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by Vern Thiessen, directed by Miles Potter

Stratford Festival, Studio Theatre, Stratford

July 7-September 20, 2007

“Thiessen’s Anne”

Little is known about the life of William Shakespeare.  Even less is known about his wife Anne Hathaway (1556-1623).  Therefore, when Albertan playwright Vern Thiessen writes an 80-minute-long play, “Shakespeare’s Will”, in which Anne reflects on her life, we have to be aware that Thiessen is dealing pure speculation.  If you hope learn more about Shakespeare or Hathaway from the play, you won’t.  Director Miles Potter claims in the programme that “you could change the character’s name and you’d still have a good play”.  In fact, Thiessen’s play is not all that interesting and trades on the character’s name to attract interest.

Thiessen imagines Anne just having returned home from her husband’s funeral.  She is haunted by a snide remark that Shakespeare’s sister Joan has made about how Shakespeare has treated Anne in his will.  Anne has the will in her hand but for unknown reasons can’t bring herself to look at it.  Thiessen uses this artificial delaying tactic to allow Anne to meditate in generally chronological order on how she met Shakespeare and how their married life progressed.  Far be it for a contemporary Canadian playwright to suggest that Anne might be an ordinary woman of her times.  In a typically academic politically correct manner, Thiessen shows us that it is Anne who is ahead of the times in her beliefs while her famous husband is narrow-minded and vindictive. 

What is known is that Anne was pregnant when she married.  She was 26 and Shakespeare only 18.  From this fact, Thiessen pictures an Anne with a healthy sexual appetite who frequents village fairs to pick up men, not for money, just for pleasure.  Her literal roll in the hay with Shakespeare gets her pregnant and leads to their marriage against her father’s wishes.  She notices that Shakespeare seems a bit distant and divines that he may have a greater hankering after boys.  Advanced in her thinking, she tells him, to use Thiessen’s phrase, that she’s “fine with that”, and she and Shakespeare make a pact that though married they will each be free to do as they wish and not encumber the other. 

Anne’s main test comes when Shakespeare seeks success in London and remains away from Stratford throughout the more than twenty years of his theatre career with only infrequent visits to Stratford, thus leaving her to raise their three children, Susannah, and the twins Hamnet [sic] and Judith, on her own.  Thiessen decides that Anne’s father was a sea captain in order to give her an overwhelming longing for the sea and, metaphorically, freedom, though Anne’s family home is so far inland this scenario is hardly likely.  It does allow Thiessen to set Anne up as a kind of heroine and invent the idea that when the plague reaches Stratford, Anne takes the children on the arduous journey to England’s west coast to save them.               

The title of Thiessen’s play refers to one of the few documents written by Shakespeare that is not a poem or a play, i.e., his last will and testament written in 1616.  What some people find odd about the will is that Shakespeare has a long passage detailing what he plans to give to his eldest daughter Susannah, including the house where he and his family lives, and how it should pass on to her male heirs.  Thiessen’s modern-minded Anne, of course, belittles this as patriarchal.  About Anne, the will says only: “Item I gyve unto my wief my second best bed with the furniture”.  Following James Joyce and others, Thiessen has Anne view this a punishment.  To do so ignores the fact that a household’s best bed would have been reserved for visitors so that the “second best bed” would have been their marriage bed and rather more indicative of sentiment than punishment.  Thiessen wants us to think that Shakespeare’s will turns Anne out of house and home causing her to create a new life for herself.  But this ignores the assumption in 17th-century England that the children would take care of their parents.  Giving the house to Susannah, contrary to Thiessen’s misconstruction, actually ensures that Anne will not be forced into homelessness. 

What then do we make of a play based on very little historical information that intentionally ignores what is known of the common practices of the period?  “Not much”, I’d say.  Director Miles Potter says of the play that “it could be about any woman whose husband is away work”.  And so it is.  Thiessen has clearly used the cachet of Shakespeare’s name to draw people to a by-the-numbers revisionist fantasy of Anne Hathaway that has no value as history and little as drama.

The reason for anyone to see the show is to see Seana McKenna, but she plays Anne with an abundance of poise and wit that might rather be appropriate to a lady-in-waiting at court than a ordinary country lass who has lived all her life in a small town.  The script gives McKenna the chance to display her talent for mimicry in imitating at least ten other characters in Anne’s life from the snooty Joan and taciturn Shakespeare to all three of her children.  Why Anne speaks in a contemporary Canadian accent is, I assume, an attempt to help the audience to relate to her and suits Thiessen’s anachronistic take on her.  Peter Hartwell supplies a modern minimalist steel set, but it would almost be better if there were none since Kevin Fraser’s is more adept at evoking the past times and places Anne recalls.  The temptation to see such a fine actor as McKenna solo and up close should be weighed against the fact that the show she is in is so annoying and pointless.  Both McKenna and we deserve better.     

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Seana McKenna. ©Andrew Eccles.