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This poem is taken from a collection by Carol Ann Duffy called “The World’s Wife”. In this collection, Duffy writes a number of dramatic monologues from the perspective of women who have been traditionally silenced in history, mythology and fiction. A dramatic monologue is a poem that is spoken by a character. The monologues are essentially giving a voice back to these women, and at the same time allowing us to see the men in their lives from a different view point. This particular poem seems extraneous to Duffy's collection as a whole. Firstly, the themes it tackles are not the dominance of masculinity over femininity, nor are they fundamentally in regards to patriarchy. The poem portrays both genders are equal in the relationship, although the use of "I dreamt he'd written me" again challenges the phallocentric origin of language. The emjambment of "I held him" and "he held me" portrays how both are equivocal to each other and a sense of equality is restored. Anne Hathaway: Shakespeare’s wife. Like Mrs Midas, this poem gives voice to and empowers the female figures from the narrative of our past – looking to the female perspective. Much of the imagery in this poem is sexual and allows us to see the relationship between husband and wife as one that is both spiritually and physically fulfilling. She creates a fantasy landscape where Shakespeare’s writing and his love for Anne are intertwined. The idea of a bed being a ‘spinning world’ is striking and starts the poem off at a giddying pace. Duffy neatly presents the bed as a microcosmic centre of an imaginative, expansive universe ‘of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas’ suggesting, at the very least, the plays As You Like It, Macbeth, Hamlet and The Tempest. Erotic image emphasising the physicality of relationship: Metaphor suggests oral sex with Anne Hathaway as well as reminding us that he was the man who wrote Ariel’s song in The Tempest. * Hathaway states that her lover’s words ‘echo’ as ‘assonance’ in her head. The words ‘on’, ‘body’, ‘softer’, ‘to’, ‘echo’, ‘assonance’, ‘touch’ and ‘noun’ are all linked by assonance; the ‘o’ sound does indeed echo through the lines as a softer rhyme. Shooting stars: associated with wishes: suggests his talent as writer was energetic, beautiful and rare: become kisses: she feels her wishes fulfilled. Note link of sibilance Structure: very loose sonnet form: 14 line and final rhyming couplet. Mostly iambic pentameter. Shakespeare wrote sonnets of iambic pentameter but with a much more disciplined structure.Shakespeare’s famous sonnet 18, beginning ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ and ending with ‘So long lives this and this gives life to thee’, voices the commonly held view that humans might die but a work of art can last forever, effectively immort alising its subject. half-rhyme, something in keeping with the ‘softer rhyme’ mentioned at the end of line 5 of this poem. Change in sonnet form: reflects how Duffy is attempting to deconstruct patriarchal structures of language, paticularly as Shakespeare wrote particularly in the sonnet form. Her choice to subvert the form of the sonnet emphasises that these are the words of his wife and represent her own insight into her husband, an insight that cannot be shared or replicated by anyone else. familiar tone and the manner in which Anne Hathaway enthuses about her dead husband. Despite its apparent simplicity, Duffy uses a rich complexity of ideas relating to language, relationships and The poem relies on double meanings very like those we find in Shakespeare's own work. Shakespeare’s work. Anne Hathaway ‘Item I gyve unto my wife my second best bed…’ (from Shakespeare’s will) Busy picture with a long list of images: relationship is heady and exhilarating To be left a ‘second best bed’ is not generally felt to have been complimentary. But Anne Hathaway’s version of events reveals that she was very much in love with her husband. Theirs was a marriage of equality. He left her his second best bed because it was the one in which they had enacted in a very real sense the drama of their relationship. Carol Ann Duffy uses her poem to try and challenge these stereotypical assumptions about Shakespeare’s wife. She reimagines the gift of the second best bed, not as a petty demonstration of marital discontent, but as the place where husband and wife experienced their most romantic and intimate moments. The bed we loved in was a spinning world of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas lines are only loosely joined together through assonance, for example “world” and “words”. The lines are softly and subtly joined together, as if to echo the physical relationship between Anne and Shakespeare. where he would dive for pearls. My lover’s words were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme to his, now echo, assonance; his touch a verb dancing in the centre of a noun. Many refs to literary features to create an extended metaphor relating skill of writer to that of lover: coupled with gentle words: increases impact in romantic, sensual way. The description of Sh akespeare’s touch as ‘a verb dancing in the centre of a noun’ creates a vital impression of joyous action. It is sexually suggestive in that his hands could be ‘dancing’ in the ‘centre’ of his wi fe. The line also alerts us to one of Shakespeare’s most famous means of energising language; he would often turn nouns into verbs. For example, in The Winter’s Tale Perdita says, ‘I’ll queen it no inch further.’ In a practically poetic sense, then, Shakespeare was able to find verbs in the centre of nouns. The fact that Duffy associates him with action, reflects the stereo -typical view of males at the time, but her association with nouns and naming is more significant, given the power of naming through history describes her husband as a ‘lover’ (line 3), suggesting that their physical relationship was vital and exciting. This is given further emphasis by the words ‘spinning’, ‘shooting’, ‘dancing’ and ‘laughing’. The vitality of their sexual union fits in well with the sort of people we might expect Anne and her husband to be. “My” conveys sense of pride and possession In keeping with the expression of a separate identity, Anne Hathaway is presented as someone who is able to use words in an impressively poetic way. In this sense her personality rhymes with her husband’s. She refers to her body being a ‘softer rhyme’ to Shakespeare. Here, Duffy is subtly relating the poetic techniques of masculine rhyme and feminine rhyme to the actual lives of two people who could hardly be separated from art: ‘kisses’ at the end of line 4 is a feminine ending; ‘touch’ is a masculine one. This explicit use of linguistic and poetic terms draws attention to the self-conscious artifice of the persona’s utterance, as well as the poet’s. Enjambment is used to allow the lines to flow into each other, again implying the deep and intricate connection that existed between Anne