shakespeare's sister essay

Summary and Analysis of Virginia Woolf’s Shakespeare’s Sister

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Shakespeare’s Sister is an extract taken from “ A Room of One’s Own .” In “Shakespeare’s Sister”, Virginia Woolf explores the plight of women in society in England during the 15th and 16th centuries. Through a subtle analysis, Woolf raises certain concerns regarding discrimination against women in a male-dominated society, such as denial of education to the girl-child, violence against women, the need for freedom of expression in women, and the right to human dignity and equality.

The extract begins with the writer’s disappointment in not being able to find concrete reasons for the poor plight of women. Instead of being flooded by a variety of views that do not help her arrive at a conclusion, she decides to narrow down the inquiry. Woolf seeks answers to her questions from the historian, who is known to record facts. She endeavours to find out from the historian the conditions under which women Lived, turning her attention to women who lived in England during the time of Queen Elizabeth, 1.

The writer is puzzled by the observation that there were no known women writers in an era in which so many men wrote songs, sonnets and other works of literature. Using the analogy of a spider’s web, Virginia Woolf points to the close association between fiction and life. Even when the link between the two is not very obvious, it still exists, she maintains.

The writer turns to Professor Trevelyan’s History of England, a well-known book of history. In her quest for the position of women in society, she was appalled to read in this book that “wife-beating was a recognized right of man, and was practised without shame by high as well as low.” As we know, the concept of feminism supports women’s rights on the grounds of equality of the sexes. So Virginia Woolf is shocked to know about the real plight of women from Professor Trevelyan’s historical records. Disturbing facts about the status of women came to light as the writer continued reading Trevelyan’s book: such as, girls who refused to marry a person of her parent’s choice were locked up and beaten. In the fifteenth century, marriage was not a matter of personal feelings, but of family interests. Thus, the interests of the women concerned were primarily ignored. The position of women did not change much even two centuries later, according to this history book. Even in the seventeenth century, women of the upper and the middle class rarely chose their own husbands. Both in terms of law and social customs, the husband was the “lord and master,” and the wives had a subservient position. However, women in literature (such as Shakespeare’s female characters) and biographical accounts (such as the seventeenth-century memoirs of Verneys) have strong personalities and distinct characters. Virginia Woolf agrees with this observation of Professor Trevelyan, and then adds that women had displayed the strength of character in the works of poets from the beginning of time. She cites many characters as examples, such as Antigone (of Sophocles’ drama), Clytemnestra (of Aeschylus’ play), Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Rosalind and Desdemona of Shakespeare’s plays, and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina among several other examples. All these women characters have dynamic personalities. Thus, women in fiction or in works of literature are endowed with strong personalities. But, in reality, the rights of women were trampled upon and they were “locked up, beaten and flung about the room”, as Professor Trevelyan points out.

Thus, an odd picture of a woman comes to light. In terms of imagination or creative literature, women receive high importance. But in practical terms or in terms of real society, women are downtrodden and of no significance. In poetry, the woman is a predominant and inspiring figure; in the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction, she has great significance; her speeches in literature reflect great thoughts. But, on the other side of the coin, in reality, a woman became a slave of any man her parents chose for her, in real life a woman could hardly read or spell, she was virtually illiterate and was regarded as a property of her husband, always subject to his will.

A strange picture like that of an odd monster of a woman would come to the fore if one were to read the historian’s view of women first and that of the poets’ afterwards. The writer regrets the scarcity of detailed facts about women in recorded works. There are no detailed substantial facts about women. There is hardly any mention of her in history. This fact points to her insignificant stature in society.

In an attempt to find women’s role or significance in history, the writer turns our attention to Professor Trevelyan’s concept of history. To this historian, history incorporated many things such as methods of agriculture, the Crusades (that is medieval military expeditions made by Europeans to recover the Holy Land,) the University, the House of Commons (a part of the parliament in England) etc. However, Apart from mentioning a few ladies of great stature such as Queen Elizabeth, there is no mention of women. Not a single middle-class woman could have been perceived to have participated in historical events or in great movements, which comprise history. Even the famous seventeenth-century English diarist John Aubrey does not mention her. The writer is shocked at the complete lack of records about women. Lack of availability of information and reading material regarding the female sex is a clear pointer to the gender bias. Not only do historians and diarists fail to write about women, but even women themselves have also added to their obliteration by not writing about their own lives or maintaining their own diaries. Virginia Woolf points out the great necessity for a mass of information about women, and wonders why some brilliant scholar does not supply it. The feminist writer feels that history could be re-written by including information about women, or, at least a supplement could be added to history books about women. Looking at the bookshelves, she finds it shockingly regrettable that there is no information about women before the eighteenth century. The writer had begun her exploration with the question of discrepancy between men and women, which is manifested by the utter lack of women’s writings in a prolific age of literature like the Elizabethan age. But she failed to find a satisfactory answer to such basic issues, such as education and literacy of women, and how they occupy themselves in their daily lives. Apparently, they had no money of their own and were married at a very young age without their consent being taken into account. All the probing of the writer about the condition of women is indicative of her concern for the basic rights of women. The writer is reminded of an old deceased bishop whose opinion about women was so low that he asserted that it was impossible for any woman to have the genius of Shakespeare whether in the past, present or future. Such an attitude points to the suppression of women to the extent that her identity, genius, intellect is completely denied by men.

Through an imaginative reconstruction, Woolf wonders what would have happened to a talented woman if she were born in the age of Shakespeare. Since facts about women were difficult to obtain, the writer reflects upon what would have happened if Shakespeare had a highly gifted sister. Woolf names the hypothetical sister as Judith. Shakespeare, being a man had the privileges of education and entertainment. He went to seek his fortune in London. He worked in the theatre, became successful as an actor, and lived in the centre of activity in the famous city of London. In the meantime, his highly talented sister, one may suppose, stayed at home. Judith was as imaginative and adventurous as her famous brother, but being a girl, she was discriminated against and not educated. So, unlike Shakespeare, she did not have the privilege of studying grammar and logic or studying Latin. Being a gifted person, she was interested in reading books and used to sometimes pick up her brother’s book perhaps. When her parents came to know of this, they told her to take care of “womanly” things such as cooking and stitching. Being talented, she probably wrote something, but knowing the strict restrictions imposed on women, probably hid her writings or set them on fire. As was the custom of her times, she was engaged to be married at a very young age. When she refused to get married, she was badly beaten by her father. Then her father stopped using such corporal punishment and tried to emotionally coerce her. Driven by such external pressures, Judith ran away from home to London. She had good music sense as well as a taste for the theatre like her famous brother. When she expressed her desire to act, men laughed at her, because she lived in an age whereby a woman’s individual talents were greatly suppressed, and she was expected to be confined to the four walls of her home. Her literary genius did not wish to be rebuffed by such anti-feminist attitudes in a male-dominated society. An actor-manager named Nick Greene became friendly with her, and she found herself pregnant. A woman of genius in Shakespeare’s time was prone to exploitation by men. Judith was ultimately led to commit suicide, as she was a woman of talent, out of synchronization with the times she lived in.

