Like poverty, misogyny remains a constant of the human condition. Many millions of words continue to crown William Shakespeare, for example, yet hardly any concern the main woman behind and beside him, his wife Ann, née Hathaway. Here Greer, with the righteous indignation for which she is renowned, attempts to address that imbalance or, depending on your point of view, that wrong. I cannot wonder with Greer “why any woman of spirit would want to be a wife”. But then I'm (only) a man.

The polemic aside, this is a thorough search for Ann. Unfortunately Greer can seek her out only, as one has to do of her husband, in nooks and shadows. The facts are few. So as Shakespearean scholars always have and will, Greer draws, over-much in my view, on Shakespeare's sonnets and plays. “If Will wooed Ann in one poem, he almost certainly wooed her in others.” A weak conditional can lead only to an even weaker conclusion. There is also a terrific amount about venereal disease - and supposition there anent. “If [Shakespeare] did consort with prostitutes in his early years ... we need seek no other reason for a cessation of intimacy between Ann and William.” Really? And of course “the whores of London were not irresistible”. Doesn't that depend?

The best in this book is its fine recreation of Elizabethan England, its sounds and and smells. Greer commands a complex sociology, and articulates it very well. Ann remains nugatory, however. Her husband endures.

Shakespeare's Wife by Germaine Greer
Bloomsbury, £8.99 Buy the book here

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