riffs on shakespeare: shakespeare’s will
the stratford festival
the national post

Few things set my teeth more sharply on edge than the sound of people talking about "Bill Shakespeare." There's a full dose of it in Shakespeare's Will, a one-woman play in which the person doing the talking is Anne Hathaway, the poet's wife or, when we meet her, his widow. Generally, when Shakespeare is "Billified," the intention is to take him down a peg. That doesn't seem to be what Anne has in mind, but the diminutive is so jarringly anachronistic that it comes out that way anyway. Why can't she call him Will, as anyone else of her generation would have done? Especially as there's an unexploded pun on that name in the play's title and in its basic situation: Anne reminiscing while waiting to read her late mate's final testament. He didn't leave any debts. If he had, the play might have been called Shakespeare's Bill.

Nobody would want or expect Vern Thiessen, Anne's ghostwriter, to write a whole play in 17th-century pastiche. What one hopes for, as with any historical piece that isn't aggressively agenda driven, is language that keeps faith both with its imagined period and with ours. And that, apart from that one oft-repeated lapse, is what Thiessen offers us. This is a perfectly intelligent, decently written play. It still strikes me as pointless: an example of drama once-removed. Miles Potter, who directs it, says in his program note that "you could change the character's name and you'd still have a good play." But that's disingenuous. The only reason that anyone's interested in Anne Hathaway is because of whom she married. Unfortunately, the one thing we know about that marriage is that we don't know very much. She was eight years older than he was; she was pregnant when they wed. They had three children in all, one of whom died young. He left their native Stratford-on-Avon for London, where he had a successful career as actor, playwright and theatrical shareholder. He returned home in his last years, and he bequeathed his wife -- notoriously -- their second-best bed (with, to be fair, all the trimmings).

That's all. The play is scrupulous about not adding to it. Such inventions as it comes up with are concerned with Anne alone. But we can't buy the play as the dreams of an everyday Elizabethan housewife, because our awareness of who her husband was hangs immovably around the evening's neck.

What did she think of him? Thiessen hazards a few guesses: that she was more experienced than he was and more amused by him as a lover than impressed; that his family background (including its presumed Catholicism) appalled her father; that she suspected, and somewhat resented, his bisexuality; that they had an open marriage, of which she took full advantage during his long absence; that she wasn't best pleased by the noisy, boozy friends (including, surprisingly, Francis Bacon) he brought back from the capital; that she heartily disliked her spinster sister-in-law, Joan. What -- the really compelling question -- did she think of his plays? We can't be told, because probably she never saw any of them. To do so, she would have had to travel to London, and there is no reason to believe that she ever did. (The play suggests that Shakespeare actively discouraged her.) Conceivably she wasn't interested, which would be interesting in itself, but which isn't explored. What did he think of his work? What, especially while away, did he think of her? She doesn't know, so neither can we. It's a hell of a hole.

The play tries to fill it by having Anne tell us things about herself that could be equally true of any woman: that she liked the sea (this is by way of being a leitmotif), that she liked men, and that she was devastated by the death of her son Hamnet, a death for which the author has a wholly new explanation. We are told that Will himself was cut up by it, too, to the extent of not being able to visit the boy's grave. Much is made of his having been named after an old Stratford friend of Shakespeare, Hamnet Sadler. Nothing is made of the haunting question: How could his father, not so many years later, have brought himself to write a play whose hero had an almost identical name? Wouldn't the mere act of writing out that name so many times have burned up his quill? Did it function as an act of exorcism, or was it a case of the artist's proverbial heartlessness? And wouldn't Anne have heard about it somehow?

Germaine Greer has a book coming out about Anne Hathaway that, she says, proclaims the marriage to have been happy and Anne to have been practically Shakespeare's muse. I don't see where the evidence can come from, but then I can't see much evidence to the contrary, either. The trajectory Thiessen presents -- a canny but trusting woman fighting off disillusion, but finally thrust into it --makes sense on its own terms, but the development is sketchy. But there's enough to enable Seana McKenna to shine. The production has her going up and down a flight of steps more often than seems necessary, but she is completely in command of her own highs and lows. She encompasses roguishness, sensuality, wit --both defensive and aggressive -- and scalding pain, neither underplaying nor overdoing. The performance may justify the choice of play: You will know, coming out, that McKenna is a superlative actress. But you probably knew that going in as well.