Woolf’s imaginative reconstruction of Judith’s tale highlights the plight of a woman of genius born in Shakespeare’s age. Social and cultural exigencies made it impossible for talented women to have existed and expressed themselves in Shakespeare’s times. Yet, the writer continues to think that genius must have existed among women as well as amongst the working class, even though it could not come to light. The writer cites Emily Bronte (a nineteenth-century woman novelist) and Robert Burns (a working-class Scottish poet) as examples of genius. Woolf feels that when a person reads about a witch, or of a woman possessed by devils, or about an outstanding man who had a mother — these may be taken as indicators of the existence of a lost woman novelist or a suppressed female poet whose talents did not find any limelight.

Reflecting upon the story of Shakespeare’s sister, as the writer had made it up, Woolf reinforces the point that any woman who had extraordinary talent in the sixteenth century, would have either gone crazy, or committed suicide, or lived in isolation outside the village. Isolated because of her genius, she would have been regarded as a half-witch, half wizard, and people would have either feared her or made fun of her. Even nineteenth-century women writers had to adopt male pseudonyms, such as Curer Bell, George Eliot and George Sand. Adopting the name of a man and assuming anonymity by women were customs greatly encouraged by men. As Pericles, the Athenian statesman and orator of the fifth century BC had said, publicity in women was a hateful quality. Thus, we see from Virginia Woolf’s exposition, how women were suppressed, their rights and fundamental identity denied.

In the concluding section of the essay, Woolf says that Judith, the talented poet who could not express herself in writing and was buried in the crossroads, still lives on. With deep empathy for women whose rights are denied, the writer says that Shakespeare’s sister lives on in women of today, and in women who efface themselves to nurture their families. The opportunity to empower such women is soon coming within our reach. The writer believes that in times to come, if women are given space and freedom, and have the courage to express their opinions in writing, if they view life objectively if women are able to look beyond Milton’s perspective (that Eve was morally and intellectually lesser than Adam), then the opportunity will come when Shakespeare’s sister (or women of talent) will have a tangible identity of their own. If we create a conducive environment, Judith can come into our midst and freely express herself.

The lack of women writers in a particular age and the lack of historical records regarding women are silent indicators of the suppression of the voice of women in society. In her subtle exploration of the status of women in society, Virginia Woolf exposes appalling facts about the condition of women during earlier centuries in England. Gender bias was strong in Elizabethan England: men and women were not treated as equals. We are shocked to know that “wife-beating was a recognized right of man”. Also, girls were denied education in England up to the eighteenth century.

Women in real society were completely different from the inspiring female characters that we see in great works of literature. In reality, according to social dictates, women were subservient to men. The complete lack of information about women before the eighteenth century in England shows the extent of discrimination against women on the basis of gender and their low position in society.

By means of imaginative reconstruction, Virginia Woolf explores what would have happened to a talented woman if she had been born in Shakespeare’s times. Through this method, the writer raises fundamental issues concerning gender bias such as denial of education to the girl-child, denial of expression of the self and one’s talents, and denial of choice in personal matters. Suppression of identity of women in the patriarchal society of sixteenth and seventeenth-century England was so severe that any woman of the exceptional genius of those times would have been led to commit suicide, become crazy, or live in utter isolation—Woolf concludes.

In the concluding section of the essay, Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister Judith emerges as a symbolic figure of a woman of genius, seeking to come to life in a conducive atmosphere for appropriate self-expression. The writer calls for a change of attitudes in society, whereby one can find parity between men and women, whereby women find space, courage and liberty to express themselves.

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If Shakespeare Had a Sister

William Shakespeare’s Sister, Joan, Emerges in Long-Lost Writings

The Shakespeare “Spiritual Testament” has baffled historians for years. Now, it may shed new light on the famous playwright’s mysterious younger sister Joan.

By Marla Mackoul | Mar 31, 2024

In 1757, nearly 150 years after William Shakespeare ’s death, a pamphlet was found in the rafters of his childhood home. Handwritten and signed by a ‘J. Shakespeare,’ the document was a passionate Catholic profession of faith. It was a promise to die a good Catholic death, understandably hidden in the rafters during a time when the Protestant Church of England was essentially at war with Catholicism. Discovery could’ve meant torture, or even death.

For years, scholars have considered this pamphlet to be the work of John Shakespeare, William’s father, and used it as evidence that the Shakespeare we all know and love was likely raised in a secretly, and perhaps fervently, Catholic household. 

But new analysis of the booklet calls all of that into question. Archival research examining a 1790 copy of the document—as the original was, unfortunately, lost—in addition to other texts from Shakespeare’s time shows that it probably wasn’t written by John Shakespeare, as had always been assumed. Rather, it was the work of William’s younger sister, Joan.

“The Last Will and Testament of the Soul”

Researcher and University of Bristol professor Matthew Steggle pieced together timelines using numerous internet archives to prove that the document must be hers. The writing, it turns out, is actually an incomplete translation of “The Last Will and Testament of the Soul,” an Italian text Steggle deduced originated several years after John’s death in 1601. Meanwhile, Joan was the only other J. Shakespeare living during this period. As a simple matter of dates, the pamphlet must have been hers—a shocking revelation that makes it her only surviving piece of writing.

Steggle’s discovery sets the record straight on an important document in Shakespeare family history. It seems we know less about William Shakespeare’s religious life than ever, given that Joan’s ideologies doesn’t necessarily reflect the attitudes of their childhood home. But beyond that, this revelation gives us crucial insight into the mystery of Shakespeare’s sister.

Who Was Joan Shakespeare Hart?

Not much is known about Joan Shakespeare Hart. Born in 1569, five years after the famous bard, she was the only one of William’s seven siblings to survive him. We know that Joan married a hatter, William Hart, had four children, and lived in a cottage on the Shakespeare estate. Her legacy has endured, albeit differently than her brother’s; her descendants are now his most direct living relatives. But we know little about Joan the person and what she was like. The “Spiritual Testament” gives Joan a voice of her own for the first time. 

“I, [Joan] Shakespeare, do protest that I will willingly accept of death in whatsoever manner it may befall me, conforming my will unto the will of God,” she writes . “Accepting of the same in satisfaction for my sins and giving thanks unto his divine majesty for the life he hath bestowed upon me.”

She goes on to claim Saint Winifred as a patron saint whom she hopes will comfort her in her last hours, another key indicator that Joan was likely the writer. Saint Winifred’s life story centered around staving off unwanted suitors, making her a particular favorite among women.  

