Back in April this weird little bloggy thing joined in the celebrations of Shakespeare’s 450^th anniversary. Today marks another Shakespeare-related red letter day which, in the normal run of things, would go unnoticed: on August 6, 1623, Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife (or widow, as she had become), passed away.

(How do I know this? Because Mrs Shakespeare—aka American actress and writer Yvonne Hudson—told me! See link at the end of this piece.)

Anne is every bit as obscure as her husband, in the sense that very little is known about the personal histories of either of them; and unlike him, of course, she left no creative legacy. We think of her, if we think of her at all, in terms which these days we consider sexist—as Will’s lover, wife, muse and mother to his children; as an appendage to a man.

We’ll never know what she amounted to in her own right. We can, however, reimagine her in our own terms. What does she represent for us?

Anne Hathaway? Probably not.

I like to think of her as epitomising ordinary, everyday people who understand that what they do in leading ordinary, everyday lives is perfectly serious and has a value; who may recognise genius when they see it, but who neither envy nor indulge it; for whom living quietly in a small community is not an inferior choice or destiny, but a congenial and fulfilling way of life.

Thinking about Anne in this (wholly arbitrary) way for some reason reminds me of Katherina’s controversial “submission” speech in Taming of the Shrew:

 

Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,

Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee….

Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot,

And place your hands below your husband’s foot….

 

This outrages modern feminist sensibilities. But what’s really going on here? Has Petruchio broken Katherina’s fierce, man-hating spirit, or has she discovered, through him, a new way to express her integrity and independence? Remember that, earlier in the scene, Petruchio takes bets with Hortensio and Lucentio to see which of their respective wives would obey most readily when called. Only Katherina responds to the summons.

One interpretation might be that she has become a parody of the submissive wife. Another (likelier, in my view) is that she is enjoying a new way of expressing her opposition to the hypocrisy, materialism and loveless manipulation that characterise the lives of Padua’s residents, including her own family. In Petruchio she has found the “real thing”—a man who, like her, has a sense of the unreality of things (“It shall be moon, or star, or what I list,/Or ere I journey to your father’s house”) and with whom even a conventional relationship, because it is grounded in truth, is not only bearable but joyous.

Having previously expressed her rebelliousness against the values of Padua through anger and violence, Katherina does so now in sweet and conservative rhetoric about a wife’s duties, much to the dismay of Bianca and the Widow, whose refusal to be ruled by their respective husbands clearly arises from commonplace selfishness and not the troubled psychology that had previously motivated Katherina’s shrewishness. One can sense the mischievous pleasure and genuine satisfaction that Katherina derives from the women’s reaction to her speech, which achieves its effects through exaggeration, not irony: it is wholly sincere, the more so because it gives voice to a spirit that was once broken but is now whole.

Was Anne Hathaway a model in some respects for Katherina? No-one will ever know, but Shakespeare’s fine reading of human nature should warn us against dismissing or marginalising somebody who appears to be conventional. One can only guess at Anne’s personal qualities, but I for one am prepared to believe that she had some richness and depth that genius could appreciate.

So let’s rehabilitate Anne as something more than Shakespeare’s support act and allow her to be, on this day at least, a complete if shadowy figure in her own right.

Thanks to Yvonne Hudson/Mrs Shakespeare, to whom we dedicate Sonnet 18 this month…and also to Sport for Jove Theatre in Sydney, Australia, whose brilliant, illuminating and hysterically funny production of Shrew is the benchmark for all others, in this humble hack’s opinion.