and Shakespeare. The sibilance in lines such as “shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses”, allow Duffy to evoke the sense of Shakespeare’s words sweeping across the sky in an arc that begins and ends with Anne. The alliteration in “living laughing love” allows the words to dance across the page, suggesting the effervescence of the poetic relationship between the pair and is suitably juxtaposed with the dull “dribbling” of the prose of the guests. The poem contains a great deal of verbs such as “dancing”, “dive”, “dozed” and “dribbling”. The verbs help to suggest that the couple’s relationship is an active and passionate one. Metaphors are consistent with Shakespeare’s occupation but they also make a forceful statement about the imaginative power of his wife. She desires him so much that she would like to have been one of his dramatic creations. The bed as site of dramatic action is there as a blank for her husband’s imagination to be unleashed upon. Visually, sheets could easily be thought of as paper in this context. It was customary in Shakespeare’s time to give up the best bed in the house for guests. Anne relishes remembering that the ‘guests dozed on’ while she and William made love. The derogatory ‘dribbling their prose’ (line 12) is contrasted sharply with ‘My living laughing love’. The lilting alliteration and the cadence of the verse at this point convey extreme happiness and affection. This contrasts with the d, b and p, sounds in ‘dozed’, ‘dribbling’ and ‘prose’. The impression created is that the guests live an inferior life of prose. Shakespeare often gave low status characters prose to speak. The fact that she describes her head as a ‘casket’, a strongbox for keeping jewels and other precious items, indicates the deep love and affection she had for her husband. The consonance on ‘hold’ and ‘held’ recalls that the lovers rhymed with each other when alive, while the tense-change poignantly signals the irrevocable change brought about by her husband’s death. The final, clinching rhyme of ‘head’ and ‘bed’ indicates that Anne Hathaway is able to keep love alive in her memory and imagination. We are left with Anne Hathaway cherishing the memory of being with her husband in ‘that next best bed’. Their true intimacy is made clear here as only she would have been able to interpret correctly Shakespeare’s intention when he wrote the famous bequest in his will. His will, in every sense, is hers. Sexual dream: sexually confident woman. He writes her – his touch brings her to life: his prowess as writer and lover. Romance and drama: relationship is exciting and adventurous: 3 sense listed Some nights, I dreamed he’d written me, the bed a page beneath his writer’s hands. Romance and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste. In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on, dribbling their prose. My living laughing love – I hold him in the casket of my widow’s head as he held me upon that next best bed. Carol Ann Duffy Holding each other – it was more than just sex This sonnet, then, is a poem about a poet by a poet, with the intermediary being the subject’s surviving partner. Carol Ann Duffy is using this thrown voice as a means of celebrating the subject, Shakespeare. She is his ultimate muse, not just inspiring him to produce great works but actually becoming them. Rather than living in an atmosphere of hostility, the couple lives in a world of “romance and drama”, brought into being through their physical and emotional love for each other. The blurring of the distinction between life and art is again inherent in this section of the poem. The subsequent ‘Romance / and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste’ is heavily erotic, concentrating on sensory exploration and not language itself. Lines 8–10 use theatrical imagery to powerful effect in presenting a scene of lovemaking. The word ‘drama’ makes reference to plays in general as well as to love, while ‘Romance’, one of the categories into which some of Shakespeare’s plays are placed, also reminds us that this relationship is not stale. Abrupt and non-descript tone: “the other” – the concept of it being the best, added only as a brief passing comment. Lack of description contrasts to elaborate symbolic images of lovers. Adjectives “dozed” and “dribbling” have neg. conns. and create images of a dull laborious relationship – and unskilful lovers. Alliterative: “living” – his memory lives on; “laughing” – happiness; “love” – her only (before and after) The dash preceding the conclusion of the poem acts as something of a dramatic gesture and separates the descriptions of Shakespeare alive with Anne’s acknowledgement that he can only live on in her imagination now that he is dead. The rhyming couplet conforms to the Shakespearean model but it does not introduce a new rhyme. By recalling ‘bed’ in line 8, the persona’s preoccupation with her physical relationship is brought to the reader’s attention. This rhyme is, incidentally, masculine so we are aware of a female voice giving her husband something of a ghostly, lasting presence in its use. Theme: This is a marriage where the couple create their own romance, one that does not involve conforming to other people’s expectations. The poem allows the reader an insight into a relationship of mutual love and respect, where the couple create a retreat from the rest of the world through poetry, a world which is symbolised by the second best bed. The power of literature and the imagination is hence a central idea in the poem. Another theme that runs through the poem is Anne’s loss of her husband and her genuine grief. Although Duffy gives Anne a voice, she actually subverts the reader’s expectations through the emotions expressed by the character. This is in contrast to another poem by Carol Ann Duffy, “Havisham”, where Miss Havisham from Great Expectations remains bitter and vengeful towards the lover who jilted her. There is no such anger or resentment in this poem, only a widow grieving a beloved husband. “Anne Hathaway” allows us a different perspective of Shakespeare, a man sometimes represented as a philandering husband who put his writing above all else. We instead perceive him as a devoted husband, who saw writing not as something separate to marriage, but as something deeply embedded within it. Therefore another key theme in the poem is the true identity of William Shakespeare, a man about whom scholars still know surprisingly little. By presenting this poem in the voice of Anne Hathaway, Duffy wants us to appreciate that Anne was a central part of his life, as well as a passionate, creative and articulate woman in her own right. *Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. The Tempest. Act i. Sc. 2. The spirit Ariel is leading Ferdinand, using magic - and this poem is part of his incantation. Ferdinand is being persuaded that his father drowned in the wreck (not true!) as he is led...And it's saying that his insides to his outsides are being changed by the sea into something