CityReads│What If Shakespeare Had A Sister?
What If Shakespeare
Had A Sister？
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Virginia Woolf,1929. A room of one's own, Hogarth Press.
Source: http://gutenberg.org
Picture source: http://www.dailynebraskan.com/shakespeare-s-sister-celebrates-women-writers/article_2ca170f3-0e06-5864-a813-40c3644c661c.html
In her classic 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf asks: what if Shakespeare had had a sister?
First edition of A Room of One’s Own
Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882 –March 28, 1941), English novelist and essayist
It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.
No,No,No. This is not because woman doesn’t have a talent to write play.
Let me imagine, since the facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say.
She remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother's perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers. They would have spoken sharply but kindly, for they were substantial people who knew the conditions of life for a woman and loved their daughter - indeed, more likely than not she was the apple of her father's eye.
Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighboring wool-stapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. He would give her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart?
The force of her own gift alone drove her to it. She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer's night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen.
The birds that sang in the hedge were not more musical than she was. She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother's, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager - a fat, loose-lipped man - guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting - no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. He hinted - you can imagine what. She could get no training in her craft. Could she even seek her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight?
At last - for she was very young, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her face, with the same grey eyes and rounded brows - at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so - who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body? - killed herself one winter's night and lies buried at some crossroads.
That, more or less, is how the story would run, I think, if a woman in Shakespeare's day had had Shakespeare's genius.
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.
If you rephrase the question raised earlier to “What if Tang Xianzu had a sister?”, the story would be largely the same. Tang Xianzu was a Chinese playwriter and a contemporarian of Shakespeare. Both died in 1616.
What changed after the 16th century?
In the 17th century, women writers were mostly noble by birth and by marriage. They were married to the best of husbands and childless. They burnt the same passion for poetry but those solitary great ladies wrote without audience or criticism, for their own delight alone.
And with Mrs Behn we turn a very important corner on the road. The middle-class woman began to write in the 18th century.
Mrs Behn was a middle-class woman with all the plebeian virtues of humour, vitality and courage; a woman forced by the death of her husband and some unfortunate adventures of her own to make her living by her wits. She had to work on equal terms with men. She made, by working very hard, enough to live on. The importance of that fact outweighs anything that she actually wrote.
For now that Aphra Behn had done it, girls could go to their parents and say, You need not give me an allowance; I can make money by my pen. Of course the answer for many years to come was, Yes, by living the life of Aphra Behn! Death would be better! and the door was slammed faster than ever.
Writing became not merely a sign of folly and a distracted mind, but was of practical importance. A husband might die, or some disaster overtake the family. Hundreds of women began as the eighteenth century drew on to add to their pin money, or to come to the rescue of their families by making translations or writing the innumerable bad novels
The extreme activity of mind which showed itself in the later eighteenth century among women—the talking, and the meeting, the writing of essays on Shakespeare, the translating of the classics—was founded on the solid fact that women could make money by writing.
All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.
In the early nineteenth century, more and more women wrote and published their works.
Why were they, with very few exceptions, all novels?
What similarities do the four famous women, George Eliot, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen share?
They were all born in middle-class families. The middle-class family in the early nineteenth century was possessed only of a single sitting-room between them. If a woman wrote, she would have to write in the common sitting-room.
Jane Austen wrote like that to the end of her days. She had no separate study to repair to, and most of the work must have been done in the general sitting-room, subject to all kinds of casual interruptions.
Still it would be easier to write prose and fiction there than to write poetry or a play. Less concentration is required.
So, a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction or poem.
What a change of temper a fixed income will bring about. Food, house and clothing are mine forever. Therefore not merely do effort and labor cease, but also hatred and bitterness. I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me.
Second, she must have a room of her own to shelter her from the claims and tyrannies of their families
Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own.