Shakespeare's Wife Read Free

be opened to let in the body of Anne Shakespeare. 19
    Greenblatt labours the point, for which he has no better evidence than the doggerel quatrain on what purports to be Shakespeare’s gravestone. Ann fares no better at the hands of women: according to Diana Price,…‘one might speculate that the Hathaways got wind of the Shagspere—Whateley licence, and Anne Hathaway’s father escorted Mr. Shagspere by pitchfork to the altar’. 20
    One might, but one probably should not. The film Shakespeare in Love presents Shakespeare as psychologically damaged by his early marriage:
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    Dr Moth: You have a wife and children?
    Will: Ay…I was a lad of eighteen, Anne Hathaway was a woman half as old again…
    Dr Moth: And…your marriage bed?
    Will: Four years and a hundred miles away in Stratford. A cold bed too since the twins were born. Banishment was a blessing.
    Dr Moth: So now you are free to love.
    Will: Yet cannot love nor write it. 21
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    In his discussion of the film in Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (2001) Philip Armstrong continues the cod psychoanalysis:

    â€¦half a mother and half a wife, no longer a wife since a mother two times over, Anne Hathaway (never seen in the film) provides the figure whose union with and simultaneous distance from her husband/son embodies a version of that Oedipal drama diagnosed in Shakespeare, and identified as the source and theme of all his work, by Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank and Ernest Jones. 22
    The bewildered reader of the endless traducing of the invisible woman of Stratford might ask as Master Lusam does in How to choose a good wife from a bad :
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    But on what root grows this high branch of hate?
    Is not she loyal, constant, loving, chaste,
    Obedient, apt to please, loth to displease,
    Careful to live, chary of her good name,
    And jealous of your reputation?
    Is not she virtuous, wise, religious? 23
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    All biographies of Shakespeare are houses built of straw, but there is good straw and rotten straw, and some houses are better built than others. The evidence that is always construed to Ann Hathaway’s disadvantage is capable of other, more fruitful interpretations, especially within the context of recent historiography.
    There is one resounding exception to the rule that the wives of great men must all have been unworthy. It does not apply to the wives of protestant reformers. The housewife superstars of reformed religion were women like Anna Zwingli, Katherine Melancthon, Idelette Calvin, Anna Bullinger and the amazing Wibrandis Rosenblatt. Käthe Luther is as silent as Ann Shakespeare; though she wrote many letters, only one survives. The marriage of the dowerless ex-nun Katherine von Bora and the ex-monk Martin Luther was arranged; they were handfasted privately and publicly blessed and feasted two weeks later, a pattern that can be discerned in the Warwickshire marriages of Ann Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Käthe then took over the vast ex-monastery the Elektor Friedrich had given her husband, filled it with orphans, teachers, students, refugees and guests, brewed the ale they drank, grew thevegetables and fruit they ate, raised and slaughtered her own animals and made their butter and cheese—and bore six children, and nursed her demanding husband through his many ailments physical and mental.
    Ann Hathaway had no gossip magazines to keep her posted on the day-to-day lives of such role models. She found her role model where Käthe Luther found it, in her Bible.
    She girdeth her loins with strength and strengtheneth her arms.
    She seeth that her merchandise is good; her candle is not put out by night.
    She putteth her hands to the wheel, and her hands handle the spindle.
    (Proverbs, xxxi: 17–19)

 
    CHAPTER ONE
    introducing the extensive and reputable family of Hathaway alias Gardner of Shottery together with the curious fact that one of their kinsmen was a successful playwright for the Admiral’s