Visible Woman

James Shapiro

  • Shakespeare’s Wife by Germaine Greer
    Bloomsbury, 406 pp, £20.00, September 2007, ISBN 978 0 7475 9019 4

We know little for sure about Shakespeare’s wife and what she was like, and even less about their marriage, other than that Ann Hathaway gave birth to three children: Susanna in 1583 and twins, Judith and Hamnet, two years later. The few surviving scraps of evidence raise as many questions as they answer, especially the will in which Shakespeare bequeathed Ann their ‘second best bed’. No record of Ann Hathaway’s baptism has been found. The only reason to believe that she was eight years older than Shakespeare is that a brass plate, set in the stone over her grave, records that Ann ‘departed this life on the sixth day of August 1623 being of the age of 67 years’. If it turns out that the engraver was misinformed about her age or that his hand slipped and changed a 1 into a 7, the racy story of an 18-year-old Shakespeare marrying an older woman will need to be rewritten.

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[*] LRB, 18 December 1986.

† Notes and Queries, October 1978.

Vol. 29 No. 19 · 4 October 2007 » James Shapiro » Visible Woman (print version)
Pages 29-30 | 3342 words