“Shakespeare’s Sister”

Steggle himself feels that Joan Shakespeare Hart’s symbolic meaning as William Shakespeare’s sister makes his discovery all the more important:

“There are only seven surviving documents from Joan’s lifetime that even mention her by name. Virginia Woolf wrote a famous essay, “Shakespeare’s Sister,” about how a figure like her could never hope to be a writer or have her writing preserved, so she has become something of a symbol for all the lost voices of early modern women. There are hundreds of thousands of words surviving from her brother, and until now none at all, of any description, from her.”

Women like Joan are largely lost to history , with records proving they existed at best. But Steggle’s findings have turned the tides in this particular case: Joan’s risky dedication to her faith survives hundreds of years later alongside her brother’s plays.

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March 21, 2024

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Shakespeare's sister: Digital archives reveal hidden insights into world-famous playwright's unknown sibling

by University of Bristol

By analyzing digital copies of an incredibly rare and obscure 17th-century Italian religious text, a University of Bristol academic has revealed that a long-lost document previously thought to have been written by William Shakespeare's father belongs, in fact, to his relatively unknown sister Joan.

The document, a religious tract in which the writer pledges to die a good Catholic death, written at a point in English history when Catholicism was strongly disapproved of, was found by a bricklayer hidden in the rafters of the Shakespeare House in Stratford-upon-Avon around 1770.

It was seen and described by two early Shakespeare experts and then lost. Both thought it must have belonged to Shakespeare's father, John, who died in 1601, which would imply that he was a zealous secret Catholic in an Elizabethan world of priest holes where people risked torture for their faith. Subsequent scholars thought it was a forgery designed to give the impression of being a document from John's lifetime.

In fact, the document is actually a translation of an Italian text, "The Last Will and Testament of the Soul," and Professor Matthew Steggle, from the University's Department of English, used Google Books and other internet archives to track down early editions of that text in Italian and six other languages, many of which editions survive only in a single copy and are scattered across the libraries of Europe.

This proved that it was from several years after John Shakespeare died and that the author of the manuscript was, in fact, the only other possible J Shakespeare—Joan—who lived from 1569 to 1646.

She was five years younger than her brother William and, in the later years of his life, his only significant living relative other than his wife and daughters. She lived in Stratford-upon-Avon all her life and is thought to have married a penniless tradesman. She had four children and outlived both her husband and her famous sibling by 30 years, living quietly in part of the old Shakespeare family house.

Professor Steggle said, "Even 30 years ago, a researcher approaching a problem like this would have been based in a single big research library, using printed catalogs and even card catalogs to try to find copies of this text. But research libraries have now made many of their resources available digitally so that it is possible to look across many different libraries in different countries at once, and what's more, you can look through the whole text, not just at the title and other details."

"There are only seven surviving documents from Joan's lifetime that even mention her by name. Virginia Woolf wrote a famous essay, 'Shakespeare's sister', about how a figure like her could never hope to be a writer or have her writing preserved, so she has become something of a symbol for all the lost voices of early modern women. There are hundreds of thousands of words surviving from her brother, and until now none at all, of any description, from her."

Quotes from the document include:

"I, [Joan] Shakespeare, do protest that I will willingly accept of death in whatsoever manner it may befall me, conforming my will unto the will of God; accepting of the same in satisfaction for my sins and giving thanks unto his divine majesty for the life he hath bestowed upon me."

"I, [Joan] Shakespeare, do here protest that I do render infinite thanks to his divine majesty for all the benefits that I have received as well secret as manifest… but above all for his so great expectation of me to penance, when he might most justly have taken me out of this life when I least thought of it, yea even then when I was plunged in the dirty puddle of my sins."

"I, [Joan] Shakespeare, do protest that I am willing, yea I do infinitely desire and humbly crave, that of this my last will and testament, the glorious and ever Virgin Mary, mother of God, refuge and advocate of sinners, whom I honor specially above all other saints, may be the chief Executrix together with these other saints my patrons, Saint Winifred, all whom I invoke and beseech to be present at the hour of my death that she and they may comfort me with their desired presence and crave of sweet Jesus that he will receive my soul into peace."

St Winifred, claimed as a patron saint in this passage, was a seventh-century Welsh princess who survived being beheaded by a disgruntled suitor and went on to found a nunnery. Winifred, whose story was all about repelling unwanted sexual advances by men, was particularly venerated by women, and this is another sign that the document belongs to Joan.

Pledges of this nature were about taking control of your own death, making a statement about final beliefs before the approach of death impairs any mental capacity. The Joan Shakespeare document is the only known British example, and there are only a handful known from the Continent.

The research, published in the journal Shakespeare Quarterly , is part of Professor Steggle's work on a biography of Shakespeare.

Provided by University of Bristol

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The Problem of Shakespeare’s Sister: Virginia Woolf on Gender in Creative Culture

By maria popova.

In a passage from the 1929 classic A Room of One’s Own ( public library ), Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) presents a pause-giving thought experiment: What if Shakespeare had had a sister — that is, a female sibling of comparable talent and identical family background? It’s a question that applies as much to women in the arts and humanities as it does to women in science — for Galileo’s sister wouldn’t have fared any differently than Shakespeare’s — and one that, despite half a millennium of tremendous progress, addresses some of the most elemental forces animating modern society and shaping our lives to this day.

Woolf writes:

Any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty. No girl could have walked to London and stood at a stage door and forced her way into the presence of actor-managers without doing herself a violence and suffering an anguish which may have been irrational — for chastity may be a fetish invented by certain societies for unknown reasons — but were none the less inevitable. Chastity had then, it has even now, a religious importance in a woman’s life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest. To have lived a free life in London in the sixteenth century would have meant for a woman who was poet and playwright a nervous stress and dilemma which might well have killed her. Had she survived, whatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination.

Gazing at the bookshelf empty of works by women from that period, and turning an eye toward George Eliot and George Sand , Woolf argues that even if such a rare woman had somehow bulldozed through the era’s barriers to female self-actualization, she would have likely gone anonymous or written under a male pseudonym in a culture where “publicity in women is detestable.” (In many ways, we still subscribe to the same limiting mythologies today.)

