I just caught up with two new paperback reprints, Drew Gilpin Faust's THE REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING: Death and The American Civil War and Germaine Greer's SHAKESPEARE'S WIFE.

From the Drew Gilpin Faust I learned that not until the tremendous losses of Union soldiers in the Civil War did public care for the returned bodies of soldiers become ritualized. The post-war effort of major figures, such as Walt Whitman, to find and return home the remains buried in battlefields created ceremonial respect for the "fallen" unlike any civilian displays hitherto.

This fact was all the more moving for me, because I live in a house built circa 1750. Three young men from the family living there during the Civil War -- two brothers and a son-in-law -- fought for the Union. Only one survived, and they are commemorated twice in graveyards: once, in the large cemetery, among memorial stones for each soldier from this Connecticut Town who died; and again, in the small family burial ground two miles from this house, with mother, father, grandfather, and sisters. I don't know if their bodies were returned.

From Germaine Greer's imaginative historical "biography" of the much-maligned Ann Hathaway Shakespeare of Stratford on Avon, I learned:

Ø how little evidence there is for any "facts" about William Shakespeare's life and his feelings his wife;
Ø how even the "second-best bed" legacy in his will may not be the insult critics have always said it was;
Ø it is as likely a supposition that they married for love as the idea William Shakespeare hated his wife;
Ø it is plausible that Ann raised and supported his children as a faithful and financially savvy spouse, letting him make a career in London that would have been impossible anywhere else in England.

Just turning Shakespearean legends on their heads and learning how many Elizabethan women did more than just survive hardship (and their lot was harder) is worth the read. Whether or not you accept any of Greer's more fanciful ideas -- that Ann Hathaway was the subject of some of the sonnets or that she helped finance the publication of the First Folios out of the estate -- you will want to reread all the plays in a new light. Especially, I think, THE TAMING OF THE SHREW.