Shakespeare being Shakespeare, there has been no shortage of biographers willing to theorise and speculate about the gaps in the record. This is certainly the case with many of the interpretations of his relationship with his wife, Ann Hathaway. The established facts are sketchy but tantalising. The couple wed in 1582, when Shakespeare was eighteen and Hathaway twenty-six. She was already pregnant with their first child, Susanna. Two years later, Ann gave birth to twins, Hamnet and Judith. Hamnet was to die, of causes unknown, at the age of eleven. By the time of his son’s death, Shakespeare was living in London where he was pursuing his career as a dramatist, while Ann remained behind in Stratford. We know that he purchased a large house in Stratford called New Place, to which he eventually retired, and that his older wife outlived him. When he died in 1616, he left a will in which he famously bequeathed her his ‘second-best bed’.

So much has been read into these details over the years that the late Samuel Schoenbaum – whose Shakespeare’s Lives (1970; revised 1991) is one of the monuments of twentieth-century Shakespeare scholarship – was moved to suggest that the interpretation of the playwright’s marriage can be considered ‘a touchstone of the biographer’s spirit’. It has been proposed that Ann was a worldly and calculating woman who entrapped the naïve young poet with an unwanted pregnancy; that she was unattractive; that their marriage was unhappy; and, most sensationally, that Ann was not merely unfaithful but cuckolded Shakespeare with his own brothers. There is, of course, no hard evidence for any of these suggestions. As Germaine Greer observes, Ann Hathaway has ‘left a wife-shaped void in the biography of William Shakespeare, which later bardolaters filled up with their own speculations, most of which do neither them nor their hero any credit’.

Part of Greer’s intention in Shakespeare’s Wife is to defend Ann’s reputation against this tendency to denigrate her. Most of Shakespeare’s recent biographers – including Park Honan, Stephen Greenblatt, Peter Ackroyd and Anthony Holden (who is thanked in the acknowledgments) – are chastised at some point in Shakespeare’s Wife. Greer reserves particular scorn for the clammy fantasising of Anthony Burgess, who takes a reference in one of the marriage documents to ‘Ann Whateley’ – generally considered to be a transcription error – as a licence to indulge in an elaborate fiction about the beautiful true love lost to poor Shakespeare through the connivance of a desperate older woman.

‘All Shakespeare biographies are houses built of straw,’ writes Greer, ‘but there is good straw and rotten straw, and some houses are better built than others.’ With this in mind, her method in Shakespeare’s Wife is to ground the known facts as thoroughly as possible in the local historical context. The book is, in many ways, less an exercise in literary biography – a genre Greer professes to despise – than a social history that, in the absence of any certain information about Ann’s personality, launches into a detailed examination of the conditions of life for a woman in her circumstances. In the absence of solid evidence to the contrary, Greer proposes that we err on the side of seeing Ann as respectable and diligent.

She establishes that the Hathaways would have been well known to Shakespeare’s family, making it unlikely that he was merely tumbled by a comely wench he happened to encounter by chance while strolling through a Shottery field; and she gives detailed explanations of the rituals of marriage and birth in Elizabethan England (including the curious fact that a labouring woman was encouraged to consume a large knob of butter, as if things weren’t bad enough already). Most importantly for Greer’s thesis, the prospects for a woman in Ann’s position to become economically active in her own right are explored as a way of establishing that a degree of independence is a genuine possibility.

Greer builds a solid case, heavy on details, although not all of her arguments are new. While it is true that Ann has received more than her fair share of slights, it is not the case that she has been universally reviled. Schoenbaum traces to the eighteenth century the first speculation about her fidelity, argues that a deep aversion to Ann only became widespread in the nineteenth century, and gives little credence to the shotgun-wedding theory. More recently, Ackroyd suggests that Shakespeare’s marriage ‘could have been an eminently sensible arrangement’ and dismisses the accusations of infidelity as baseless. Honan describes the suggestion that, at twenty-six, Ann was past marriageable age as a ‘modern myth’. And both Holden and Ackroyd lean toward the view that bequeathing the notorious ‘second-best bed’ was a gesture of affection rather than a deliberate snub – the ‘best’ bed being reserved for guests, ‘second-best’ would specify the marital bed and thus a fond item.

By focusing on Ann rather than on her husband, however, Greer does allow us to re-envision their marriage, although the portrayal of Ann as capable, decent and supportive inevitably has its speculative side. Shakespeare’s Wife is a book that tosses out ideas like handfuls of confetti; a book in which the words ‘might’, ‘could’ and ‘perhaps’ all make regular appearances. Greer wonders, for example, if the unfortunate Hamnet might have been a sickly or disabled child, which is an interesting possibility that can be placed alongside all of those other unknowable possibilities. She decides that Ann, coming from a puritan family, could read but probably not write, which is perhaps likely but not at all certain, since literacy rates were low, particularly for women. Nevertheless, on the basis of this supposition, Greer does permit herself to imagine Ann reading Shakespeare’s poetry.

Shakespeare’s Wife is mostly an example of Greer in scholarly mode, but her polemical instincts do occasionally come to the fore. She begins with characteristic verve, noting the ignominy that is frequently visited upon the wives of great men and denouncing some of the more egregious slurs upon Ann’s character. James Joyce’s alter ego Stephen Dedalus imagines the elderly Ann, once ‘fresh as cinnamon’, with ‘her leaves falling’. ‘Cinnamon is not used fresh and women don’t grow leaves,’ Greer snaps. Later she quotes a biographer who proposes that Shakespeare had grown so fat in later life that the three-day ride from London to Stratford would have been uncomfortable. ‘For the horse, presumably,’ adds Greer. Such flashes of enlivening humour are, unfortunately, all too rare in what is at times an almost wilfully boring book, burdened with detailed genealogies, explanations of petty legal squabbles, and discussions of knitted stockings and Elizabethan haberdashery.

In an attempt to provide a sober antidote to overheated speculations about her subject, Greer often becomes bogged down in the minutiae of her social history. The contextualising research is thorough and wide-ranging, and some of it is interesting, but in many chapters the material fails to come to life. This is a pity because Greer’s thesis is a provocative piece of revisionism. The final suggestion made in Shakespeare’s Wife is that Ann may have had a role in the publication of the First Folio, which appeared in 1622, three months after her death. This is the book’s most radical suggestion, one that Greer asks to be at least considered as a possibility. If it is true, it would mean that we are more indebted to Ann Shakespeare than anyone has previously imagined.