Shakespeare’s Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance – a review
By Lynne Weiss | On August 8, 2024 | Comments (0)
Ramie Targoff begins Shakespeare’s Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance (Knopf, 2024), her fascinating exploration of four female writers of the English Renaissance, not with a reference to a 16th-century woman, but to Virginia Woolf.
The title of Targoff’s book comes from Woolf’s assertion that if Shakespeare had had a sister, whom she names Judith Shakespeare, who shared his talent for writing, she never would have been able to achieve anything like her brother’s success, given the oppressive conditions women faced in sixteenth and seventeenth century England.
In fact, Woolf claims, she would have “gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at … so thwarted and hindered by other people … she must have lost her health and sanity.”
Targoff doesn’t dispute the limitations placed on women in Shakespeare’s England. She recognizes that the vast majority of women were barred from educational opportunities. If married, they were not allowed to own property. Nor could they vote nor hold political office, or become lawyers, doctors, or actors.
Even so, Targoff contends, there were women who managed to write, who were in fact, despite restrictions and obstacles, driven to write, and not just write but to challenge some of the assumptions of the world in which they lived by writing poetry, history, religious texts, and plays.
Four Remarkable Women
Ramie Targoff focuses her book on four of these remarkable women—Mary Sidney, Æmilia Lanyer, Elizabeth Cary, and Anne Clifford—and in doing so, invites readers to see the history of women’s literature with fresh eyes. The work of these women was literally lost for centuries—and as a result it was not discussed, not taught—even in academic programs focusing on this era.
Recognizing the work of these women, Targoff argues, changes our perception of women’s literary history and of the possibilities for women writing today. Unlike others of their time and place, whether through social status or through sheer luck, they succeeded in what was an excellent education for their time. Some even managed to become significant property owners.
Their work is important not simply because they were women and writers, but because they shared their perspective as women, questioning the patriarchal structures that ruled their lives and bringing the lives of women to the forefront. And these women challenged these structures not only through what they wrote, but also in the ways they lived their lives.
The Death and Funeral of Queen Elizabeth I
Targoff begins her account of the literary careers of Sidney, Lanyer, Cary, and Clifford in 1603, with a vivid description of Queen Elizabeth I and the aftermath of her death. Thirteen-year-old Anne Clifford’s mother Margaret was among those who sat up with the Queen’s coffin for several nights during the many weeks it lay in state before burial.
Æmilia Lanyer’s father, a musician in the Queen’s court, marched in Elizabeth’s funeral procession, as did newly married Elizabeth Cary’s father-in-law, Sir Edward Cary, the Master of the Jewel House.
Mary Sidney’s son, the Earl of Pembroke, carried the Great Banner of England hat day. Right behind him, four horses pulled an open chariot that carried the queen’s velvet-draped coffin, a life-size wax-and-wood effigy atop it.
Thus the lives of all four of these women were closely linked to that of the queen. Yet Targoff warns against any assumptions regarding the role of this powerful woman on any sense of entitlement on the part of these four women. She makes it clear that Elizabeth was “both a woman and more than a woman, or not woman at all.” She refused to become a wife or a mother.
She never experienced the lack of power and agency over her body or her property that affected her female subjects. “I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman,” she famously said, “but I have the heart and stomach of a king.”
Nor did she look for ways to identify with the women of her realm: “Thou has willed me,” she wrote in a prayer she published in 1563, “to be not some wretched girl from the meanest rank of the common people who would pass her life miserably in poverty and squalor, but to a kingdom.”
In other words, the concerns of ordinary women were not the concerns of Elizabeth. But Clifford, Lanyer, Cary, and Sidney, though they married and bore children, were like the queen in one important way: like Elizabeth, all were widely read and highly educated.
Interconnected Lives
The lives of these women were interconnected, even beyond their shared proximity to the queen. Mary Sidney’s writing was cited as an inspiration by Æmelia Lanyer; Lanyer served briefly as Anne Clifford’s tutor.
And yet they came from different economic strata of their era: Anne Clifford came from the highest levels of wealth and aristocratic background; Mary Sidney, who was descended from an aristocratic mother and a bureaucrat father, married into another aristocratic family despite her father having to go into debt to cover her dowry.
Æmelia Lanyer was the daughter of a court musician and married the same, but only after becoming pregnant by her lover, one of Queen Elizabeth’s cousins. Elizabeth Carey’s father had no aristocratic connections, yet he accumulated significant wealth through his legal practice.
With the exception of Anne Clifford, all were able to read and write in multiple languages, including French, Latin, and Italian. Clifford was highly educated as well, but her xenophobic father forbade her learning any language other than English.
. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . .
Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke
Mary Sidney (1561– 1621) first took over the work of her brother, a poet, completing and polishing work he had started but had yet to publish at the time of his death.
But she went beyond his work, expanding on his translations of the first 43 Psalms to complete all 150, and thus becoming the first person to translate the Book of Psalms into English at least a decade before publication of the King James Bible in 1611.
Sidney didn’t just translate the Psalms; some refer to her work as paraphrasing, because she added numerous literary elements and perspectives. Rather than supplying a simple literal translation, she included additional lines which reflected at times on the perspective of women.
. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . .
Æmelia Lanyer
Æmelia Bassano Lanyer (1569–1645) is credited with having written the first “country house” poem written in English. A “country house” poem was one written in praise of a house, its inhabitants, and its surroundings—the house she praised was that of the Margaret Clifford, mother of Anne Clifford.
By 1611, the year when the King James Bible first appeared in print, she had become the first woman in the 17th century to publish a book of original poetry, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. Part of Salve Deus is narrated by the wife of Pontius Pilate, who warns her husband that he will be killing the son of God if he allows Christ to be crucified. She then argues that if men crucify their savior, women should be exempt from their patriarchal rule
. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . .
Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland
Elizabeth Cary (1585–1639) was the first woman in England to publish an original play. The Tragedy of Mariam portrays the wife of Herod, falsely accused of infidelity, as a heroic figure. She proclaims her own innocence in a time when wives were barely allowed to speak on their own behalf, much less contradict their husbands.
Elizabeth was never comfortable with the Protestantism of England. After she converted to Catholicism, she was placed on house arrest and driven out of her husband’s household. Unbowed by the punishment for her religious views, she translated a French text, A Reply of the most illustrious Cardinal of Perron to the answer of the King of Great Britain.
. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . .
Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset, Pembroke and Montgomery;
14th Baroness de Clifford
Anne Clifford (1590–1676) was a woman who believed in the importance of her own life and went to the trouble of recording it. Few women of this era kept diaries, and those who did tended to simply list their activities and prayers.
Clifford recorded her thoughts and reactions and engaged in self-reflection, making her the most important female diarist of her time. In 1923, her descendant Vita Sackville-West published her surviving diaries and a 1603 memoir under the title The Diary of Anne Clifford, with a Long Preface.
In 1649, Clifford wrote another memoir, The Life of Me, covering her life from 1590–1649, and she chronicled her family’s history in the Great Books of Record. This collection of over one thousand oversize pages is a history of the Clifford estate and dynasty, including short biographies of each of her ancestors.
She gave special attention to her female forebears, and transcribed numerous charters, royal grants, petitions, deeds, wills, and any other documents that confirmed that women had been the source of much of the property of this extremely wealthy family.
Structure of Shakespeare’s Sisters
Targoff made what seems to me to have been an unusual choice in the structuring of her account of these four women’s and their achievements. Their lifespans overlapped, and Targoff proceeds chronologically cutting back and forth among the women.
This was an intriguing approach but made a confusing read. It wasn’t easy for me, at least, to keep track of which woman I was reading about as we moved from one character to another in each chapter. Targoff could have employed other techniques to help readers keep track of these thematically connected lives.
For example, she includes several pages of Family Charts in the book’s front matter. These would have been far more useful had some dates (even if not exact) had been included. Likewise, a page of timelines of the four women’s lives would have been extremely helpful.
Targoff’s account ends by reflecting on her own experience as a Yale undergraduate and then as a graduate student at Berkeley immersed in Renaissance literature. During her studies, she never read anything written by a woman before 1800 and assumed that Virginia Woolf was right when she said that no woman of Shakespeare’s era could have been a writer.
She takes some responsibility for this: she never asked one of her professors about women writers of this era. Yet she suspects that even if she had raised the issue, she would not have found out about the women in this volume.
. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . .
Feminist Scholarship
What changed? Targoff credits the work of a number of feminist scholars with the increased visibility of these women. She cites in particular Margaret W. Ferguson, Margaret P. Hannay, Jessic L. Malay, Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, Heather Wolfe, and Susanne Woods. I would have liked more details about what exactly these researchers have done.
She mentions that a number of the works produced by these women were finally made available to the general public in the 1990s. These include The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford; Lanyer’s Salve Deus, Carey’s Tragedy of Mariam and her biography, The Lady Falkland, written by her daughters; and The Collected Works of May Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke.
Publication of these works laid the groundwork for further research, and since then, Targoff says, there have been numerous dissertations, anthologies, and scholarly articles about these women and others of their era.
Some of these works are starting to make their way into the occasional syllabus, but Targoff points out that it is still quite possible for a student to graduate with a degree in English without knowing anything about these women or any of the others who wrote in this era.
By extension, she says, many of those who study and read about this era of English history and literature know very little about the experiences and perspectives of the women who lived through it.
Access to such information, Targoff argues, has the potential to provide models and inspiration for women writing today. Access to such works, in fact, might have led Virginia Woolf to more fully imagine her Judith Shakespeare and give her greater possibilities than Woolf had previously considered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Contributed by Lynne Weiss: Lynne’s writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review; Brain, Child; The Common OnLine; the Ploughshares blog; the [PANK] blog; Wild Musette; Main Street Rag; and Radcliffe Magazine. She received an MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and has won grants and residency awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Millay Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. She loves history, theater, and literature, and for many years, has earned her living by developing history and social studies materials for educational publishers. She lives outside Boston, where she is working on a novel set in Cornwall and London in the early 1930s. You can see more of her work at LynneWeiss.
Leave a Reply