Ann or Agnes Hathaway was a farmer’s daughter from Shottery, near Stratford. Born in about 1556, she was 26 years old when she married William Shakespeare, a glove-maker’s son eight years her junior. It seems he was already a budding poet. An early sonnet, written in jaunty octosyllabics and concluding with a laboured pun (hate away /Hathaway), is thought to have been a courtship poem. Ann was pregnant when they married.

While her husband found fame and fortune in London, Ann’s life remained firmly rooted in Stratford. In 1598, when she was in her early 40s, the family moved into a large house on the edge of town, New Place, bought, presumably, on theatrical profits. Shakespeare returned there when he could, which was probably not often. The outlines of Ann’s career as a wife and mother are inscribed in the parish register — the baptisms of her children; the death of her only son, Hamnet, at the age of 11; the weddings of her daughters; the birth of her first grandchild, Elizabeth, in 1608. Shakespeare died in the spring of 1616, having made his will a few weeks earlier, including its notoriously brusque bequest: “I gyve unto my wief my second best bed with the furniture”. Ann died, in her mid-60s, in August 1623.

What we know of Ann is more or less what we know of hundreds of middle-class Elizabethan and Jacobean women — a skeleton of documentary fact, mostly familial. It is Germaine Greer’s laudable aim in Shakespeare’s Wife to rescue this woman condemned to the shadows of her famous husband’s life, to retrieve some kind of individuality for her, and to “re-embed” the story of their marriage “in its social context”.

Greer gives a robust account of Ann’s origins and formative family experiences: she finds the Hathaways “a frugal, no-nonsense people”, and notes the Puritan leanings of some of the family. She writes informatively, en passant, about various aspects of a provincial Elizabethan woman’s life and choices. We hear of the costs of wet nursing, the routines of light agriculture, the contents of a visiting pedlar’s pack. This is enjoyable, if sometimes self-defeating, as it tends to make Ann exemplary rather than individual: an identikit housewife of the period.