Imagining Shakespeare’s Wife: A Conversation with Prof Katherine Scheil

**Philip Rowe** (0:10)
Welcome to the History of European Theatre podcast, and thanks for joining me on this journey through millennia of theatrical history. Episode 119 –Imagining Shakespeare's Wife For this episode, I'm very pleased to welcome Katherine Sheil, Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. Katherine is author of several books about Shakespeare, but today we're particularly talking about her book about Shakespeare's Wife called Imagining Shakespeare's Wife –The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway. It's a fascinating examination of the known facts of Anne's life and how her persona has been used and abused throughout the centuries as a means of examining and justifying views about Shakespeare, but also about how Anne has been viewed in her own right. Katherine is a leading expert on Anne Hathaway and her legacy to history, so following on from the last podcast episode about Shakespeare's early life and marriage, this was a perfect opportunity to talk to Katherine, who adds much nuanced thought and detail to the subject of Anne's life, which adds to the basic facts that I detailed here last time. So, if you haven't listened to that episode yet, it's probably a good idea to go back and do so before returning here.
I talked to Katherine from her home in Minnesota over Zoom and in this first part of our conversation, Katherine took me through the facts of Anne's life up to her death in 1623 and the manner and significance of her burial in the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon.
I started by asking Katherine what had drawn her to write about Shakespeare's Wife and her afterlife.

**Katherine Scheil** (1:44)
A 2018 book, Imagining Shakespeare's Wife, The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway, actually began in my Shakespeare classroom. I was teaching a class called Shakespeare and After, which was works inspired by Shakespeare and related topics, and we did a unit that combined a Shakespeare novel, the novel Will by Grace Tiffany, and we read that alongside a biography of Shakespeare, which was Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World. And somewhat randomly, I chose the meeting of Anne and William and the subsequent marriage as just a life episode for my students to read in each work and compare.
The students were mortified at the amount of fiction in Stephen Greenblatt's biography.
And they were just totally taken aback at the version of Anne in that book and the amount of imaginative energy that went into it.
So I'll just read you a little excerpt of that to give you the flavor of what that fictional interpretation looks like. So just to set this up also, Will in the World came out in 2004, reissued in 2016, and it's still widely available. So the chapter about the Shakespeare marriage is called, Wooing, Wedding, and Repenting, a line repurposed from Much Ado About Nothing. So you kind of get the argument about the Shakespeare marriage just title, right? So here's how the marriage and relationship between the Shakespeare's is described. Shakespeare must abandon his disastrous mistake of a wife. He was dragged to the altar. He viewed Anne with distaste and contempt. He experienced the frustrated longing for spousal intimacy. He felt sour anger to Anne and a strange, ineradicable distaste for her that he felt deep within him.
So that that's all pretty fantastical and intensely negative. And the reaction of my students and actually my own reaction to this started me thinking about what are the pieces of Anne's life that exist and how could they possibly be put together in such a way to produce this really hideous nightmare version of a wife. That was the inspiration behind this book. And I started thinking about how are these pieces of evidence privileged and other pieces suppressed and then fiction added to that to produce a particular Anne. So the first part of the book is an exploration of what we know about Anne, what's the surviving evidence about her. And then the second part talks about how those pieces of her life have been combined in various ways, embellished and suppressed, usually with the aim of producing a particular version of Shakespeare.

**Philip Rowe** (4:43)
Yes, I noticed in the appendix to your book, you listed the works of biography or criticism that Anne features in significantly over the years, 61 of them.
And then you also list works of fiction that she appears in 74 of them, which I guess is significant in itself, but then we come to the actual factual evidence that exists for her. I mean, there are, you list eight pieces of surviving evidence about Anne. So how do you weigh those pieces up against all of this work that has been extrapolated from them?

**Katherine Scheil** (5:17)
Right, right. That's a good question. Well, so you've already mentioned the marriage between Anne and William in a previous episode. So in terms of items of evidence, I'll just say a little bit to add to that.