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Greer Tames the ShrewA feminist icon rescues the Shakespeares' marriage.

By Laura ShapiroPosted Monday, March 31, 2008, at 7:11 AM ET

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Stephen Metcalf corresponded with Ron Rosenbaum, author of The Shakespeare Wars, in a 2006 Slate "Book Club." According to Bryan Curtis, New York's annual Shakespeare in the Park performance is not a pleasant way to spend an evening. In 1999, David Edelstein marveled at the resilience of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream—even in a lackluster film adaptation.

Greer herself is a longtime Shakespeare scholar with plenty of experience in the murky depths of Elizabethan-era research. By examining sources on Stratford, the Hathaway family, and the lives of comparable women, she comes up with a hazy but plausible CV featuring Ann's skills as a malt-maker, herbalist, knitter, and home manager. She also has a fine time slashing away at nearly everything previously written about Shakespeare's wife.

Because of the supposedly shotgun marriage, biographers have asserted that young Shakespeare was seduced by an ugly old maid and dragged to the altar, and that he fled for London because the marriage made him miserable. Greer, by contrast, has young Shakespeare ardently wooing an older woman (several examples in the plays), welcoming the pregnancy because it meant their parents couldn't object to the marriage (if he didn't want to marry her, he could have run away or denied paternity), and leaving for London because he couldn't make a living in Stratford. The only evidence that he didn't keep loving her is that she gave birth to no more children (maybe she couldn't, after bearing twins) and the fact that there are no surviving love letters (but then, there are no surviving letters from Shakespeare to anyone).

Greer also suggests that by the time Shakespeare packed and left, Ann may have been relieved. "Ann Shakespeare could have been confident of her ability to support herself and her children, but not if she had also to deal with a layabout husband good for nothing but spinning verses, who had the right to do as he pleased with any money she could earn," she writes. "Ten to one if he was useless, he was also restless."

Yet the plays are full of wives who desperately miss their husbands, and Greer believes these portraits reflect Ann. Greer has always had a peculiar soft spot for rugged, time-worn marriages that can survive every storm. In The Female Eunuch, she offered the example of Lillian Hellman's long relationship with Dashiell Hammett. (This was before the discovery that Hellman had slathered her memoirs with fiction.) Over the years, wrote Greer, Hammett and Hellman fought, betrayed each other, parted, and returned—a "strange distant love affair" more impressive to Greer than simple romance. Where Greenblatt finds a dearth of happy marriages in the plays, Greer finds more powerful bonds. "What should be obvious is that Shakespeare did not think in twentieth-century cliches," she writes. "We are not dealing her with representations of folk as 'happily married,' but as truly married."

Greer never loses faith in this relationship, and she makes sure Ann doesn't, either. By the end of the book, Shakespeare's wife is selflessly nursing him through his final illness, financing the bust of the poet that was erected in the church, and helping organize the First Folio. It's a little much—even Hellman didn't have to forgive syphilis—but it speaks to a famous quirk at the heart of Greer's feminism. In The Female Eunuch, she praised The Taming of the Shrew for its portrait of Kate as an ideal wife. Huh? Kate, the free-spirited woman who is abused by her husband, Petruchio, until she's suitably broken? The whole play is odious, but Greer is drawn to it. Kate, she wrote, "has the uncommon good fortune to find Petruchio, who is man enough to know what he wants and how to get it. He wants her spirit and her energy because he wants a wife worth keeping. … [S]he rewards him with strong sexual love and fierce loyalty." In this book, Greer barely mentions the play; but I don't think she's changed her mind. I think she's taken this chance to give her beloved Shakespeare a wife who's worthy of him and the marriage he deserves.