Shakespeare's Wife

Little is known of the wife of England's greatest playwright; a great deal, none of it complimentary, has been assumed. The omission of her name from Shakespeare's will has been interpreted as evidence that she was nothing more than an unfortunate mistake from which Shakespeare did well to distance himself.

Yet Shakespeare is above all the poet of marriage. Before Shakespeare there were few comedies or tragedies of wooing and wedding. Tragedies were not about loving 'not wisely but too well' but about the fall of illustrious men. Comedies were not about the pitfalls that lay in wait along the path of true love but about getting away with adultery.

Here, Germaine Greer combines literary-historical techniques with documentary evidence about life in Stratford, striving to re-embed the story of Shakespeare's marriage in its social context.

Part-biography, part-history, Shakespeare's Wife is fascinating in its reconstruction of Ann's life, and the daily lives of Elizabethan women. It offers an illuminating portrait of their working routines, the rituals of their courtship and the minutiae of married life.