Renaissance Women: A new book celebrates—and sells short—Shakespeare’s sisters

Renaissance WomenA new book celebrates—and sells short—Shakespeare's sisters Catherine Nicholson (bio) The great problem" of women and literature, as Virginia Woolf defined it in A Room of One's Own (1929), is a problem in two senses of the word. There is the practical question of how women with the ability and the desire to write might succeed in doing so, and then there is the historical question of why so very few women have. Woolf 's answer to the first question takes the form of an aphorism: "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." Her answer to the second is a story: "Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say." The brief and tragic life of Judith Shakespeare unfolds over a single vividly plotted paragraph. Born in Stratford-upon-Avon, End Page 141 she possesses every ounce of her older brother's talent and ambition but has none of the privileges or protections of his sex: "She was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil." To avoid an unwanted marriage, she runs off to London, tries and fails to find work, gets pregnant out of wedlock, and dies by suicide before her twentieth birthday. It must have been thus: a woman in Shakespeare's day with Shakespeare's genius could only have squandered it, but, Woolf adds, "it is unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare's day should have had Shakespeare's genius." Unthinkable because, although genius is ineffable, the conditions for its realization, what it needs to get "itself onto paper," are concrete: time and quiet, access to books and freedom from interruption, a full belly and a reasonably comfortable chair. As Woolf puts it, "Intellectual freedom depends upon material things… Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor." Therefore, the woman "who was born with a gift of poetry in the sixteenth century" was necessarily and irredeemably stymied: "All the conditions of her life, all her own instincts, were hostile to the state of mind which is needed to set free whatever is in the brain." Conjuring that state of mind leads Woolf to Shakespeare, placid, discreet, and chameleonic, rich in invention and devoid of self-interest: His grudges and spites and antipathies are hidden from us. We are not held up by some "revelation" which reminds us of the writer. All desire to protest, to preach, to proclaim an injury, to pay off a score, to make the world the witness of some hardship or grievance was fired out of him and consumed. Therefore his poetry flows from him free and unimpeded. As the portrait of a poet who wrote with the primary aim of making a living and—if titles like As You Like It and What You Will are anything to go by—some fleeting irritation at having to do so, Woolf 's End Page 142 tribute to Shakespeare is idealized at best. More troublingly, as a template of poetic sensibility, it is at stark odds with the circumstances of early modern women's lives as Woolf herself imagined them. Indeed, Woolf 's paean to Shakespeare's "free and unimpeded" art seems designed not simply to explain but to guarantee the exclusion of women writers from the literary canon. Stunted by hardship and maddened by constraint, by her lights, they could only have written badly or not at all. "Woolf had good reasons for her pessimism," says Ramie Targoff in her new book, Shakespeare's Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance, rehearsing the list of forces that conspired to "drastically reduce" the scope and possibilities of early modern women's lives. They were almost universally denied formal education, legally and economically subordinated to first their fathers and then their husbands, and barred from any form of political participation and most professions—including, famously, the stage. Given their programmatic exclusion from nearly every sphere of learning, law, wealth, politics, art, entertainment, exploration, experimentation, and civic engagement in which the culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England was forged, it makes sense...