I Did It!

One of my post-retirement activities has been to join the community band that my husband directs. It meets in a town about an hour and a half away, where he also teaches private music lessons at the public school. In the past, I've driven up in the afternoon for the once-a-week rehearsals, but this year I decided to just ride along with him, saving gas money - and making it so I don't have to drive back after dark (the real reason).

But what's a girl to do all day with no car in town? Fortunately for me, this town has an outstanding public library, so I've been bringing my laptop and spending the day catching up on things like my digital scrapbooking and organizing my list of things I'd like to read.

One of the things that has been on my list for a long time is Loving Will Shakespeare by Carolyn Meyer. I've had a hard time finding it, though. Fortunately (again), this library has it! Since today is the last day until January that I will be coming for rehearsal, I decided to take the book off the shelf and see if I could finish reading it during the time I'm at the library while my husband is at lessons.

And I did! I actually would have finished in the morning hours, but he got away early for lunch, so I had to finish the last bit after coming back. It wasn't a little easy-reader chapter book, either; this is a young-adult novel with 265 pages (ok, ok, young-adult books are not difficult, but hey, I still feel accomplished).

The book tells the story of Anne Hathaway, who married William Shakespeare when she was 26 and he was 18. It's about the sort of miserable life Anne had growing up after her mother died of the Black Death when Anne was only 8 and after her father remarried. In the tradition of the wicked stepmother, Anne and her stepmother clash over just about everything. Anne has a few romances that give her a hope of escaping that miserable life - one with a migrant farm hand, one with a reserved schoolmaster, one with her stepmother's nephew (which the stepmother pushed on Anne; Anne didn't choose that one), and finally, the one with Will Shakespeare that had simmered below the surface of all the others. Sadly for Anne, once she did end up married to Will, she didn't get the dream marriage she had hoped for - after only a couple of years, Will was off to London to become the Shakespeare we all know, returning home for only an occasional week or two. I couldn't help thinking how much happier Anne would have been if she had been able to marry the schoolmaster, who was "safe" and "boring," but a genuinely nice guy (he died in another epidemic), instead of the passionate and romantic Will.

One thing that struck me as I read was the limitations women faced during that time period. There's this statement from Anne's best friend:

“I pray God that you will soon find such a man,” Emma said kindly, “for a woman without a husband is no woman at all.”

 And Anne's schoolmaster, when she asks him to help her learn to write, responds:

“Reading can be useful as well as pleasurable, ‘tis true,” Ned allowed. “But what use has a woman for writing?” 

Really glad I wasn't born in the 1500's!

So now my library days are over for a while. I will miss them.