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From a book review by Charles Nichol of Germaine Greer’s new biography of Ann Hathaway - Married to the myth

The best way to learn more about Ann Shakespeare would be actually to discover something new about her - a formidable task which Greer does not attempt. She refers to her theories as “daring”, and “heresy”, and to herself as “the intrepid author”, yet in the end she offers just a different set of unsupported hypotheses. At its best this is a spirited, voluble, scholarly book which gives some depth and some dignity to the marginalised Mrs Shakespeare, but it is marred by a tendency to play ideological ping pong with her reputation.

I haven’t read the book, but the review brings up a not uncommon problem the constant interpretation or reinterpretation of history. Sometimes done with from the point of view of what it means in context of modern culture and in Greer’s case (and she is far from alone) injecting a certain ideological bent into the retelling of events. In Greer’s look at Ann Hathaway she hasn’t done anything that previous male historians haven’t done in the other direction. Still Greer had the opportunity to set some things straight and gently push the possibility of new interpretation of Hathaway’s life and seems to have ended up putting more Germaine in then Ann.

DEPENDING,

…on who is doing the talking, fashion is bourgeois, girly, unfeminist, conformist, elitist, frivolous, anti-intellectual and a cultural stepchild barely worth the attention paid to even the most minor arts.

My first instinct is that fashion is frivolous and shallow. Then I think about the ripple effect. The jobs it creates for one. Not just the high end fashion designers and their workers, but the part that trickles down into the affordable clothes that people wear to the office produced in factories by people with families and have bills to pay. The article also mentions fashions ties to the arts and commerce in general.