Know Your Enemy

"Some biographers - men of course, possessors of those opprobrious and lesion-ridden penises - have called Ann illiterate. Greer's revenge is to make her the preserver of Shakespeare's texts, to whom we are obliged to offer eternal gratitude: could she have subsidised the First Folio? Apparently doubtful about her own idle fancy, Gree ironically qualifies the notion as 'absurd'. But this is a book in which an absurd implausibility can serve as grounds for belief. As she puts it: 'So far-fetched is the idea that Shakespeare's widow might have hired an amanuensis to prepare an edition of her husband's plays that no one has ever considered it'.

She assumes that Ann personally gathered up the manuscripts the editors worked from and is unembarrassed by the fact that Shakespeare's will mentioned no such papers. 'No dog', insists Greer, 'has ever been listed in an Elizabethan inventory, but that doesn't mean that Elizabethans didn't own dogs'. So that's how literary detective work is done: the lack of evidence is all the evidence we need! It all depends, I suppose, on how credulous or how fanatically prejudiced you happen to be."

Just a short excerpt from Peter Conrad's thorough trashing of Germaine Greer's new book about Ann Hathaway, 'Shakespeare's Wife', in the Observer.

Also worth a read from the Review section of the Sunday before last: Will Self, Toby Litt, Colm Toibin, Beryl Bainbridge, Geoff Dyer, Ali Smith, Jonathan Coe and 43 other authors choose the novels they feel are or have been most unjustly underrated.