James Shapiro writes:

With the publication of Shakespeare’s Wife, I can’t imagine that any biographer will ever again dare suggest (as Anthony Holden recently has) that Ann was ‘a homely wench’ who may have ‘set out to catch herself a much younger husband by seducing him’, or that Shakespeare married her only because she became pregnant after ‘a careless roll in the hay of a summer evening’. Greer demolishes such claims one by one, showing, for example, that it wasn’t Ann’s but rather Will’s age at marriage that would have raised eyebrows: Stratford locals could count on the fingers of one hand the number of men that married at 18 during Queen Elizabeth’s reign; both men and women in late 16th-century England didn’t marry, typically, until they were 25 or so. The idea that it was a ‘shotgun marriage’ is also handily dismissed, as Greer draws effectively on the archives to show that it was not unusual for Elizabethan brides to be a few months pregnant.

(LRB 4 October 2007)

Bloomsbury | hardback 406 pp. |ISBN: 9780747590194