that fits the sea. That he himself doesn't fade into nothing, but changes into something altogether different. This poem is taken from “The World’s Wife”, dramatic monologues (spoken by a character) from the point of view of women who have not had a voice in the past. Structure: very loose sonnet form: 14 line and final rhyming couplet in iambic pentameter. Duffy takes and changes the traditional form used by males to declare their love, for her own use to express the power of her female character. Themes: love, imagination, literature Anne Hathaway Anne Hathaway: Shakespeare’s wife. ‘Item I gyve unto my wife my second best bed…’ Such a gift would have been seen as uncomplimentary but Duffy turns it around in her poem, showing it to be the special place of their love-making. (from Shakespeare’s will) Metaphor transforms the bedroom into the exciting, adventurous romantic world. Implication is that Shakespeare’s imagination( by allusions to Shakespeare’s plays) is shared with her and becomes part and parcel with their love-making lines loosely joined through assonance: eg “in” and “spinning” “world…forests…torchlight…words”, and alliteration: “where…would…words were” The bed we loved in was a spinning world of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas Sexual implications and allusion to Ariel’s song in “The Tempest” (Act I, Scene 2). Image of magical transformation of imagination into reality where he would dive for pearls. My lover’s words were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses Sound mirroring sense: a softer rhyme: “kisses” and “his”, “now” and “noun” as well as “assonance” also in the repeated ‘o’ sounds Metaphor of her body as softer rhyme to his continues the metaphor related to words and shows the lovers connected, in their relationship, like rhyme in the same poem. But their difference , reflecting the male and female, portrays her as softer, and an echo , like assonance. He is associated with action, “a verb”, at the centre of her being,“ a noun” on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme to his, now echo, assonance; his touch a verb dancing in the centre of a noun. Heightened sexual imagery of “diving for pearls”, “kisses” and “his touch… dancing in… [her] centre” Metaphor of words as stars which transform to kisses: further elaborates the previous image suggesting the connection between the imagination and physical reality which cannot be separated. Shooting stars: associated with wishes, beauty and rarity: become kisses: her wishes come true. Sibilance is sizzling ‘spinning’, ‘shooting’, ‘dancing’: show the physical vitality of the relationship Anne also uses very innovative imagery, ‘echoing’ Shakespeare but forging the language of conceit in her own way. The imagery develops from being implicitly about words, to words as subject and finally, to words as the centre of the image itself. Where “wo rds” turned to “kisses”, now “touch” turns to words. The image also shows her power: where before the focus was Shakespeare’s imagination and words, now his touch is transformed by her into words. Words and actions are interchangeable: both art and life ha ve the same weight in reality Enjambment from kisses onwards (4-7) connects the lines (as they are connected as a couple) but also provide a softening afterthought to the strong word at the end of the line, in keeping with the softer echo: eg “kisses” then “on these lips” Imagery of imagination and words continues into the second half of the poem but in less exotic, more muted expression. This is in keeping as the poem makes the transition from physical and imaginative vitality to revelation of the idea behind the second best bed and finally to expression of loss and grief. The vision is hers but attests to his creative power bringing her into existence by his writing. Her dreaming continues the motif of imagination which ends the poem with his continued life in her memory, and begins the notion of sleep which ends finally in death. Some nights, I dreamed he’d written me, the bed a page beneath his writer’s hands. Romance Theatrical imagery of the imagination but grounded again in the physical reality of the senses. and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste. Guests do not live a heightened existence of poetry but a somnambulant life of prose. In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on, dribbling their prose. My living laughing love – I hold him in the casket of my widow’s head Metaphor: “casket” also holds jewels and precious things. as he held me upon that next best bed. Carol Ann Duffy Non-descript “other” shows it to be nothing special and “the best” is added as an after-thought. Alliteration: “living” – his memory lives on; “laughing” – happiness; “love” – what he is to her. The soft, fluid ‘L’ sounds add to the liveliness and contrast with the heavy dull sounds ( d, b and p) used to describe the guests who don’t really live their lives but are asleep. The dash creates a dramatic pause to stress the contrast between the vitality of their living relationship to the realisation that he can only live on in her mind. Holding each other – it was more than just sex The rhyming couplet emphasises the equality of imaginative and physical aspects of the relationship. Background Context This poem is taken from a collection by Carol Ann Duffy called “The World’s Wife”. In this collection, Duffy writes a number of dramatic monologues from the perspective of women who have been traditionally silenced in history, mythology and fiction. A dramatic monologue is a poem that is spoken by a character. For example, she writes a poem about a modern day Medusa, allowing us to think more sympathetically about a woman whose story normally presents her as the villain in a story about a heroic man. The monologues are essentially giving a voice back to these women, and at the same time allowing us to see the men in their lives from a different view point. Anne Hathaway was the wife of William Shakespeare. She was nine years older than her husband, who married her when she was pregnant with their first child. They spent long periods of time apart; he went to London to work in the theatres whilst she stayed behind in Stratford upon Avon. When Shakespeare died, the only present he left his wife in his will was the second best bed in the house. Many scholars have seen this as confirmation that the couple had become estranged, and that this parting gift was meant to be a snub on Shakespeare’s part. There has been much speculation about the great loves and muses in Shakespeare’s life but very few people think that Anne Hathaway was one of them. In the film Shakespeare in Love Anne Hathaway, whom we never see, is nothing more than an inconvenience to her husband, getting in the way of his search for a true muse who will inspire him to produce a masterpiece. By doing so, she makes us question the relationship between Anne Hathaway and Shakespeare, and the wife’s contribution to the work of her husband. Language and Imagery From