Anne Hathaway (wife of Shakespeare) is imagined by James Joyce's character Stephen Dedalus, who makes a number of references to Hathaway. In "Ulysses", he speculates that the gift of the infamous "second-best bed" was a punishment for her adultery, and earlier in the same novel, Dedalus analyses Shakespeare's marriage with a pun: "He chose badly? He was chosen, it seems to me. If others have their will Ann hath a way." Anne also appears in Hubert Osborne's "The Shakespeare Play" (c.1911) and its sequel "The Good Men Do" (1917), which dramatises a meeting between the newly widowed Anne and her supposed old rival for William's
Anne Hathaway and "real." Preparing for the role, Hathaway consumed fewer than 500 calories a day to lose , researched prostitution and cut her hair. To get into the character's mental space alone during filming in London, Hathaway sent her husband back to the US; this resulted in her becoming increasingly temperamental. Christopher Orr from "The Atlantic" wrote that "Hathaway gives it everything she has, beginning in quiet sorrow before building to a woebegone climax: she gasps, she weeps, she coughs." Ann Hornaday of "the Washington Post" wrote that "the centerpiece of a movie composed entirely of centerpieces belongs to Anne Hathaway,