Anne Shakespeare: What’s all the fuss about?
Because Anne Shakespeare is the true author, try not to think of William Shakespeare as the author. How hard is that! I think we have all become accustomed to thinking this way because we have, from school to university, been conditioned to think that only a man of such genius could write like this. That is why (1) it is hard to imagine the author as a woman and (2) to wrap our “heads around” what this means for how we interpret the plays, poems and Sonnets written by a woman.
Therefore, we need a new paradigm in which to place the author as a woman and to see the world Anne Shakespeare saw through her eyes. And the Sonnets now have so much to tell us not only about herself but also about her husband, William Shakespeare and the often called dark lady that William was having an affair with. The Sonnets are chronicle of not only Anne’s life as she lived it (her lived experience) in her relationship with the man she was determined to immortalise through her verse (as it appears in her plays, poems and Sonnets), it is also a chronicle of the times she lived in and her growing disillusionment with the humanist project she believed in; a project that she thought could change the world for the better. Now, we need to read all of her plays, poems and Sonnets as a chronicle of those times; the changes, the failing humanist project, the rise of the bourgeoisie, the crumbling feudal order, the nouveau riche (of which William, through his business transactions was just one of them) rising to power and influence across the economic, religious, political and social spheres of a rapidly changing Renaissance landscape (both within England and abroad as the “new” world was opened up for exploitation and commerce).
However, time was against both William and Anne. William returned to Stratford sometime during 1610-11, supposedly never to write again. And Anne never did write under William’s name again. But why? Was she so disillusioned with the failing humanist project that she gave up? Or was there something else going on. No matter how much Anne may have wanted to write a soaring tribute to William when he died in 1616, she could not. If she had she would have outed herself as the author; therefore she had to remain silent. But what she did undertake, in her final act of immortalising William was to re-edit the plays she had penned under his name and readied them for publication as the First Folio. The Folio that was only to be published after her own death in 1623 in order that there could be no questions asked of her about it. But why did William return to Stratford? My own theory (see Summers, 2021, pp. 43-49) is that William was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and there is evidence for that in terms of William being involved in a court case in which he could not remember any of the details and secondly, in that he left Anne their ‘second best bed’. Which in itself is not so strange (except that here was the wife who was devoted to him) except that it is not actually written into his will; it appears as a delineated entry above a line in his will which indicates that he was either reminded by the clerk to leave something to his wife or he suddenly remembered that he had left Anne out of his will altogether!
More to come.
