Performing Identity and Historical Legacy: Germaine Greer’s Reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s Wife

Abstract

For centuries, Ann Hathaway has been a marginal figure in the Shakespearean world, stereotyped as the undesirable wife who trapped a genius. Germaine Greer’s Shakespeare’s Wife (2008) challenges this narrative, but a gap remains in analyzing its approach through a robust theoretical framework that can deconstruct the mechanisms of this historical erasure. This study employs a qualitative textual analysis of Greer’s work, framed by Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity and Stephen Greenblatt’s New Historicism. It aims to demonstrate how Greer reinstates Ann’s legacy by exposing the patriarchal power structures that shaped and silenced her. Nevertheless, the analysis reveals that Ann Hathaway meticulously performed the socially mandated roles of chaste maiden, economic breadwinner, and devoted nurse. Her successful management of the household and children in Shakespeare’s absence was a vital performance of economic agency. However, these essential contributions were systematically devalued and erased by the very patriarchal system that demanded them, concluding in her symbolic dispossession in Shakespeare’s will. With that note, the study concludes that Greer’s work is a potent exercise in feminist historiography, demonstrating that Ann’s historical neglect was not a failure of her performance but a function of a power system that renders women’s labor invisible. Shakespeare’s Wife thus provides a critical paradigm for re-evaluating the wives of great men, arguing that historical silence is an active concept of patriarchy.