being a mundane gift to a neglected spouse, the bed in Anne’s eyes is transformed into “a spinning world/of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas”. Duffy creates a magical world of romance and intrigue, with subtle nods towards key elements in Shakespeare’s own plays, such as the forest and castle in Macbeth or the sea of The Tempest. Shakespeare’s words become “shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses/on these lips”. His words are stars up in the sky that everyone can see and admire, but his poetry is also something intimate that only Anne can experience and fully comprehend. For her, his works are something physical that she can touch, an experience of Shakespeare that nobody else can have. Duffy further develops this notion by using the language of poetry to describe the lovemaking between Anne and Shakespeare. Sex and poetry are interwoven as his touch becomes “a verb dancing in the centre of a noun”. Anne imagines she is a product of her husband’s imagination, written into existence through their passionate exchanges, whilst the second best bed functions as “a page beneath his writer’s hands”. Anne imagines the guests in the next room, “dribbling their prose”, whilst herself and her husband create poetry and drama. Anne and Shakespeare inhabit a world full of senses, “played by touch, by scent, by taste”, whilst all the guests are able to do is dribble. The poem concludes with Anne claiming that all her memories of her husband are stored “in the casket of my widow’s head”. He is preserved not in a coffin or urn, not even in his writing, but in the thoughts inside Anne’s head, implying that the real William Shakespeare was a man that only his wife could ever truly know. Poetic Devices The poem is written in the form of a sonnet. Shakespeare’s most famous poems about love were written in this form, and Duffy’s choice here suggests that this poem is both a homage to Shakespeare’s romantic sonnet and at the same time a re-examining of the poet and playwright from a different angle. Whilst she keeps the rough outline of the sonnet, Duffy does not use the traditional rhyme scheme that all Shakespearian sonnets follow; ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. She keeps the rhyming couplet at the end, but otherwise her Duffy’s The poem is rich in metaphors, such as the “spinning world” of the bed or the “lover’s words” as “shooting stars”. The metaphors allow the world of Shakespeare’s poetry to intertwine with the physical reality of his marriage to Anne. Themes This is a poem about love and one that could usefully be compared to Shakespeare’s own sonnets on the topic, in particular Sonnet 130, where he compares his mistress to the standards normally required of women in poetry, and concludes that even though she is not the divine goddess other poets write about, to him she is just as beautiful in spite of, or maybe even because of, her human imperfections. “Anne Hathaway” is about a Anne Hathaway Anne Hathaway (1556-1623) was a real woman - famous for being the wife of William Shakespeare. (We do know some things about her - she was nine years older than her husband, but outlived him by seven years. They married in 1582, when Anne was already pregnant, and had three children together. Although Shakespeare spent many years working in London, he made frequent visits to their home in Stratford-upon-Avon.) In the poem Anne sees her relationship with Shakespeare in terms of his own writing. She uses the sonnet form (though she does not follow all the conventions of rhyme or metre) which Shakespeare favoured. She suggests that as lovers they were as inventive as Shakespeare was in his dramatic poetry - and their bed might contain “forests, castles, torchlight”, “clifftops” and “seas where he would dive for pearls”. These images are very obviously erotic, and Ms. Duffy no doubt expects the reader to interpret them in a sexual sense. Where Shakespeare's words were” shooting stars” (blazing in glory across the sky) for her there was the more down-to-earth consequence of “kisses/on these lips”. She also finds in the dramatist's technique of “rhyme...echo...assonance” a metaphor for his physical contact - a “verb” (action) which danced in the centre of her “noun”. Though the best bed was reserved for the guests, they only dribbled “prose” (inferior pleasure) while she and her lover, on the second best bed enjoyed the best of “Romance/and drama”. The language here has obvious connotations of sexual intercourse - we can guess what his verb and her noun are and what the one is doing in the other, while the guests' “dribbling” suggests a less successful erotic encounter. Back to top The language is strictly too modern to be spoken by the historical Anne Hathaway (especially the word order and the meanings) but the lexicon (vocabulary) is not obviously anachronistic - that is, most of the words here could have been spoken by the real Anne Hathaway, though not quite with these meanings and probably not in this order. What does this poem say about the nature of imagination? Explain, in your own words, how the central image of the “second best bed” works in the poem. How well does the poet adapt the sonnet form here? In what ways does this poem appeal to the senses? Is this poem more about Anne or her husband, or is it about them both, as a couple? Does this poem change the way you think of William Shakespeare? by Liz Allen Created on: April 03, 2007 Last Updated: July 30, 2012 In her poem entitled 'Anne Hathaway', Carol Ann Duffy adopts the persona of Shakespeare's widow. The introductory quote from Shakespeare's will 'Item I gyve unto my wife my second best bed' reminds us that Shakespeare's best bed was reserved for guests, and that Anne inherited the one that she and her husband slept in. This bed becomes the focus of the fourteen-line poem. In the opening two lines, Duffy uses a metaphor to express the magic of the bed in which Shakespeare made love to Anne: it was 'a spinning world / of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas'. More metaphors follow in lines three and four as Anne Hathaway recalls their lovemaking; she expresses the notion that Shakespeare would 'dive for pearls', and she describes the sweet words he said to her as 'shooting stars' that landed on her lips when he kissed her. From line five to line ten Duffy uses imagery in a fascinating way that relates directly to the fact that Shakespeare was a writer. Anne sees her body as 'a softer rhyme to his ... now assonance', assonance being a figure of speech in which the same vowel sound is repeated. Then follows the charming personification of his touch, portrayed as 'a verb dancing in the centre of a noun', giving a feeling of grace and delicacy. Anne says that she sometimes dreamed that Shakespeare had 'written' her, wishing that she herself were part of his artistic creation. She metaphorically imagines the bed as 'a page beneath his writer's hands'. She sees their lovemaking as drama enacted through 'touch', 'scent' and 