It was commissioned by Geoffrey Brumlik, then Artistic Director of the River City Shakespeare Festival in Edmonton as a performance vehicle for Jan Alexandra Smith and premiered at the Citadel Theatre in February 2005.
"[4] The audience shares details of her historically-unknown personal life, a mixture of general information about the lives of women in Elizabethan England, fictional dramatic twists, and twenty-first century interpretations.
When plague sweeps the country, she must find a way to protect the children without news or support from William and relates her decision to take them to the seashore, far from disease and death.
Anne's rage at his post-mortem betrayal, after she honourably maintained her side of their vows, gives her the strength to break free from the constraints of her situation as well.
Anne's own childhood journey to the sea supplies a pattern of water-based imagery which resolves in the final sequence of the play; it is a mirror and cyclic resolution to Bill's love affair with words.
She draws attention to the repeated emphasis on imagery of the sea, flow, and voyages to express the fluid nature of desire and human intimacies.
[4] Reviewer James Wenley praised the show as 'catnip for Shakespeare fans', writing that Anne emerges from the play a vivid and humanized character.
[5] Conversely, reviewer John Coulbourn believed that "not much of it rings true, either to the heart or to the period of the piece", considering that Anne's musings were too generic to convince.