Imagining Shakespeare's Wife

Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Folger Shakespeare Library

Arts

4.8 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 18 September 2018

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The family. The cottage. The age difference. The pregnancy. The children. The second best bed. The grave. We know so little about Anne Hathaway, but it hasn’t stopped us from speculating about her life for the past 300 years. In this episode, we talk to Katherine Scheil, a professor of English at the University of Minnesota, about the many, many versions of Anne Hathaway. In her new book, Imagining Shakespeare's Wife: The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway, Scheil looks at how historians, biographers, and novelists have repeatedly reinterpreted and reshaped Hathaway’s image over the centuries, and why. Scheil is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. Published September 18, 2018. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “Thy Dear Self's Better Part" was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster and Esther Ferington. Ben Lauer is the web producer.

Transcript

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0:00.0	She's Rosalind.
0:01.6	She's Juliet.
0:03.0	No.
0:03.8	She's Lady Macbeth.
0:05.5	She's Kate, the Shrew.
0:07.8	She's the woman Shakespeare loved.
0:10.0	No.
0:11.0	She's the woman he spent his entire life escaping.
0:14.9	Who was Anne Hathaway?
0:17.5	She was Shakespeare's wife, we know.
0:20.0	But pretty much everything else is up for grabs.
0:29.8	From the Folcher Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I'm Michael Whitmore,
0:35.8	the Folcher's director. In her new book, Imagining Shakespeare's
0:40.2	wife, the afterlife of Anne Hathaway, Catherine Shyle, a professor of English at the University
0:46.4	of Minnesota, looks at how Anne Hathaway has been represented by historians, biographers, and novelists
0:53.1	over the centuries.
0:54.8	All the ways her image has been reinterpreted and reshaped.
0:58.7	And why?
0:59.9	We are constantly returning to Shakespeare to make him fit our times and answer our questions.
1:07.0	And whenever that return touches on Shakespeare's personal life, our understanding of Shakespeare's wife gets swept along.
1:14.9	If we want him to be a moral authority,
1:17.6	if we want him to be a libertine, if we want him to be gay,
	...

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