'taste'. In lines eleven and twelve a contrast is created to the early magic of the poem in the description of how the guests, in the best bed, 'dozed on, / dribbling their prose'; no poetic lovemaking for them! But line twelve then switches to Anne's alliterative description of Shakespeare as 'My living laughing love'. She tells us in line thirteen how she treasures her memories of him with the metaphor 'I hold him in .the casket of my widow's head'. The final line compares this act to the way in which Shakespeare held Anne so lovingly in that second-best bed. The last two lines are a rhyming couplet, just as the last two lines of a Shakesperian sonnet would be, ending the poem with a sense of unity. Duffy's 'Anne Hathaway' is a poem full of rich imagery, the tale of a woman who remembers her husband in a wonderful, loving way with no hint of sorrow. It is beautiful to read and to dwell on the magical pictures that are painted within it. Anne Hathaway BY MICHAEL WOODS This poem from The World’s Wife, written in the voice of Shakespeare’s widow, is immediately accessible because of its famili ar tone and the manner in which Anne Hathaway enthuses about her dead husband. Despite its apparent simplicity, Duffy uses a rich complexity of ideas relating to language, relationships and Shakespeare’s work. She has chosen to adopt the sonnet form and t his is particularly appropriate as Shakespeare himself adapted the form and wrote 154 of his own sonnets. The poets Thomas Wyatt (1503–42) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517–47) were credited with introducing the sonnet to England. The standard form was known as the Petrarchan, Italian or regular sonnet, with a rhyme scheme abba abba cde cde, but it was modified thus by Shakespeare: ababacdcdefef gg. The volta is delayed in his sonnets until the final rhyming couplet although there is often a discernible change in direction at around line 8, the traditional position of the volta. Duffy’s rhyme scheme is looser than those already mentioned and employs half-rhyme, something in keeping with the ‘softer rhyme’ mentioned at the end of line 5 of this poem. The rhyming couplet conforms to the Shakespearean model but it does not introduce a new rhyme. By recalling ‘ bed’ in line 8, the persona’s preoccupation with her physical relationship is brought to the reader’s attention. It is fitting that Anne Hathaway writes in the form that her husband so famously used. This in itself is an act of homage and , possibly, a means of keeping him alive. Shakespeare’s famous sonnet 18, beginning ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ and ending with ‘So long lives this and this gives life to thee’, voices the commonly held view that humans might die but a work of art can l ast forever, effectively immortalising its subject. Shakespeare, the arch metaphor-user and coiner of words, is written about in metaphorical terms even in the first line. The idea of a bed being a ‘spinning world’ is striking and starts the poem off at a giddyin g pace. Duffy neatly presents the bed as a microcosmic centre of an imaginative, expansive universe ‘of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas’ suggesting, at the very least , the plays As You Like It, Macbeth, Hamlet and The Tempest. As You Like It is set in the Forest of Arden, close to Stratford-upon-Avon; Macbeth and Hamlet are partly set in castles. Hamlet contemplates suicide on a clifftop and The Tempest involves a sea voyage. The image of Shakespeare diving in bed suggests oral sex with Anne Hathaway as well as reminding us that he was the man who wrote Ariel’s song in The Tempest. It is significant that Anne Hathaway describes her husband as a ‘lover’ (line 3), suggesting that their physical relationship was vital and exciting. This is given further emphasis by the words ‘spinning’, ‘shooting’, ‘dancing’ and ‘laughing’. The vitality of their sexual union fits in well with the sort of people we might expect Anne and her husband to be. Duffy begins with a quotation from Shakespeare’s will as an epigraph to the poem. Some commentators, and not only feminists, have taken the statement to be something of a slight on Anne Hathaway. To be left a ‘second best bed’ is not generally felt to have been complimentary. We might have expected, then, that Anne Hathaway would be given the opportunity to have her revenge. Although other poems in The World’s Wife do present women as being unhappy with their lot, Anne Hathaway’s version of events reveals that she was very much in love with her husband. Theirs was a marriage of equality. He left her his second best bed because it was the one in which they had enacted in a very real sense the drama of their relatio nship. No children are mentioned by Anne, she concentrates purely on the physical act and not its consequences. In keeping with the expression of a separate identity, Anne Hathaway is presented as someone who is able to use words in an impressively poetic way. In this sense her personality rhymes with her husband’s. She refers to her body being a ‘softer rhym e’ to Shakespeare. Here, Duffy is subtly relating the poetic techniques of masculine rhyme and feminine rhyme to the actual lives o f two people who could hardly be separated from art: ‘kisses’ at the end of line 4 is a feminine ending; ‘touch’ is a masculi ne one. This explicit use of linguistic and poetic terms draws attention to the self -conscious artifice of the persona’s utterance, as well as the poet’s. Hathaway states that her lover’s words ‘echo’ as ‘assonance’ in her head. The words ‘on’, ‘body’, ‘so fter’, ‘to’, ‘echo’, ‘assonance’, ‘touch’ and ‘noun’ are all linked by assonance; the ‘o’ sound does indeed echo through the lines as a softer rhyme. The description of Shakespeare’s touch as ‘a verb dancing in the centre of a noun’ creates a vital impression of joyous action. It is sexually suggestive in that his hands could be ‘dancing’ in the ‘centre’ of his wife. The line also alerts us to one of Shakespeare’s most famous means of energising language; he would often turn nouns into verbs. For example, in The Winter’s Tale Perdita says, ‘I’ll queen it no inch further.’ In a practically poetic sense, then, Shakespeare was able to find verbs in the centre of nouns. As is sometimes the case in Shakespeare’s sonnets, there is a perceptible progression in this sonnet with ‘Some nights’ (line 8), but the volta actually occurs after line 12 at the rhyming couplet, providing the clinching idea and sense of closure. This rhyme is, incidentally, masculine so we are aware of a female voice giving her husband something of a ghostly, lasting presence in its use. The metaphors in lines 8–9, ‘I dreamed he’d written me, the bed / a page beneath his writer’s hands’, are consistent with Shakespeare’s occupation but they also make a forceful statement about the imaginative power of his wife. She desires him so much that she would like to have been one of his dramatic creations. The bed as site of dramatic action is there as a blank for her husband’s imagination to be unleashed upon. Visually, sheets could easily be thought of as paper in this context. The blurring of the distinction between life and art is again inherent in this section of the poem. The subsequent ‘Romance / and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste’ is heavily erotic, concentrating on sensory exploration and not language itself. Lines 8 –10 use theatrical imagery to powerful effect in presenting a scene of lovemaking. The word ‘drama’ makes reference to plays in general as well as to love, while ‘Romance’, one of the catego ries into which some of Shakespeare’s plays are placed, also reminds us that this relationship is not stale. Anne relishes remembering that the ‘guests dozed on’ while she and William made love. The derogatory ‘dribbling their prose’ (line 12) is contrasted sharply with ‘My living laughing love’. The lilting alliteration and the cadence of the verse at this point convey extreme happiness and affection. This contrasts with the d, b and p, sounds in ‘dozed’, ‘dribbling’ and ‘prose’. The impression created is that the guests live an inferior life of prose. Shakespeare often gave low status characters prose to speak. The dash preceding the conclusion of the poem acts as something of a dramatic gesture and separates the descriptions of Shakespeare alive with Anne ’s acknowledgement that he can only live on in her imagination now that he is dead. The fact that she describes her head as a ‘casket’, a strongbox for keeping jewels and other precious items, indicates the deep love and affection she had for her husband. The consonance on ‘hold’ and ‘held’ recalls that the lovers rhymed with each other when alive, while the tense -change poignantly signals the irrevocable change brought about by her husband’s death. The final, clinching rhyme of ‘head’ and ‘bed’ indicates that Anne Hathaway is able to keep love alive in her memory and imagination. We are left with Anne Hathaway cherishing the memory of being with her husband in ‘that next best bed’. Their true intimacy is made clear here as only she would have been able to interpret correctly Shakespeare’s intention when he wrote the famous bequest in his will. His will, in every sense, is hers. This sonnet, then, is a poem about a poet by a poet, with the intermediary being the subject’s surviving partner. Carol Ann Duffy is using this thrown voice as a means of celebrating the subject, Shakespeare. Shakespeare delayed the volta in his sonnets until line twelve but there is often a discernible shift of ideas after the second quatrain, the point at which a Petrarchan sonnet displays a more noticeable turn. Background Context This poem is taken from a collection by Carol Ann Duffy called “The World’s Wife”. In this collection, Duffy writes a number of dramatic monologues from the perspective of women who have been traditionally silenced in history, mythology and fiction. A dramatic monologue is a poem that is spoken by a character. For example, she writes a poem about a modern day Medusa, allowing us to think more sympathetically about a woman whose story normally presents her as the villain in a story about a heroic man. The monologues are essentially giving a voice back to these women, and at the same time allowing us to see the men in their lives from a different view point. Anne Hathaway was the wife of William Shakespeare. She was nine years older than her husband, who married her when she was pregnant with their first child. They spent long periods of time apart; he went to London to work in the theatres whilst she stayed behind in Stratford upon Avon. When Shakespeare died, the only present he left his wife in his will was the second best bed in the house. Many scholars have seen this as confirmation that the couple had become estranged, and that this parting gift was meant to be a snub on Shakespeare’s part. There has been much speculation about the great loves and muses in Shakespeare’s life but very few people think that Anne Hathaway was one of them. In the film Shakespeare in Love Anne Hathaway, whom we never see, is nothing more than an inconvenience to her husband, getting in the way of his search for a true muse who will inspire him to produce a masterpiece. By doing so, she makes us question the relationship between Anne Hathaway and Shakespeare, and the wife’s contribution to the work of her husband. Language and Imagery From being a mundane gift to a neglected spouse, the bed in Anne’s eyes is transformed into “a spinning world/of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas”. Duffy creates a magical world of romance and intrigue, with subtle nods towards key elements in Shakespeare’s own plays, such as the forest and castle in Macbeth or the sea of The Tempest. Shakespeare’s words become “shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses/on these lips”. His words are stars up in the sky that everyone can see and admire, but his poetry is also something intimate that only Anne can experience and fully comprehend. For her, his works are something physical that she can touch, an experience of Shakespeare that nobody else can have. Duffy further develops this notion by using the language of poetry to describe the lovemaking between Anne and Shakespeare. Sex and poetry are interwoven as his touch becomes “a verb dancing in the centre of a noun”. Anne imagines she is a product of her husband’s imagination, written into existence through their passionate exchanges, whilst the second best bed functions as “a page beneath his writer’s hands”. Anne imagines the guests in the next room, “dribbling their prose”, whilst herself and her husband create poetry and drama. Anne and Shakespeare inhabit a world full of senses, “played by touch, by scent, by taste”, whilst all the guests are able to do is dribble. The poem concludes with Anne claiming that all her memories of her husband are stored “in the casket of my widow’s head”. He is preserved not in a coffin or urn, not even in his writing, but in the thoughts inside Anne’s head, implying that the real William Shakespeare was a man that only his wife could ever truly know. Poetic Devices The poem is written in the form of a sonnet. Shakespeare’s most famous poems about love were written in this form, and Duffy’s choice here suggests that this poem is both a homage to Shakespeare’s romantic sonnet and at the same time a re-examining of the poet and playwright from a different angle. Whilst she keeps the rough outline of the sonnet, Duffy does not use the traditional rhyme scheme that all Shakespearian sonnets follow; ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. She keeps the rhyming couplet at the end, but otherwise her Duffy’s The poem is rich in metaphors, such as the “spinning world” of the bed or the “lover’s words” as “shooting stars”. The metaphors allow the world of Shakespeare’s poetry to intertwine with the physical reality of his marriage to Anne. Themes This is a poem about love and one that could usefully be compared to Shakespeare’s own sonnets on