Fantasy Anne Hathaways

The poet and playwright William Shakespeare has been the subject of hundreds of imaginary works, from novels to play to films, over the last few centuries. These texts share the common goal of explaining some of the mysteries of Shakespeare’s life story—what Graham Holderness has described as “what biography really wants most of all to know, the interior life, the secrets of the private man: what he believed, how he felt, whom he loved.” In describing the motivation behind his novel My Name is Will: A Novel of Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare (2008), Jess Winfield identified just such a goal, remarking that he “wanted to portray Shakespeare as a living, breathing, sensual, and all-too-human young man, rather than the pedestal-bound bust he’s become in our cultural consciousness.” Bruce Duffy identifies this aim as that of a novel rather than a biography; he argues that the form of biofiction can “get inside some human beings—into their world in a way that history or biography can’t duplicate.”

As part of the yearning to access Shakespeare the man, his wife Anne Hathaway has been imagined in a variety of ways, in response to fantasies about Shakespeare as a lover, husband, father, and private man. This intense interest in Shakespeare’s private life has fueled an industry of Anne Hathaway-related texts that is ideally suited to the form of biofiction. Since Anne’s life has to be rounded out with fiction in the absence of new archival material, fiction may have the better claim to represent the “Anne” that readers and audiences desire. In fact, Ina Schabert has remarked that biofiction “is most successful with obscure lives, where lack of material reduces the factual portrait to a mere sketch or silhouette: figures of the remote past, lower class heroes, artists about whose private lives little is known, and women.” This is indeed the case with Shakespeare’s wife, where the surviving details about her are scant, and the desire to know more about her is correspondingly plentiful.

Invented stories about Anne have offered possibilities to explain a number of questions about Shakespeare’s life, including the circumstances under which he left his hometown of Stratford for the artistic scene in London, the nature of his family life, and the inspirations for his literary works. While biofiction cannot solve the factual cruxes in Shakespeare’s life story, it can serve as a way for readers to imagine the possible scenarios for Shakespeare’s romantic life, and it can suggest solutions to biographical cruxes.

The numerous biofictional “Annes” in the last several decades run the gamut from casting her as the author of Shakespeare’s plays, the lover of the Earl of Oxford, the loyal wife minding the house while her husband worked, and the cast-off oppressive spouse, gladly left behind in Stratford. Anne has been an angry, vindictive wife who seeks revenge on her husband; a disastrous mistake of a wife who Shakespeare sought to forget; and a loyal, supportive partner who inspired his literary works. Despite all of these variations on Anne, she is always constructed in relation to Shakespeare, and remains inescapably bound to her famous husband, as readers and audiences seek out him through her.

In biofiction, the gap in knowledge about Anne has frequently been filled in to bolster ideological claims about women’s place in marriage, about the connections between artistic genius and romantic life, about Shakespeare’s views of women, and about the relationship between Shakespeare’s works and his life. With the later twentieth century growing interest in women, feminism, and in a wider context for the stories of great men, there has been a remarkable expansion of Anne Hathaway texts in the twentieth century. Various “Annes” have been crafted in order to appeal to specific readerships and audiences, especially for women and young adult readers. Many of these works are designed to impart various ideologies about gender, marriage, passion, sexuality, and female ambition to a reading audience eager to encounter hidden tales of love and passion authorized by an often radically invented private life of the famous poet. In these...