I loved this book.
If you are a stickler for rigorous historical accuracy, you might not love this book. I have just abandoned, and given a 1-start rating, and bad-tempered review, to a book that got the dates of the Thirty Year War wrong -- so why do I love this book?
Well, IMHO, O'Farrell isn't so much writing a historical novel, as writing an alternative history. What we actually know about the marriage and private lives (let alone their innermost thoughts) of one W.Shakespeare and A. Hathaway could be written on the back of a postage stamp (and not a Shakespeare 400th anniversary commemorative ...) O'Farrell is imagining the lives, and experiences (and innermost thoughts) of a woman named Agnes, a rather strange young woman who -- against all logic and social pressure -- marries a younger man, with big dreams. Whose name is NOT necessarily W. Shakespeare, oh, no.
Most readers I've spoken to (and reviewers I've read) treat it as a cute "in-joke" by O'Farrell that Agnes' husband is never named -- he is The Husband, The Son, The Father, The Playwright. But, for me, this is O'Farrell's whole point -- she isn't arrogantly claiming that she has "cracked the mystery" of Shakespeare's relationship with his wife, and his family, she is merely offering an alternative scenario, using two people who are very like W. Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway -- an alternative scenario to counter the hoary (and very misogynistic) old tale of the older woman, who entraps Callow Youth in marriage, prompting Callow Youth to run away to London and become the Greatest Playwright the world has ever known. (And quietly avenging himself, posthumously, by leaving the Conniving Older Woman nothing but the "second best bed" in his will. Take that, Conniving Older Woman!)
Most scholars now accept that the hoary old tale is based on next to zero facts, and mindlessly misogynistic interpretation of whatever facts there are. Anne Hathaway's reputation has already had a spirited (and well researched) defense from feminist writers like Germaine Greer. O'Farrell uses this framework of facts, such as they are, to construct a fiction about two people, capable in their own different ways, who marry, whose marriage evolves, who suffer a terrible loss.
As Shakespeare himself did -- with King Lear, with several of his comedies, with his history plays, with Hamlet itself -- O'Farrell has taken an established text and transformed it, to reflect his own themes and objectives, making it something different and rarer, even if it isn't slavishly true to its sources.
If it were possible to read this in blissful ignorance of who Agnes and her Husband "are," I think it would still be a worthwhile and satisfying story, for the universal truths that O'Farrell finds in the lives of two people who were remarkable in their own ways.
If you are a stickler for rigorous historical accuracy, you might not love this book. I have just abandoned, and given a 1-start rating, and bad-tempered review, to a book that got the dates of the Thirty Year War wrong -- so why do I love this book?
Well, IMHO, O'Farrell isn't so much writing a historical novel, as writing an alternative history. What we actually know about the marriage and private lives (let alone their innermost thoughts) of one W.Shakespeare and A. Hathaway could be written on the back of a postage stamp (and not a Shakespeare 400th anniversary commemorative ...) O'Farrell is imagining the lives, and experiences (and innermost thoughts) of a woman named Agnes, a rather strange young woman who -- against all logic and social pressure -- marries a younger man, with big dreams. Whose name is NOT necessarily W. Shakespeare, oh, no.
Most readers I've spoken to (and reviewers I've read) treat it as a cute "in-joke" by O'Farrell that Agnes' husband is never named -- he is The Husband, The Son, The Father, The Playwright. But, for me, this is O'Farrell's whole point -- she isn't arrogantly claiming that she has "cracked the mystery" of Shakespeare's relationship with his wife, and his family, she is merely offering an alternative scenario, using two people who are very like W. Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway -- an alternative scenario to counter the hoary (and very misogynistic) old tale of the older woman, who entraps Callow Youth in marriage, prompting Callow Youth to run away to London and become the Greatest Playwright the world has ever known. (And quietly avenging himself, posthumously, by leaving the Conniving Older Woman nothing but the "second best bed" in his will. Take that, Conniving Older Woman!)
Most scholars now accept that the hoary old tale is based on next to zero facts, and mindlessly misogynistic interpretation of whatever facts there are. Anne Hathaway's reputation has already had a spirited (and well researched) defense from feminist writers like Germaine Greer. O'Farrell uses this framework of facts, such as they are, to construct a fiction about two people, capable in their own different ways, who marry, whose marriage evolves, who suffer a terrible loss.
As Shakespeare himself did -- with King Lear, with several of his comedies, with his history plays, with Hamlet itself -- O'Farrell has taken an established text and transformed it, to reflect his own themes and objectives, making it something different and rarer, even if it isn't slavishly true to its sources.
If it were possible to read this in blissful ignorance of who Agnes and her Husband "are," I think it would still be a worthwhile and satisfying story, for the universal truths that O'Farrell finds in the lives of two people who were remarkable in their own ways.
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