the topic, in particular Sonnet 130, where he compares his mistress to the standards normally required of women in poetry, and concludes that even though she is not the divine goddess other poets write about, to him she is just as beautiful in spite of, or maybe even because of, her human imperfections. “Anne Hathaway” is about a Anne Hathaway Anne Hathaway (1556-1623) was a real woman - famous for being the wife of William Shakespeare. (We do know some things about her - she was nine years older than her husband, but outlived him by seven years. They married in 1582, when Anne was already pregnant, and had three children together. Although Shakespeare spent many years working in London, he made frequent visits to their home in Stratford-upon-Avon.) In the poem Anne sees her relationship with Shakespeare in terms of his own writing. She uses the sonnet form (though she does not follow all the conventions of rhyme or metre) which Shakespeare favoured. She suggests that as lovers they were as inventive as Shakespeare was in his dramatic poetry - and their bed might contain “forests, castles, torchlight”, “clifftops” and “seas where he would dive for pearls”. These images are very obviously erotic, and Ms. Duffy no doubt expects the reader to interpret them in a sexual sense. Where Shakespeare's words were” shooting stars” (blazing in glory across the sky) for her there was the more down-to-earth consequence of “kisses/on these lips”. She also finds in the dramatist's technique of “rhyme...echo...assonance” a metaphor for his physical contact - a “verb” (action) which danced in the centre of her “noun”. Though the best bed was reserved for the guests, they only dribbled “prose” (inferior pleasure) while she and her lover, on the second best bed enjoyed the best of “Romance/and drama”. The language here has obvious connotations of sexual intercourse - we can guess what his verb and her noun are and what the one is doing in the other, while the guests' “dribbling” suggests a less successful erotic encounter. Back to top The language is strictly too modern to be spoken by the historical Anne Hathaway (especially the word order and the meanings) but the lexicon (vocabulary) is not obviously anachronistic - that is, most of the words here could have been spoken by the real Anne Hathaway, though not quite with these meanings and probably not in this order. What does this poem say about the nature of imagination? Explain, in your own words, how the central image of the “second best bed” works in the poem. How well does the poet adapt the sonnet form here? In what ways does this poem appeal to the senses? Is this poem more about Anne or her husband, or is it about them both, as a couple? Does this poem change the way you think of William Shakespeare? by Liz Allen Created on: April 03, 2007 Last Updated: July 30, 2012 In her poem entitled 'Anne Hathaway', Carol Ann Duffy adopts the persona of Shakespeare's widow. The introductory quote from Shakespeare's will 'Item I gyve unto my wife my second best bed' reminds us that Shakespeare's best bed was reserved for guests, and that Anne inherited the one that she and her husband slept in. This bed becomes the focus of the fourteen-line poem. In the opening two lines, Duffy uses a metaphor to express the magic of the bed in which Shakespeare made love to Anne: it was 'a spinning world / of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas'. More metaphors follow in lines three and four as Anne Hathaway recalls their lovemaking; she expresses the notion that Shakespeare would 'dive for pearls', and she describes the sweet words he said to her as 'shooting stars' that landed on her lips when he kissed her. From line five to line ten Duffy uses imagery in a fascinating way that relates directly to the fact that Shakespeare was a writer. Anne sees her body as 'a softer rhyme to his ... now assonance', assonance being a figure of speech in which the same vowel sound is repeated. Then follows the charming personification of his touch, portrayed as 'a verb dancing in the centre of a noun', giving a feeling of grace and delicacy. Anne says that she sometimes dreamed that Shakespeare had 'written' her, wishing that she herself were part of his artistic creation. She metaphorically imagines the bed as 'a page beneath his writer's hands'. She sees their lovemaking as drama enacted through 'touch', 'scent' and 'taste'. In lines eleven and twelve a contrast is created to the early magic of the poem in the description of how the guests, in the best bed, 'dozed on, / dribbling their prose'; no poetic lovemaking for them! But line twelve then switches to Anne's alliterative description of Shakespeare as 'My living laughing love'. She tells us in line thirteen how she treasures her memories of him with the metaphor 'I hold him in .the casket of my widow's head'. The final line compares this act to the way in which Shakespeare held Anne so lovingly in that second-best bed. The last two lines are a rhyming couplet, just as the last two lines of a Shakesperian sonnet would be, ending the poem with a sense of unity. Duffy's 'Anne Hathaway' is a poem full of rich imagery, the tale of a woman who remembers her husband in a wonderful, loving way with no hint of sorrow. It is beautiful to read and to dwell on the magical pictures that are painted within it. Anne Hathaway BY MICHAEL WOODS This poem from The World’s Wife, written in the voice of Shakespeare’s widow, is immediately accessible because of its familiar tone and the manner in which Anne Hathaway enthuses about her dead husband. Despite its apparent simplicity, Duffy uses a ric h complexity of ideas relating to language, relationships and Shakespeare’s work. She has chosen to adopt the sonnet form and this is particularly appropriate as Shakespeare himself adapted the form and wrote 154 of his own sonnets. The poets Thomas Wyatt (1503–42) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517–47) were credited with introducing the sonnet to England. The standard form was known as the Petrarchan, Italian or regular sonnet, with a rhyme scheme abba abba cde cde, but it was modified thus by Shakespeare: ababacdcdefef gg. The volta is delayed in his sonnets until the final rhyming couplet although there is often a discernible change in direction at around line 8, the traditional position of the volta. Duffy’s rhyme scheme is looser than those already mentioned and employs half-rhyme, something in keeping with the ‘softer rhyme’ mentioned at the end of line 5 of this poem. The rhyming couplet conforms to the Shakespearean model but it does not introduce a new rhyme. By recalling ‘ bed’ in line 8, the persona’s preoccupation with her physical relationship is brought to the reader’s attention. It is fitting that Anne Hathaway writes in the form that her husband so famously used. This in itself is an act of homage and , possibly, a means of keeping him alive. Shakespeare’s famous sonnet 18, beginning ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ and ending with ‘So