Anne Hathaway (wife of Shakespeare) It is widely attributed to Charles Dibdin (1748–1814) and may have been written for the Stratford-upon-Avon Shakespeare Festival of 1769: Anne is depicted in fiction during the 19th century, when Shakespeare starts to become a figure in wider national and popular culture. Emma Severn's novel "Anne Hathaway, or, Shakespeare in Love" (1845) portrays an idealised romance and happy marriage in an idyllic rural Stratford. She also appears in William Black's 1884 novel "Judith Shakespeare" about her daughter, portrayed as a conventional dutiful wife and concerned parent with a wayward daughter. By the early 20th century a more negative image of
Reputation of William Shakespeare William Hazlitt raised admiration for Shakespeare to worship or even "bardolatry" (a sarcastic coinage from bard + idolatry by George Bernard Shaw in 1901, meaning excessive or religious worship of Shakespeare). To compare him to other Renaissance playwrights at all, even for the purpose of finding him superior, began to seem irreverent. Shakespeare was rather to be studied without any involvement of the critical faculty, to be addressed or apostrophised—almost prayed to—by his worshippers, as in Thomas De Quincey's classic essay "On the Knocking at the Gate in "Macbeth"" (1823): "O, mighty poet! Thy works are not as those of