Woolf considers the effects of these social structures on the creative spirit:

That woman, then, who was born with a gift of poetry in the sixteenth century, was an unhappy woman, a woman at strife against herself. 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. But what is the state of mind that is most propitious to the act of creation, I asked? Can one come by any notion of the state that furthers and makes possible that strange activity? […] One gathers from this enormous modern literature of confession and self-analysis that to write a work of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty. Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from the writer’s mind whole and entire. Generally material circumstances are against it. Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down. Further, accentuating all these difficulties and making them harder to bear is the world’s notorious indifference. It does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them. It does not care whether Flaubert finds the right word or whether Carlyle scrupulously verifies this or that fact. Naturally, it will not pay for what it does not want. And so the writer, Keats, Flaubert, Carlyle, suffers, especially in the creative years of youth, every form of distraction and discouragement. A curse, a cry of agony, rises from those books of analysis and confession. ‘Mighty poets in their misery dead’ — that is the burden of their song. If anything comes through in spite of all this, it is a miracle, and probably no book is born entire and uncrippled as it was conceived. But for women, I thought, looking at the empty shelves, these difficulties were infinitely more formidable. In the first place, to have a room of her own, let alone a quiet room or a sound-proof room, was out of the question, unless her parents were exceptionally rich or very noble, even up to the beginning of the nineteenth century. […] Such material difficulties were formidable; but much worse were the immaterial. The indifference of the world which Keats and Flaubert and other men of genius have found so hard to bear was in her case not indifference but hostility. The world did not say to her as it said to them, Write if you choose; it makes no difference to me . The world said with a guffaw, Write? What’s the good of your writing? Here [psychologists] might come to our help, I thought, looking again at the blank spaces on the shelves. For surely it is time that the effect of discouragement upon the mind of the artist should be measured, as I have seen a dairy company measure the effect of ordinary milk and Grade A milk upon the body of the rat. They set two rats in cages side by side, and of the two one was furtive, timid and small, and the other was glossy, bold and big. Now what food do we feed women as artists upon?

Feast upon A Room of One’s Own — which also contains Woolf’s enduring insight into the creative advantages of the androgynous mind — and complement it with Woolf on the shock-receiving capacity necessary for being an artist , the elasticity of time , how to read a book , the creative benefits of keeping a diary , and the only surviving recording of her voice .

— Published December 29, 2015 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/12/29/virginia-woolf-a-room-of-ones-own-shakespeare-sister/ —

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Focusing on Virginia Woolf and the Blooomsbury Group

Give a listen to masterful reading of virginia woolf’s “shakespeare’s sister”.

Thursday 11 May 2017 by Paula Maggio

Woolf’s speech is one of several featured in the digital project “ Figures of Speech ,” presented by the Almeida Theatre in London.

The project places history’s greatest speeches centre stage through a series of films read by well-known actors speaking the words of important historical figures and moments, to explore how they resonate in 2017.

Besides Woolf’s speech, the project also includes talks by:

• Labour Party Politician Neil Kinnock spoken by Ashley Walters
• American politician Harvey Milk spoken by Ian McKellen
• Nelson Mandela spoken by Lucian Msamati
• AIDS activist Elizabeth Glaser spoken by Nicola Walker

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Shakespeare’s Sisters by Ramie Targoff review – four women who wrote the Renaissance

This lively, accessible insight into a quartet of female writers in Elizabethan and Jacobean England explores the complex political, patriarchal and religious backdrop to their lives

V irginia Woolf, in her seminal essay A Room of One’s Own , famously asserted that any hypothetical sister of William Shakespeare would have had her literary gifts thwarted from the outset, thanks to the restrictions on women’s education in the Elizabethan age, not to mention the burdens of motherhood and domestic drudgery.

In the last few decades, the field of feminist literary and historical studies has vastly expanded, holding up to the light those female writers who, despite Woolf’s dismissal, did exist and create in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Ramie Targoff, professor of English at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, sets out to examine the life and work of four of the most prominent in Shakespeare’s Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote the Renaissance . One is the prolific diarist Anne Clifford, who was certainly known to Woolf because her lover, Vita Sackville-West – a direct descendant of Clifford – had published Anne’s early diaries. Where Woolf regarded Anne as “practical and little educated”, “busied with all the cares of wealth and property”, Sackville-West praised her “sharp, vigorous mind”. In Targoff’s account, Anne – who lived to be 86 – emerges as determined and independent minded, her writing offering a vivid account of her personal battle to assert her rights after she was disinherited from her father’s estate.

Targoff’s other three subjects are equally fascinating. There’s Mary Sidney, sister of the poet Sir Philip and later Countess of Pembroke, whose translations of the Psalms were praised by her male contemporaries, including John Donne; Aemilia Lanyer, daughter of an Italian (possibly Jewish) immigrant musician, whose name may be more familiar since Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s 2018 hit play Emilia brought her to a new audience; and Elizabeth Cary, a child prodigy who went on to become the author of the first published play by a woman in English, despite having 11 children. These women and their writings are not unknown, but to see their individual and occasionally interwoven stories set out side by side is to understand with greater clarity that, while Woolf was not wrong about the obstacles faced by female writers, she was mistaken about the quality and reception of their work.

Most striking in Targoff’s account is the way the women had to accommodate a world of male expectations and bend their way around it in order to make their voices heard. Mary Sidney used her famous brother as a foil, slipping her own earliest work into print under cover of his name. When Elizabeth Cary was newly married and her husband, Henry, went abroad to fight in the Netherlands, Elizabeth’s mother had someone else write to Henry on his wife’s behalf, lest the evidence of Elizabeth’s ferocious intelligence put him off; Elizabeth’s play, The Tragedy of Mariam , was published with only her initials on the title page, to conceal her identity.

Anne Clifford, only surviving child of the Earl of Cumberland, spent four decades in legal action to recover the estates that her father had bequeathed to his brother and his male heirs, in what Targoff calls “one of the most impressive challenges to patriarchy that England had ever seen”. Though her diaries were not intended for publication, her interest in recording her inner landscape as well as the more ordinary events of her days (“I ate so much cheese that it made me sick”) results in an extraordinarily rich picture of early Jacobean life. When Anne and her husband, the Earl of Dorset, are summoned to see the king about her lawsuit, she declares: “Now I had a new part to play upon the stage of this world.” Only Aemilia published under her own name in her lifetime: “this daughter of an immigrant father and a mother unable to sign her name made English history by becoming the first woman in the 17th century to publish a book of original poetry”.

Unlike Mary Sidney’s work, however, there is no record of how Aemilia’s book, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum , was received by contemporary writers, and after the first two printings it was not reissued for 360 years. Even then, she was mistakenly identified as Shakespeare’s lover by the academic AL Rowse, who published a volume of her poetry in 1978 titled The Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady , her name obscured and subsumed by a more famous man.

Targoff’s style is lively and accessible; assuming a curious general reader, she offers a succinct overview of the complex political and religious backdrop to these women’s lives. In a personal epilogue, she notes that “it’s rare for anyone without a specialised degree to have heard of any of the women in this book”. Shakespeare’s Sisters is a valuable addition to our understanding not only of women’s writing at the turn of the 17th century, but of their lives. As Targoff concludes: “the more of these voices we can uncover, the richer our own history becomes”.

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Shakespeare's sisters: women who wrote the Renaissance

Posted 12 Mar 2024, by Ramie Targoff

I was a student at Yale University in the late 1980s when I fell in love with Renaissance literature. In a course entitled 'Major English Poets', I was introduced to Edmund Spenser, John Donne and John Milton.

