Mrs Shakespeare's New Face(t)s

The existence of Shakespeare’s wife has been reconstructed, imagined, interpreted, and questioned. Creative and critical narratives drawing upon and simultaneously producing different forms of knowledge about her can be classified as: 1. legal documents; 2. poems; 3. plays; 4. novels; 5. scholarly criticism. Each rendition exhibits a paradox. Anne Hathaway’s life, perhaps hardly meaningful per se, acquires significance thanks to its impact on Shakespeare’s life, creativity, and productivity. Assumptions, biases and limited historical data about Hathaway have been used to illuminate personal circumstances and public facts concerning Shakespeare, to support romanticised or disparaging ideas about their marriage, to gather evidence of an initial connection and gradual estrangement, to cast a value judgement on her hypothetical degree of literacy, to reflect on early modern social norms, to reinforce canonical or feminist critical interpretations. Intergeneric and intertextual dynamics emerge from different forms of narrativization. Among them, the battle of the critics featuring Germaine Greer and Stanley Wells shows that in the twenty-first century the biography of Mrs Shakespeare and her imagined identities disclose metacritical enquiries into the intricacies of Shakespeare scholarship.