Imagining Shakespeare’s Wife: A Conversation with Prof Katherine Scheil

The History Of European Theatre

Episode 119:

For this episode I’m very pleased to welcome Katherine Sheil, Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. Katherine is Author of several books about Shakespeare, but today we particularly talk about her book about Shakespeare’s wife called ‘Imagining Shakespeare’s Wife: The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway’. It is a fascinating examination of the known facts of Anne’s life and of how her persona has been used and abused through the centuries, as a means of examining and justifying views of Shakespeare, but also about how Anne has been viewed in her own right.

Katherine is a leading expert on Anne Hathaway and her legacy to history so, following on from the last podcast episode about Shakespeare’s early life and marriage this was a perfect opportunity to talk to Katherine, who adds much nuanced thought and detail to the subject of Anne’s life, which adds to the basic facts I detailed last time, so if you have not listened to that episode yet it’s probably a good idea to do so before returning here.

Katherine Scheil is Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of several books about Shakespeare, including The Taste of the Town: Shakespearean Comedy and the Early Eighteenth-Century Theatre; Shakespeare/Adaptation/Modern Drama (with Randall Martin); She Hath Been Reading: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America; Imagining Shakespeare’s Wife: The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway; Shakespeare & Biography (with Graham Holderness); and Shakespeare & Stratford. She is finishing a book on the history of women and Stratford-upon-Avon, and a book about Shakespeare and biofiction, called Father Shakespeare. She was one of the co-editors of the recent Annethology: Poems Re-Presenting Anne Shakespeare. Her work on the epitaph of Anne Shakespeare in Holy Trinity Church will be coming out later this year with Cambridge University Press.

Links to Katherine's latest books, available from any bookshop.

www.cambridge.org/9781108404068

https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/anne-thology

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