Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Book Note: Imagining Shakespeare's Wife: The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway

Scheil, Katherine West. Imagining Shakespeare's Wife: The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

If you're looking for a book that will make you want to run out and read a bunch more books, try Katherine West Scheil's Imaging Shakespeare's Wife: The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway.

This scholarly, well-written, engaging book takes its readers on a journey through what we know of Anne Hathaway's history—and then on a fascinating tour of all the ways she has been appropriated, characterized, and fictionalized through the centuries.

Along the way, she mentions dozens of interesting (and, yes, dozens of uninteresting) fictional Annes.

I'd like to give you a sample of the chapter that starts to deal with these imagined Annes:











It's hard to stop, since the story keeps evolving in such an engaging way, but I should refrain from revealing the rest of the fascinating narrative. You should get it and read it for yourself—and then start filling your bookshelf with the interesting works Scheil mentions.

Click below to purchase the book from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

—The Tempest