John Donne (1573–1631), Aged 49 c.1622

British School

I studied Shakespeare in large lecture halls and in small seminars; I read lots of sonnets. But when I graduated with a BA in English, I had never read a word written by a woman before the nineteenth century. Nor did I imagine there were things to be read. I took Virginia Woolf at her word when she told me in A Room of One's Own that no woman could have ever made it as a writer in Shakespeare's England.

Virginia Woolf 1902

George Charles Beresford (1864–1938)

Six years as an English graduate student only confirmed this impression. There, I plunged into classes on Renaissance theatre, and learned about the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation and the witchcraft craze.

Macbeth, Banquo and the Witches (from William Shakespeare's 'Macbeth', Act I, Scene iii) 1793–1794

Henry Fuseli (1741–1825)

I read sermons, political treatises, prayer books and travel narratives. But when I received my PhD in 1996, I still hadn't encountered a single woman writer from the Renaissance.

Part of this was my own fault. I never asked any of my professors whether any women might be included in their exclusively male syllabi. But until the 1990s, most Renaissance women writers were unpublished, out of print or appeared in books that obscured their authorship.

Probably Elizabeth Cary, née Tanfield c.1614–1618

William Larkin (c.1585–1619)

Elizabeth Cary's 1613 Tragedy of Mariam hadn't been reissued outside of a scholarly facsimile in 1913; Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus first surfaced after more than 300 years under the misleading title The Poems of Shakespeare's Dark Lady; Mary Sidney's Psalms were published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries under her brother's name or with her name subordinated to his.

Anne Clifford's early diaries came out in Sackville-West's 1923 edition, but her other autobiographical writings were unavailable.

Anne, Countess of Pembroke (Lady Anne Clifford) c.1650

Peter Lely (1618–1680) (after)

And then everything changed. Thanks to the amazing work of feminist scholars and editors in the last few decades, Renaissance women writers have been resurrected from the dead. A full edition of The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford was first printed in 1990 and the Great Books of Record in 2015; a critical edition of Aemilia's Salve Deus in 1993; Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam and her daughters' memoir of her life in 1994; and The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke in 1998. Scholarly essays and books on these women and their contemporaries began to appear. A new field was born. But unless you found yourself at a university where someone was doing this work, it was entirely possible to hear nothing about it.

Mary Sidney (1561–1621), Countess of Pembroke

Federico Zuccaro (c.1540/1541–1609) (attributed to)

Today, the situation has, in many ways, changed again. There are anthologies of women's writing that include materials far beyond poems and plays, giving readers access to letters, prayers, pamphlets, diaries, domestic treatises and all sorts of occasional writing by women whose names we'd never heard before. In the classroom, these women now frequently show up in syllabi otherwise dedicated to works by men. The situation has certainly improved from my time at Yale 35 years ago.

And yet. When a young friend of mine studying tragedy at Cambridge University in 2021 asked if she could write about Elizabeth Cary's play, her professor told her he'd never heard of it. To his credit, he gave her permission – and maybe next time he'll even include The Tragedy of Mariam in his course – but the anecdote is by no means unusual. Many scholars working in the field still never teach anything written by Renaissance women. In the larger public, few have heard of many of the women in this story, and therefore – and possibly more importantly – it's also rare for them to know anything about what it was like to be a woman in Shakespeare's England.

Portrait of a Lady, Called Elizabeth, Lady Tanfield 1615

It's important to affirm that these women absolutely stand up to their male counterparts. One of the questions I'm frequently asked, when I talk about these writers is, are they any good? Putting aside the offensiveness of the question, with its underlying assumption that the canon has done its work and kept out the lesser talents, it's important to affirm that they are indeed 'good' by literary standards: Aemilia Lanyer and Mary Sidney are brilliant poets, Elizabeth Cary is a first-rate playwright and Anne Clifford is one of the great diarists of the era.

Shakespeare's Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote the Renaissance

Ramie Targoff (2024)

And the list by no means stops here. I've chosen these four women to anchor my book Shakespeare's Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote the Renaissance, but there are many more who deserve our attention. During Mary Sidney's childhood, Isabella Whitney, a woman who worked for a while as a servant and described herself as 'whole in body and in mind, but very weak in purse', published a book of love poems and a second collection of verse and prose in 1573.

Whitney's contemporary Anne Vaughan Lock was a religious writer in the mid-sixteenth century: a passionate Protestant who fled to Geneva to escape from the Catholic Mary I.

Mary I (1516–1558) (Mary Tudor)

Antonis Mor (1512–1516–c.1576) (after)

Lock translated Calvin's sermons into English and wrote a paraphrase of Psalm 51 in the form of 21 sonnets, both published anonymously in 1560. Four hundred years later, she was identified as the author.

John Calvin (1509–1564)

Enoch Seeman the younger (c.1694–1745)

In the generation of Elizabeth Cary and Anne Clifford came Mary Sidney's niece Lady Mary Wroth, who followed in her aunt's path. Wroth's Countess of Montgomery's Urania, published in 1621, was the first prose romance published by an Englishwoman. This complex tale involved characters who were only loosely disguised from Wroth's contemporaries, creating a court scandal which led Wroth to claim she never intended for the book to be published. Appended to the Urania was Wroth's collection of 103 sonnets and songs, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus . For the first time in English literary history, a woman took on the celebrated form of the sonnet – but reversed the gender roles so that now a female poet was describing her unrequited love for her male beloved, not vice versa.

The title page of Lady Mary Wroth's 'The Countess of Montgomery's Urania'

1621, illustration by Simon van de Pass (1595–1647)

If we cast our gaze a bit later, two significant women writers stand out. Margaret Lucas Cavendish, a passionate intellectual who published no fewer than 14 books between 1653 and 1668 – ranging in genres from natural philosophy and satire to poetry, plays and romance – became famous for her work of science fiction, The Blazing World . The story focuses on the intergalactic adventures of a shipwrecked woman who becomes the empress of her new land.

Aphra Behn c.1670

Peter Lely (1618–1680)

A decade or so after Cavendish's works appeared in print, the first truly professional woman writer came onto the scene. Born around 1640 to a wet nurse and a barber, Aphra Behn lived for a while in the Dutch colony of Surinam before becoming a spy for Charles II in Antwerp. Due to her inadequate pay – she may even have served time in a debtor's prison – Behn took up her pen to earn her living through writing.

Starting in 1670 she wrote no fewer than 19 plays which were performed on the London stage. Behn's best-known work was her novel, Oroonoko, which tells the story of an African prince who was abducted and sold into slavery. Drawing upon Behn's own experiences in the colony, the novel took what was considered a radical abolitionist stance.

Frances d'Arblay ('Fanny Burney') c.1784–1785

Edward Francis Burney (1760–1848)

It's tempting to imagine what it would have been like if Behn or any of the other extraordinary women who followed in her wake – Fanny Burney, Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Wollstonecraft, to name a few – had had easy access to the works of their Renaissance sisters. Generations of women writers who came after them couldn't access their work; they were forced instead to turn inward for inspiration without models to emulate and surpass. But we can access them. We can hear their words and learn their lessons, and the more of these voices we can uncover, the richer our own history becomes.

