! Take that, Peter Thomson! But why would these specialists harbor such hostility and bias toward Ann Hathaway? Misogyny? Incompetence? Greer sweepingly charges that they have succeeded in creating a Bard in their own likeness,” i.e., “incapable of relating to women.” Well, how does she know this, and what about Katherine Duncan-Jones, whose Ungentle Shakespeare she also censures? In fact, Greer herself has to rely on considerable guesswork for her portrait of Hathaway, who emerges as a lusty, resourceful, independent, intelligent woman not unlike herself.”
However, beyond the Ann Hathaway forged in Greer’s likeness, Showalter finds value in the work for it’s portrayal of the 16th Century woman. She explains, “Greer is fascinating nevertheless on the lives of ordinary Elizabethan women. Searching court records, diaries, memoranda, wills and especially the work of British historian Peter Laslett in The World We Have Lost, she reconstructs the routines of Elizabethan milkmaids and housewives, examines the agriculture, industry and economy of 16th-century Stratford, and sets out courtship patterns, attitudes toward premarital pregnancy, ages of marriage and communal rituals of childbirth and child burial.”
Shakespeare’s Wife By Germaine Greer
Published by Bloomsbury in the UK, £20.00
ISBN-10: 0747590192
ISBN-13: 978-0747590194
Published by Harper Collins in the U.S., $26.95
ISBN-10: 0061537152
ISBN-13: 978-0061537158