KEY POINTS:
In her latest outing, Germaine Greer comes neither to praise nor to bury Shakespeare. Her mission is to dig him up and belabour his powdery remains.
A doggerel quatrain above his grave begs for his dust to be left undisturbed; Greer ignores the anathema, since what lies under her bludgeoning feet is only, according to her, a "heap of rottenness".
And why, she demands, was such a ban on exhumation thought to be necessary?
She goes on to give a reckless, baseless answer to her question: If Shakespeare's bones were grubbed out for forensic examination, they might have revealed signs of the syphilis that, in her grim and gloating view, is likely to have killed him.
There is no evidence for the supposition, but it supplies Greer with the ugly image she craves, a trophy to be triumphantly exhibited as she prosecutes her war of attrition against the chromosome-deficient male sex.
Here is a lethal souvenir of Shakespeare's tomcatting with the imaginary courtesans who entertained him in London, while poor Ann Hathaway - abandoned, reviled, even excluded from her abusive spouse's will - stoically toiled over her domestic chores in Stratford.
The Shakespeare who exchanged a good woman for those poxy whores, Greer rages, was "a colossal fool". At least he was if any of this ever happened, which in her wild-eyed, foamy-lipped enthusiasm she has unfortunately forgotten to prove.
Anger, as always, is Greer's octane. She accuses "bachelor dons" of vilifying Shakespeare's wife because they are themselves "incapable of relating to women".
Since her ire is so ad hominem, it's tempting to accuse this spinster professor of sanctifying the put-upon Ann - often compared here with the legendary figure of the patient Griselda, a martyr to her brutish, sadistic husband - in order to satisfy her own grudge against men.
The problem is that the spurious argument concerns a woman who is, as Greer admits, "invisible".
All that the disputants on either side have to sustain their wishful thinking are a few derisory facts.
Ann Hathaway was a farmer's daughter, older than her husband. He effectively walked out on her to make his fortune in London, so she raised their children on her own. When he died, ever the ingrate, he left her only his second-best bed.
Greer's aim is to empower Ann who, with the aid of some hyperbolic suppositions, becomes a model of doughty female self-reliance.
Did she establish her economic independence and keep the Stratford household afloat by setting up shop as a haberdasher? Well, perhaps she did or perhaps not.
All Greer has to support her hypothesis is documentation from social history about what other wives did. She expects us to agree that Ann did the same.
Some biographers - men of course, possessors of those opprobious and lesion-ridden penises - have called Ann illiterate. Greer's revenge is to make her the preserver of Shakespeare's texts, to whom we are obliged to offer eternal gratitude.
This is a book in which an absurd implausibility can serve as grounds for belief. As she puts it: "So far-fetched is the idea that Shakespeare's widow might have hired an amanuensis to prepare an edition of her husband's plays that no one has ever considered it."
She assumes that Ann personally gathered up the manuscripts the editors worked from and is unembarrassed by the fact that Shakespeare's will mentioned no such papers. "No dog," insists Greer, "has ever been listed in an Elizabethan inventory, but that doesn't mean that Elizabethans didn't own dogs."
So that's how literary detective work is done: the lack of evidence is all the evidence we need. The whole enterprise is a desperate venture into the subjunctive mood. Entire chapters are confected from guesses or hunches. So many sentences begin with the word "if" that in the end the book seems distinctly iffy.
At times, Greer, who has never seemed to me exactly level-headed, offers her own rationality as a credential of truth: "It stands to reason" that there were basketmakers in Stratford because osiers grew along the Avon. Does that entitle her to propose immediately afterwards that battling, resilient Ann made and sold baskets? Greer suggests Shakepeare may have been in a state of "mental confusion" because of possible syphilis, but sorting through the pile-up of invidious inference and unwarranted aspersion, I was left wondering whose wits were truly addled.
The protracted harangue that is Greer's career has been devoted to self-promotion; her temperament leaves her unable to comprehend a writer as self-negatingly elusive as Shakespeare. A dramatist is allowed to be absent from his own work. He ventriloquistically confers voices on his characters, but never speaks in his own person. His plays enact polyphonic dramas that no single life could ever contain.
It is telling that Greer revives the silly, fusty affectation of referring to Shakespeare as "the Bard". She wants him to be bardic like Whitman or Victor Hugo, a national poet who declaims the song of his self-consciousness and confers his own identity on his countrymen.
Unless he is a virile egomaniac, how can she justify emasculating him? Intent on creating a fuss by executing the manmade, masculine god of the bardolaters, Greer announces on the last page that everything in it is a "heresy".
Not really. What it contains is at best hearsay, at worst, to paraphrase Coleridge's comment on Iago, the motive-hunting of a motiveless paranoia.
* Published by Bloomsbury
- Observer
