The Mystery of Shakespeare’s Wife
Two views of Anne Hathaway might make you wonder: Why did she marry such a space cadet apart from their hot sex?
Anne Hathaway is easy to defame. So little is known about William Shakespeare’s wife that you can make up just about anything about her and get away with it.
That fact may help to explain a stage version of Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell’s much-honored novel about Shakespeare’s only son, who died in childhood.
The Royal Shakespeare Company’s “disappointingly meek” production opened recently in London after a sold-out run in Stratford-upon-Avon, and to judge by the British reviews, it does Hathaway few favors.
The play “defames Anne as a surly hysteric who wastes her time cooking, gossiping, preparing herbs, minding the sick and scolding the young,” one critic wrote. She has three children, whose births “involve volcanic eruptions of petulant screaming,” and she scolds her husband after Hamnet dies: “Where’s your despair?”
O’Farrell certainly doesn’t defame Hathaway in the novel adapted for the RSC play. Her heroine gives birth, alone and…
