The Germaine Greer book Shakespeare’s Wife (Bloomsbury Publishing, London 2007) is best read as an academic treatise on the life of Ann Hathaway, wife of William Shakespeare. Greer’s work portrays alternative readings of the women in William Shakespeare’s life, but it is difficult to read unless the reader is first of all intimately familiar with the few historically established facts of Shakespeare’s life and the history of the times in which he lived. As an exercise in unraveling biography from the minutiae of bureaucracy and scraps of bureaucratic records, the book works well.