The future of the past is full of women.

Ramie Targoff, author

Ramie's book Shakespeare's Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote the Renaissance is published by riverrun

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A Summary and Analysis of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

A Room of One’s Own is Virginia Woolf’s best-known work of non-fiction. Although she would write numerous other essays, including a little-known sequel to A Room of One’s Own , it is this 1929 essay – originally delivered as several lectures at the University of Cambridge – which remains Woolf’s most famous statement about the relationship between gender and writing.

Is A Room of One’s Own a ‘feminist manifesto’ or a work of literary criticism? In a sense, it’s a bit of both, as we will see. Before we offer an analysis of Woolf’s argument, however, it might be worth breaking down what her argument actually is . You can read the essay in full here .

A Room of One’s Own : summary

Woolf’s essay is split into six chapters. She begins by making what she describes as a ‘minor point’, which explains the title of her essay: ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’ She goes on to specify that an inheritance of five hundred pounds a year – which would give a woman financial independence – is more important than women getting the vote (women had only attained completely equal suffrage to men in 1928, the same year that Woolf delivered her lectures).

Woolf adopts a fictional persona named ‘Mary Beton’, and addresses her audience (and readers) using this identity. This name has its roots in an old Scottish ballad usually known as either ‘Mary Hamilton’ or ‘The Four Marys’ and concerns Mary Hamilton, a lady-in-waiting to a Queen of Scotland. Mary falls pregnant by the King, but kills the baby and is later sentenced to be executed for her crime. ‘Mary Beton’ is one of the other three Marys in the ballad.

Woolf considers the ways in which women have been shut out from social and political institutions throughout history, illustrating her argument by observing that she, as a woman, would not be able to gain access to a manuscript kept within an all-male college at ‘Oxbridge’ (a rhetorical hybrid of Oxford and Cambridge; Woolf originally delivered A Room of One’s Own to the students of one of the colleges for women which had recently been founded at Cambridge, but these female students were still forbidden to go to certain spaces within all-male colleges at the university).

Next, Woolf turns her attention to what men have said about women in writing, and gets the distinct impression that men – who have a vested interest in retaining the upper hand when it comes to literature and education – portray women in certain ways in order to keep them as, effectively, second-class citizens.

Woolf’s next move is to consider what women themselves have written. It is at this point in A Room of One’s Own that Woolf invents a (fictional) sister to Shakespeare, whom Woolf (perhaps recalling the name of Shakespeare’s own daughter) calls ‘Judith Shakespeare’. (Incidentally, Woolf’s invention of ‘Shakespeare’s sister’ inspired a song by The Smiths of that name and the name of a female pop duo .)

Woolf invites us to imagine that this imaginary sister of William Shakespeare was born with the same genius, the same potential to become a great writer as her brother. But she is shut off from the opportunities her brother enjoys: grammar-school education, the chance to become an actor in London, the opportunity to earn a living in the Elizabethan theatre.

Instead, ‘Judith Shakespeare’ would find the doors to these institutions closed in her face, purely because she was born a woman. Woolf’s point is made in response to people who claim that a woman writer as great as Shakespeare has never been born; this claim misses the important fact that great writers are made as well as born, and few women in Shakespeare’s time enjoyed the opportunities men like Shakespeare had.

Woolf’s ‘Judith’ is seduced by an actor-manager in the London playhouses, she falls pregnant, and takes her own life in poverty and misery.

Woolf then returns to a survey of what women’s writing does exist, considering such authors as Jane Austen and Emily Brontë (both of whom she admires), as well as Aphra Behn, the first professional female author in England, whom Woolf argues should be praised by all women for showing that the professional woman writer could become a reality.

Behn, writing in the seventeenth century, was an important breakthrough for all women ‘for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.’ Earlier women writers were too constrained by their insecurity – as women writing in a male-dominated literary world – and this leads to a ‘flaw’ in their work.

But nineteenth-century novelists like Austen and George Eliot were ‘trained’ in social observation, and this enabled them to write novels about the world she knew:

Jane Austen hid her manuscripts or covered them with a piece of blotting-paper. Then, again, all the literary training that a woman had in the early nineteenth century was training in the observation of character, in the analysis of emotion. Her sensibility had been educated for centuries by the influences of the common sitting-room. People’s feelings were impressed on her; personal relations were always before her eyes. Therefore, when the middle-class woman took to writing, she naturally wrote novels.

But even this led to limitations: Emily Brontë’s genius was better-suited to poetic plays than to novels, while George Eliot would have made full use of her talents as a biographer and historian rather than as a novelist. So even here, women had to bend their talents into a socially acceptable form, and at the time this meant writing novels.

Woolf contrasts these nineteenth-century women novelists with women novelists of today (i.e., the 1920s). She discusses a recent novel, Life’s Adventure by Mary Carmichael. (Both the novel and the writer are fictional, invented by Woolf for the purpose of her argument.) In this novel, she finds some quietly revolutionary details, including the depiction of friendship between women , where novels had previously viewed women only in relation to men (e.g., as wives, daughters, friends, or mothers).

Woolf concludes by arguing that in fact, the ideal writer should be neither narrowly ‘male’ or ‘female’ but instead should strive to be emotionally and psychologically androgynous in their approach to gender. In other words, writers should write with an understanding of both masculinity and femininity, rather than writing ‘merely’ as a woman or as a man. This will allow writers to encompass the full range of human emotion and experience.

A Room of One’s Own : analysis

Woolf’s essay, although a work of non-fiction, shows the same creative flair we find in her fiction: her adoption of the Mary Beton persona, her beginning her essay mid-flow with the word ‘But’, and her imaginative weaving of anecdote and narrative into her ‘argument’ all, in one sense, enact the two-sided or ‘androgynous’ approach to writing which, she concludes, all authors should strive for.

A Room of One’s Own is both rational, linear argument and meandering storytelling; both deadly serious and whimsically funny; both radically provocative and, in some respects, quietly conservative.

Throughout, Woolf pays particular attention to not just the social constraints on women’s lives but the material ones. This is why the line which provides her essay with its title – ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’ – is central to her thesis.

‘Judith Shakespeare’, William Shakespeare’s imagined sister, would never have become a great writer because the financial arrangements for women were not focused on educating them so that they could become breadwinners for their families, but on preparing them for marriage and motherhood. Their lives were structured around marriage as the most important economic and material event in their lives, for it was by becoming a man’s wife that a woman would attain financial security.

Such a woman, at least until the late nineteenth century when the Married Women’s Property Act came into English law, would usually have neither ‘a room of her own’ (because the rooms in which she would spend her time, such as the kitchen, bedroom, and nursery, were designed for domestic activities) nor money (because the wife’s wealth and property would, technically, belong to her husband).