long lives this and this gives life to thee’, voices the commonly held view that humans might die but a work of art can l ast forever, effectively immortalising its subject. Shakespeare, the arch metaphor-user and coiner of words, is written about in metaphorical terms even in the first line. The idea of a bed being a ‘spinning world’ is striking and starts the poem off at a giddyin g pace. Duffy neatly presents the bed as a microcosmic centre of an imaginative, expansive universe ‘of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas’ suggesting, at the very least , the plays As You Like It, Macbeth, Hamlet and The Tempest. As You Like It is set in the Forest of Arden, close to Stratford-upon-Avon; Macbeth and Hamlet are partly set in castles. Hamlet contemplates suicide on a clifftop and The Tempest involves a sea voyage. The image of Shakespeare diving in bed suggests oral sex with Anne Hathaway as well as reminding us that he was the man who wrote Ariel’s song in The Tempest. It is significant that Anne Hathaway describes her husband as a ‘lover’ (line 3), suggesting that their physical relationship was vital and exciting. This is given further emphasis by the words ‘spinning’, ‘shooting’, ‘dancing’ and ‘laughing’. The vitality of their sexual union fits in well with the sort of people we might expect Anne and her husband to be. Duffy begins with a quotation from Shakespeare’s will as an epigraph to the poem. Some commentators, and not only feminists, have taken the statement to be something of a slight on Anne Hathaway. To be left a ‘second best bed’ is not generally felt to have been complimentary. We might have expected, then, that Anne Hathaway would be given the opportunity to have her revenge. Although other poems in The World’s Wife do present women as being unhappy with their lot, Anne Hathaway’s version of events reveals that she was very much in love with her husband. Theirs was a marriage of equality. He left her his second best bed because it was the one in which they had enacted in a very real sense the drama of their relatio nship. No children are mentioned by Anne, she concentrates purely on the physical act and not its consequences. In keeping with the expression of a separate identity, Anne Hathaway is presented as someone who is able to use words in an impressively poetic way. In this sense her personality rhymes with her husband’s. She refers to her body being a ‘softer rhyme’ to Shakespeare. Here, Duffy is subtly relating the poetic techniques of masculine rhyme and feminine rhyme to the actual lives o f two people who could hardly be separated from art: ‘kisses’ at the end of line 4 is a feminine ending; ‘touch’ is a masculine one. This explicit use of linguistic and poetic terms draws attention to the self -conscious artifice of the persona’s utterance, as well as the poet’s. Hathaway states that her lover’s words ‘echo’ as ‘assonance’ in her head. The words ‘on’, ‘body’, ‘softer’, ‘to’, ‘echo’, ‘assonance’, ‘touch’ and ‘noun’ are all linked by assonance; the ‘o’ sound does indeed echo through the lines as a softer rhyme. The description of Shakespeare’s touch as ‘a verb dancing in the centre of a noun’ creates a vital impression of joyous action. It is sexuall y suggestive in that his hands could be ‘dancing’ in the ‘centre’ of his wife. The line also alerts us to one of Sh akespeare’s most famous means of energising language; he would often turn nouns into verbs. For example, in The Winter’s Tale Perdita says, ‘I’ll queen it no inch further.’ In a practically poetic sense, then, Shakespeare was able to find verbs in the cent re of nouns. As is sometimes the case in Shakespeare’s sonnets, there is a perceptible progression in this sonnet with ‘Some nights’ (line 8), but the volta actually occurs after line 12 at the rhyming couplet, providing the clinching idea and sense of closure. This rhyme is, incidentally, masculine so we are aware of a female voice giving her husband something of a ghostly, lasting presence in its use. The metaphors in lines 8–9, ‘I dreamed he’d written me, the bed / a page beneath his writer’s hands’, are consistent with Shakespeare’s occupation but they also make a forceful statement about the imaginative power of his wife. She desires him so much that she would like to have been one of his dramatic creations. The bed as site of dramatic action is there a s a blank for her husband’s imagination to be unleashed upon. Visually, sheets could easily be thought of as paper in this context. The blurring of the distinction between life and art is again inherent in this section of the poem. The subsequent ‘Romance / and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste’ is heavily erotic, concentrating on sensory exploration and not language itself. Lines 8 –10 use theatrical imagery to powerful effect in presenting a scene of lovemaking. The word ‘drama’ makes reference to plays in general as well as to love, while ‘Romance’, one of the categories into which some of Shakespeare’s plays are placed, also reminds us that this relationship is not stale. Anne relishes remembering that the ‘guests dozed on’ while she and William m ade love. The derogatory ‘dribbling their prose’ (line 12) is contrasted sharply with ‘My living laughing love’. The lilting alliteration and the cadence of the verse at this point convey extreme happiness and affection. This contrasts with the d, b and p, sounds in ‘dozed’, ‘dribbling’ and ‘prose’. The impression created is that the guests live an inferior life of prose. Shakespeare often gave low status characters prose to speak. The dash preceding the conclusion of the poem acts as something of a dramatic gesture and separates the descriptions of Shakespeare alive with Anne’s acknowledgement that he can only live on in her imagination now that he is dead. The fact that she describes her head as a ‘casket’, a strongbox for keeping jewels and other precious items, indicates the deep love and affection she had for her husband. The consonance on ‘hold’ and ‘held’ recalls that the lovers rhymed with each other when alive, while the tense -change poignantly signals the irrevocable change brought about by her husb and’s death. The final, clinching rhyme of ‘head’ and ‘bed’ indicates that Anne Hathaway is able to keep love alive in her memory and imagination. We are left with Anne Hathaway cherishing the memory of being with her husband in ‘that next best bed’. Their true intimacy is made clear here as only she would have been able to interpret correctly Shakespeare’s intention when he wrote the famous bequest in his will. His will, in every sense, is hers. This sonnet, then, is a poem about a poet by a poet, with the intermediary being the subject’s surviving partner. Carol Ann Duffy is using this thrown voice as a means of celebrating the subject, Shakespeare. Shakespeare delayed the volta in his sonnets until line twelve but there is often a discernible shift of ideas after the second quatrain, the point at which a Petrarchan sonnet displays a more noticeable turn.