Customer Reviews
A con - By: J.M.R., 01 Nov 2008 
Where here the blunt Aussie frankness that Germaine Greer has celebrated & been respected for all of her life?
When writing history, it is sometimes almost acceptable to now & then fillin gaps by positing things to make sense of an action, but this disingenuous offering is the worst `history' book I have ever readin that it is 99% conjecture - positing - & 1% truism.
After 400 pages we know exactly nothing more about Shakespeare or his wife, than we did - than anybody did - before. Using highly irritating devices like: `if... we might suppose... it is not inconceivable... I would argue...' etc. ad nauseam, Greer attempts to create a woman whom she can find sympathy with, for no other reason than to defend her against the criticisms of other historians who clearly know no more about their subject than Greer does.
The reader does not care about individualsin the records who have no bearing on the facts about William Shakespeare or Ann Hathaway & are putin as ballast. But anyone interestedin the truth will be appalled & insulted by the deceitful way Greer uses suggestion to give substance to her imagination & thus mislead him or her.
Very convincing, compassionate and scholarly - By: Meerkat, 20 May 2008 
I found this a very convincing portrait of a forgotten life & 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 & that his wife was an illiterate cunning woman who trapped a gullible boy into a marriage that he hated & 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 & enables the reader to re-evaluate what they think of Ann & her life & marriage.
Greer rightly praises Ann's achievements, unnoticed until now: she bore & brought up 3 children through plague & famine on her own, she livedin the same small town all her married life without a hint of scandal & she seems to have not only lived, but prospered, keeping herself & 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 wivesin that situation & 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 & this can become confusing & occasionally a bit tedious, which is why I've given the book 4 stars & not 5.
If you want a balanced & 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 interestedin how ordinary people lived at that time & how this extraordinary woman might have lived as well.
Dire - By: Anna, 16 Apr 2008 Although interestedin social history & 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 & exists on a presumption that it will sell because of the author & a nice cover. As a broad reader who enjoys serious books based on facts & 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 & better. I pity the teacher who will use itin class to stimulate her Shakespeare students as unless carefully used, it could have exactly the opposite effect!
Jarring and fanciful - By: Paul Callick, 18 Mar 2008 
Sadly, a rather embarassing performance, this,in the long tradition of half-baked & almost entirely fanciful Shakespearean speculation (A.L. Rowse etc). Greer presents suppositions as fact, & her assertive tone is really jarring, hectoring & trying to compel, rather than drawing the reader in; & there's a nastily dismissive approach to fellow critics & historians (which she isn't). Greer's scholarly work on the seventeenth century writers is sure-footed & interesting. By contrast, this book will be quickly forgotten, I hope. And of course, it's unluckyin that it appears shortly after three genuinely excellent books on Shakespeare: Charles Nicholl's The Lodger, Shapiro's 1599, & Frank Kermode's little book on Shakespeare's Language.
shoddy scholarshio - By: W. Mahon, 22 Jan 2008 This is simply a flight of fancy on Ms Greer's part.She sneers dismissively at the work of other scholars, sometimesin quite an insulting tone, while putting forward her own ideas, most of which can have little basisin fact. She insists that they provide proof for their conclusions while then, oftenin 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 & 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 optionsin 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.