Because of this strong focus on the material limitations on women, which in turn prevent them from gaining the experience, the education, or the means required to become great writers, A Room of One’s Own is often described as a ‘feminist’ work. This label is largely accurate, although it should be noted that Woolf’s opinion about women’s writing diverges somewhat from that of many other feminist writers and critics.

In particular, Woolf’s suggestion that writers should strive to be ‘androgynous’ has attracted criticism from later feminist critics because it denies the idea that ‘women’s writing’ and ‘women’s experience’ are distinct and separate from men’s. If women truly are treated as inferior subjects in a patriarchal society, then surely their experience of that society is markedly different from men’s, and they need what Elaine Showalter called ‘a literature of their own’ as well as a room of their own?

Later feminist thinkers, such as the French theorist Hélène Cixous, have suggested there is a feminine writing ( écriture feminine ) which stands as an alternative to a more ‘masculine’ kind of writing: where male writing is about constructing a reality out of solid, materialist details, feminine writing (and much modernist writing, including Woolf’s fiction, is ‘feminine’ in this way) is about the ‘spiritual’ or psychological aspects of everyday living, the daydreams and gaps, the seemingly ‘unimportant’ moments we experience in our day-to-day lives. It is also more meandering, less teleological or concerned with an end-point (marriage, death, resolution), than traditional male writing.

Given how much of Woolf’s fiction is written in this way and might therefore be described as écriture feminine , one wonders how far her argument in A Room of One’s Own is borne out by her own fiction.

Perhaps the answer lies in the novel Woolf had published shortly before she began writing A Room of One’s Own : her 1928 novel Orlando , in which the heroine changes gender throughout the novel as she journeys through three centuries of history. Indeed, if one wished to analyse one work of fiction by Woolf alongside A Room of One’s Own , Orlando might be the ideal choice.

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Essays on Virginia Woolf

Prompt examples for virginia woolf essays, the stream of consciousness technique.

Explore Virginia Woolf's use of the stream of consciousness narrative technique in her works. How does this literary style enhance the reader's understanding of the characters and their inner thoughts and emotions?

The Role of Women in Woolf's Novels

Analyze the portrayal of women and their roles in Virginia Woolf's novels. How does she challenge traditional gender norms and expectations? Discuss the ways in which her female characters assert themselves and seek independence.

The Bloomsbury Group and Literary Influence

Discuss Virginia Woolf's association with the Bloomsbury Group and its influence on her writing. How did her interactions with other writers and artists shape her literary style and themes?

Depictions of Mental Health

Examine how Virginia Woolf portrays mental health and psychological states in her works, particularly in novels like "Mrs. Dalloway" and "To the Lighthouse." How does she explore the inner workings of the human mind?

The Concept of Time

Explore the theme of time in Woolf's novels. How does she manipulate time, memory, and the passage of years in her narratives? Discuss the significance of time as it relates to the characters and their experiences.

Woolf's Contribution to Modernist Literature

Analyze Virginia Woolf's role in the modernist literary movement. How does she exemplify the characteristics of modernist literature, including experimentation with narrative structure and a focus on individual consciousness?

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Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf: The Superficiality of Social Conventions in Society

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Societal Standards and The Impact of The Individual in Virginia Woolf’s to The Lighthouse and The Waves

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Symbolism Exploited in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

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January 25, 1882, Kensington

March 28, 1941, Lewes, United Kingdom

Novelist, Essayist, Publisher, Critic

• Mrs Dalloway (1925)
• To the Lighthouse (1927)
• Orlando (1928)
• A Room of One's Own (1929)
• The Waves (1931)
• "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
• "As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world."
• "One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well."

25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941

Virginia Woolf was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.

Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), A Room of One's Own (1929), The Waves (1931)

Before the Second World War and long before the second wave of feminism, Virginia Woolf argued that women's experience, particularly in the women's movement, could be the basis for transformative social change. Woolf has become an iconic feminist in both pop culture and academic circles.

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) is recognised as one of the most innovative writers of the 20th century. She was best known for her novels, especially Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). She also wrote pioneering essays on artistic theory, literary history, women’s writing, and the politics of power.

“Books are the mirrors of the soul.” “Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?” “If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”

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A Remarkable Discovery of a Document Shatters One of William Shakespeare's Biggest Mysteries

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This story is a collaboration with PopularMechanics.com .

In the annals of William Shakespeare ’s legacy, a twist has emerged that’s practically as dramatic as any of the Bard’s plays: the real “Shakespeare” behind a centuries-old family document has been revealed... and it’s not the man we expected.

In 1757, a bricklayer found a religious document hidden in the rafters of the Shakespeare House in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. Historians have long attributed the document, which was signed, “ J. Shakespeare ,” to William’s father, John.

But a new study in Shakespeare Quarterly, from scholars at the University of Bristol, claims John wasn’t actually the writer of the scrutinized document. Instead, the researchers say it was William’s relatively unknown younger sister, Joan Shakespeare Hart, who is mentioned by name in only seven surviving documents from her lifetime. Study author Matthew Steggle said in a statement :

“ Virginia Woolf wrote a famous essay, Shakespeare’s sister , about how a figure like her could never hope to be a writer or have her writing preserved, so she has become something of a symbol for all the lost voices of early modern women. There are hundreds of thousands of works surviving from her brother, and until now, none at all, of any description, from her.”

In the tucked-away document, which heavily cites an obscure 17 th century Italian religious tract called The Last Will and Testament of the Soul, the writer pledges to die a good Catholic death. If the writer was indeed John Shakespeare , who remained a devout Protestant until his death in 1601, it would have indicated a major shift in his beliefs and suggested a clandestine life during an era when secret allegiance to the Catholic Church in Elizabethan England could have been dangerous. For this reason, many experts have suspected the document to be forged.

But in the new study, Steggle used internet archives to track down early editions of The Last Will and Testament of the Soul in Italian and six other languages and concluded the document could have only been written after John Shakespeare’s death. That left Steggle with just one other “J. Shakespeare:” Joan.

Joan, who was five years younger than William, survived for 30 years after her brother’s death, and long resided in the family home where the document was found.

“Even 30 years ago, a researcher approaching a problem like this would have been based in a single big research library, using printed catalogues and even card catalogues to try to find copies of this text,” Steggle said in the statement. “But research libraries have now made many of their resources available digitally, so that it is possible to look across many different libraries in different countries at once, and what’s more, you can look through the whole text, not just at the title and other details.”

Steggle emphasized the importance of this approach in aligning the document’s quotes with the original timing of the composition of The Last Will and Testament of the Soul. Joan, who outlived her tradesman husband and had four children in the old Shakespeare family house, then had to have been the secret Catholic supporter.

The mystery flourished for centuries, in part, because William Shakespeare himself was a secretive figure, Biography has previously written .

