Filling in the ‘Wife-Shaped Void’: The Contemporary Afterlife of Anne Hathaway

Summary

Shakespeare's domestic life has been the subject of much recent scholarly and creative interest. At least three new plays have appeared in the last decade with his wife Anne Hathaway at the centre, and Germaine Greer's biography (Shakespeare's Wife, 2007) has similarly generated intense discussion. Anne Hathaway wrote nothing that survives (if she was in fact literate), few material details remain about the realities of her life and no representations exist of what she looked like. Yet, just as Shakespeare has been used for a variety of social, cultural and political causes, so too has his wife been appropriated, perhaps more easily because she lacks a body of creative work with which adapters must grapple and there are few stable points of reference for her. To some degree, anyone writing about Anne Hathaway (whether biographer, scholar, novelist, etc.) must invent material to fill in the gaps of her life story, and some of the most recent examples have constructed her in relation to contemporary life.

Married to one of the most famous men in history and firmly entrenched in the world of domesticity through the preservation (and global proliferation) of her famous cottage, the afterlife of Anne Hathaway is ideal for articulating the relationship between husband and wife, and between domestic responsibility and the workplace, in scholarly and imaginative works alike.