Free Shakespeare's Wife by Germaine Greer Page B

to woo ‘a virtuous maid, the daughter of a count that died some twelvemonth since’. Orsino assumes that because Cesario is a boy he will succeed in his suit where his own has failed.
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    She will attend it better in thy youth
    Than in a nuncio’s of more grave aspect…
    For they shall yet belie thy happy years
    That say thou art a man. Dian’s lip
    Is not more smooth and rubious. Thy small pipe
    Is as the maiden’s organ, shrill and sound…(I. iv. 27–8, 30–3)
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    When Cesario makes a disturbance at her gate Olivia asks her majordomo: ‘Of what personage and years is he?’ (I. v. 150). And Malvolio makes answer:
    Not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy. As a squash is before ’tis a peascod, or a codling when ’tis almost an apple. ’Tis with him in standing-water, between boy and man. He is very well-favoured, and he speaks very shrewishly. One would think his mother’s milk were scarce out of him. (151–6)
    The supposed boy achieves access where no man could, but there is nothing bashful in his suit. He describes what he would do to win Olivia from her obduracy.
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    Make me a willow cabin at your gate,
    And call upon my soul within the house.
    Write loyal cantons of contemnèd love,
    And sing them loud even in the dead of night.
    Halloo your name to the reverberate hills,
    And make the babbling gossip of the air
    Cry out, ‘Olivia’! (I. v. 257–63)
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    Though Olivia doesn’t marry her original boy lover, who is a girl in disguise, she does marry her twin Sebastian who can be no older than she. There is no good reason to suppose that William wooed Ann after Cesario’s fashion; the most we can conclude from the evidence of Twelfth Night is that the idea of a youth seducing a woman in mourning didn’t paralyse him with horror or drown him in bitter reflection.
    Scholars desirous of separating Shakespeare from his pesky wife have taken for granted that all her life she could neither read nor write. They want her, need her to have had no inkling of the magnitude of her husband’s achievement.

    Of course most of the women in his world had little or no literacy, but the commonness of the condition does not change the fact: it is entirely possible that Shakespeare’s wife never read a word that he wrote, that anything he sent her from London had to be read by a neighbour and that anything she wished to tell him—the local gossip, the health of his parents, the mortal illness of their only son—had to be consigned to a messenger. 22
    Greenblatt can see no one to help Ann keep in touch with her husband beyond an Elizabethan version of a courier service. He imagines that any letter of Shakespeare’s would have to have been read by a ‘neighbour’. If Shakespeare wrote at all, he would have written as Richard Quiney did, to a kinsman or a close friend, who had the duty of reading the letter to his wife and of penning her response. Abraham Sturley used to sign himself off to Quiney as writing ‘at your own table in your own house’, with Elizabeth Quiney beside him, virtually dictating what he was to write. 23 At least one of Shakespeare’s brothers was fully literate and should have kept Shakespeare informed of the health of his parents. Ann’s brother could read and write, as could her elder daughter Susanna. 24 Ann did not have to depend on the kindness of strangers or on professional messengers, who did not exist. Early modern letters were not private, but designed to be read aloud, in company. Truly intimate matters were deemed unsuitable for a letter.
    Certainly it is possible, even entirely possible, that Ann could not read. It is also possible, given the absolute absence of evidence to the contrary, that she was blind. She may have been illiterate when Shakespeare met her, and he may have spent the long hours with her as she watched her cows grazing on the common,