Anne Hathaway was the wife of William Shakespeare, an English poet, playwright and actor. They were married in 1582, when Hathaway was 26 years old and Shakespeare was 18. She outlived her husband by seven years. Very little is known about her life beyond a few references in legal documents. Her personality and relationship to Shakespeare have been the subject of much speculation by many historians and writers.
The Chandos portrait is the most famous of the portraits that are believed to depict William Shakespeare (1564–1616). Painted between 1600 and 1610, it may have served as the basis for the engraved portrait of Shakespeare used in the First Folio in 1623. It is named after the 3rd Duke of Chandos, who formerly owned the painting. The portrait was given to the National Portrait Gallery, London, on its foundation in 1856, and it is listed as the first work in its collection.
The Phoenix and the Turtle is an allegorical poem by William Shakespeare, first published in 1601 as a supplement to a longer work, Love's Martyr, by Robert Chester. The poem, which has been called "the first great published metaphysical poem", has many conflicting interpretations. The title "The Phoenix and the Turtle" is a conventional label. As published, the poem was untitled. The title names two birds: the mythological phoenix and the turtle dove.
The Female Eunuch is a 1970 book by Germaine Greer that became an international bestseller and an important text in the feminist movement. Greer's thesis is that the "traditional" suburban, consumerist, nuclear family represses women sexually, and that this devitalises them, rendering them eunuchs. The book was published in London in October 1970. It received a mixed reception, but by March 1971, it had nearly sold out its second printing. It has been translated into eleven languages.
William Shakespeare's sexuality has been the subject of frequent debates. It is known from public records that he married Anne Hathaway and had three children with her; scholars have examined their relationship through documents, and particularly through the bequests to her in his will. Some historians have speculated Shakespeare had affairs with other women, based on contemporaries' written anecdotes of such affairs and sometimes on the "Dark Lady" figure in his sonnets. Some scholars have argued he was bisexual, based on analysis of the sonnets; many, including Sonnet 18, are love poems addressed to a man, and contain puns relating to homosexuality.
Bonnie Greer, OBE FRSL is an American-British playwright, novelist, critic and broadcaster, who has lived in the UK since 1986. She has appeared as a panellist on television programmes such as Newsnight Review and Question Time and has served on the boards of several leading arts organisations, including the British Museum, the Royal Opera House and the London Film School. She is Vice President of the Shaw Society. She is former Chancellor of Kingston University in Kingston upon Thames, London. In July 2022 she was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
The Beautiful Boy is a book by radical feminist academic Germaine Greer, published in 2003 as The Boy in the Commonwealth by Thames & Hudson and in the rest of the world by Rizzoli. Its avowed intention was "to advance women's reclamation of their capacity for and right to visual pleasure". The book is a study of the youthful male face and form, from antiquity to the present day, from paintings and drawings to statuary and photographs.
Sonnet 145 is one of Shakespeare's sonnets. It forms part of the Dark Lady sequence of sonnets and is the only one written not in iambic pentameter, but instead tetrameter. It is also the Shakespeare sonnet which uses the fewest letters. It is written as a description of the feelings of a man who is so in love with a woman that hearing her say that "she hates" something immediately creates a fear that she is referring to him. But then when she notices how much pain she has caused her lover by saying that she may potentially hate him, she changes the way that she says it to assure him that she hates but does not hate him.
Shakespeare's Will is a play by Canadian writer Vern Thiessen. It was commissioned by Geoffrey Brumlik, then Artistic Director of the River City Shakespeare Festival in Edmonton as a performance vehicle for Jan Alexandra Smith and premiered at the Citadel Theatre in February 2005. It has been regularly revived and was performed at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in 2011. Shakespeare's Will was published in 2002 by Playwrights Canada Press.
Germaine Greer is an Australian writer and public intellectual, regarded as one of the major voices of the second-wave feminism movement in the latter half of the 20th century.
Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature (TSWL), founded by Germaine Greer in 1982, is devoted to the study of women's literature and women's writing in general. Publishing "articles, notes, research, and reviews of literary, historicist, and theoretical work by established and emerging scholars in the field of women's literature and feminist theory", it has been described as the "longest-running academic journal focusing exclusively on women's writing".
Richard Hunt was born in Gloucestershire in 1596, the son of a cleric, and died in February 1661. He is primarily noted for his connection to William Shakespeare.
Anne Whateley is the name given to a woman who is sometimes supposed to have been the intended wife of William Shakespeare before he married Anne Hathaway. Most scholars believe that Whateley never existed, and that her name in a document concerning Shakespeare's marriage is merely a clerical error. However, several writers on Shakespeare have taken the view that she was a real rival to Hathaway for Shakespeare's hand. She has also appeared in imaginative literature on Shakespeare and in Shakespeare authorship speculations. Shakespeare's biographer Russell A. Fraser describes her as "a ghost", "haunting the edges of Shakespeare's story". She has also been called "the first of the Shakespearean Dark Ladies".
Katherine Dorothea Duncan-Jones, was an English literature and Shakespeare scholar. She was a Fellow of New Hall, Cambridge (1965–1966) and then Somerville College, Oxford (1966–2001). She was also Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford from 1998 to 2001. She was a scholar of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
Joseph Peter de Fonseka (1897–1948) was a Sri Lankan essayist and editor. His essays were noted for their trenchant humour and defence of Roman Catholic values, in the style of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. He was a friend and collaborator of the former.
Lucy Peacock is a Canadian actress best known for major stage roles at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada during the course of 30 years.
John Clapham (1566–1619) was an English historian and poet.
Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators is a British drama mystery television series set in Stratford-upon-Avon and produced by BBC Birmingham. The first series was broadcast in February 2018. A second series of ten episodes began broadcasting on 25 February 2019. A third series of ten episodes began broadcasting on 3 February 2020. A fourth series of ten episodes was filmed in 2021, with broadcast following in February 2022 on BBC One for the first nine, with the remaining one being saved for a Christmas special.
The Marlowe Papers is a novel by Ros Barber published in 2012. It won the Hoffman Prize in 2011, the Desmond Elliott Prize in 2013 and was joint-winner of the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award.
Daddy, We Hardly Knew You is a 1989 book by feminist academic Germaine Greer. The book is a study of her father who was an Australian intelligence officer during World War II. According to Penguin Random House, the book took three years to write and her objective was to discover information about her father, who she claimed had been distant from her during his life.