Shakespeare, who lived from 1564 to 1616, left behind no letters, no handwritten manuscripts, few contemporary accounts, and only six signatures, all spelled differently. It seems almost unbelievable to scholars and critics that the country boy from Stratford-upon-Avon who never attended university wrote 37,000 words for his plays and added roughly 300 words to the English vocabulary.

Yet, the scarcity of Shakespeare’s personal artifacts does little to dim the luster of his legacy, which stands in stark contrast to his modest, mysterious origins.

The early years of Shakespeare’s life are murky. He was born to a father, John, who managed a portfolio as a landowner, moneylender, local official, and glover and leather craftsman. Instead of pursuing higher education, Shakespeare’s knowledge was gleaned from life experiences, absorbing wisdom from his dad’s civic engagements and perhaps gaining insights from his son-in-law, who was a doctor.

The idea that Shakespeare kept his London-based professional life separate from his personal life in Stratford-upon-Avon plays into the recent findings regarding his sister, Joan. “This secretive attitude,” Biography has reported, “may have been because much of his family were known Catholic sympathizers and chose to live quietly in Protestant Elizabethan England. In fact, some believe Shakespeare himself received Catholic communion on his death bed.”

Shakespeare wasn’t known to be loud and boisterous; instead, he carried an air of mystery, relishing the relative anonymity provided by Stratford life. Following his marriage to Anne Hathaway and the birth of their children, there’s a seven-year gap in his historical record. These are known as the “lost years.”

Speculation about William Shakespeare’s “lost years” varies widely; some suggest he may have been in hiding due to accusations of poaching, while more substantiated theories propose he was making a living as an actor and playwright in London. But despite this period of obscurity, Shakespeare’s reputation flourished through his poetry, sonnets, and plays.

As a prominent member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a renowned London acting company, Shakespeare invested in his craft, and his financial success allowed him to buy New Place, one of the largest houses in Stratford-upon-Avon. Shakespeare’s theatrical endeavors didn’t stop there; in collaboration with fellow actors, he started the iconic Globe Theater, which became synonymous with his celebrated playwriting and solidified his legacy.

As Shakespeare grew his name in London’s theaters, he simultaneously established himself as a prominent figure in his hometown of Stratford. Acquiring the family estate in 1601 and subsequently purchasing 107 acres the following year, he strategically invested in additional properties. Experts suggest that the income from leasing these lands gave him the financial stability to pursue his writing.

Meanwhile, Joan resided in the Shakespeare family home amidst speculation and secrets. And its rafters served as a vault for her Italian-inspired religious writings—a hidden gem that’s still sparking scholarly intrigue, and revealing new layers to the Shakespeare legacy today.

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Maureen Dowd

Donald Trump’s Insatiable Bloodlust

By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist, writing from Washington.

An earthquake. An eclipse. A bridge collapse. A freak blizzard. A biblical flood. Donald Trump leading in battleground states.

Apocalyptic vibes are stirred by Trump’s violent rhetoric and talk of blood baths.

If he’s not elected, he bellowed in Ohio, there will be a blood bath in the auto industry. At his Michigan rally on Tuesday, he said there would be a blood bath at the border, speaking from a lectern with a banner reading, “Stop Biden’s border blood bath.” He has warned that, without him in the Oval, there will be an “Oppenheimer”-like doomsday; we will lose World War III, and America will be devastated by “weapons the likes of which nobody has ever seen before.”

“And the only thing standing between you and its obliteration is me,” Trump has said.

An unspoken Trump threat is that there will be a blood bath again in Washington, like Jan. 6, if he doesn’t win.

That is why he calls the criminals who stormed the Capitol “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots.” He starts some rallies with a dystopian remix of the national anthem, sung by the “J6 Prison Choir,” and his own reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance.

The bloody-minded Trump luxuriates in the language of tyrants.

In “Macbeth,” Shakespeare uses blood imagery to chart the creation of a tyrant. Those words echo in Washington as Ralph Fiennes stars in a thrilling Simon Godwin production of “Macbeth” for the Shakespeare Theater Company, opening Tuesday.

“The raw power grab that excites Lady Macbeth and incites her husband to regicide feels especially pertinent now, when the dangers of autocracy loom over political discussions,” Peter Marks wrote in The Washington Post about the production with Fiennes and Indira Varma (the lead Sand Snake in “Game of Thrones”).

Trump’s raw power grab after his 2020 loss might have failed, but he’s inflaming his base with language straight out of Macbeth’s trip to hell.

“Blood will have blood,” as Macbeth says. One of the witches, the weird sisters, urges him, “Be bloody, bold and resolute.”

Another weird sister, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is predicting end times. “God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent,” she tweeted on Friday. “Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come. I pray that our country listens.”

Like Macbeth, Trump crossed a line and won’t turn back. The Irish say, “You may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.” Macbeth killed his king, then said: “I am in blood. Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey reported that since Trump put his daughter-in-law in charge of the Republican National Committee, prospective employees are asked if they think the election was stolen. Republicans once burbled on about patriotism and defending America. Now denying democracy is a litmus test for employment in the Formerly Grand Old Party.

My Irish immigrant father lived through the cruel “No Irish need apply” era. I’m distraught that our mosaic may shatter.

But Trump embraces Hitleresque phrases to stir racial hatred. He has talked about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country.” Last month he called migrants “animals,” saying, “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases. They’re not people, in my opinion.”

Trump’s obsession with bloodlines was instilled by his father, the son of a German immigrant. He thinks there is good blood and bad blood, superior blood and inferior blood. Fred Trump taught his son that their family’s success was genetic, reminiscent of Hitler’s creepy faith in eugenics.

“The family subscribes to a racehorse theory of human development,” the Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio told PBS. “They believe that there are superior people and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring.”

Trump has been talking about this as far back as an “Oprah” show in 1988. The “gene believer” brought it up in a 2020 speech in Minnesota denouncing refugees.

“A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe?” he told the crowd about their pioneer lineage, adding: “The racehorse theory, you think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”

As Stephen Greenblatt writes in “Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics,” usurpers don’t ascend to the throne without complicity. Republican enablers do all they can to cozy up to their would-be dictator, even introducing a bill to rename Dulles Airport for Trump. Democrats responded by introducing a bill to name a prison in Florida for Trump.

“Why, in some circumstances, does evidence of mendacity, crudeness or cruelty serve not as a fatal disadvantage but as an allure, attracting ardent followers?” Greenblatt asked. “Why do otherwise proud and self-respecting people submit to the sheer effrontery of the tyrant, his sense that he can get away with saying and doing anything he likes, his spectacular indecency?”

Like Macbeth’s castle, the Trump campaign has, as Lady Macbeth put it, “the smell of blood,” and “all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten” it.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Maureen Dowd is an Opinion columnist for The Times. She won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary. @ MaureenDowd • Facebook