SHAKESPEARE’S SISTERS: How Women Wrote the Renaissance, by Ramie Targoff
Judith Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf’s imaginary sister of the Bard, was for years the accepted portrait of the nonexistent writer of Renaissance England. In “A Room of One’s Own,” her seminal feminist essay, Woolf concluded that any glimmer of female creativity in Shakespeare’s time would have been expunged by a pinched life as a breeding machine of children who so often died, disallowed opinions of her own. Had any woman survived these conditions, wrote Woolf, “whatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed, issued from a strained and morbid imagination.”
Wrong, says the Renaissance scholar Ramie Targoff in “Shakespeare’s Sisters,” her fascinating excavation of four intellectual powerhouse women of the 16th and early 17th centuries. Woolf had just not dug deep enough to find Mary Sidney’s sublime translations, Aemilia Lanyer’s groundbreaking poems or Elizabeth Cary’s subversive dramas. She dismissed the fourth, the great diarist Anne Clifford, as “trivial,” says Targoff — a view not shared by Anne’s distant relative Vita Sackville-West when she discovered and lovingly edited the diaries in 1923.
All Targoff’s subjects — except for the court musician’s daughter, Lanyer — were well-born women. (The female literacy rate in Renaissance England was, by some calculations, below 10 percent outside London — so there is little chance of a hidden masterpiece emerging from the ruins of a pigsty on Pudding Lane.)
But aristocratic life for women with an educated mind offered its own special torture. They had to watch the men of the family leave home for the schooling they were denied and could be married off early to tyrannical dullards — Mary Sidney was only 15 when she was “picked to breed” by a dour 38-year-old widower, the Earl of Pembroke, and to take on the responsibilities as chatelaine of one of England’s grandest stately homes.
Elizabeth Cary’s husband, Sir Henry (with whom she churned out 11 children), was a dead weight on his wife’s soaring talent as a playwright. He forced her to ride, despite her terror of horses. When he left for two years to fight in Protestant wars in the Netherlands, his mother hired someone to write letters to him in Elizabeth’s name in case her husband found her obvious intelligence repellent.
The cruel certainties and caprices of primogeniture were an occupational hazard for aristocratic women. Anne Clifford battled for four bitter decades to reverse her exclusion from her father’s will: In clear breach of an entail, it left the entirety of his vast northern estates to his brother. Defying her husband and even the king, she eventually won and took possession of all five of the family’s crumbling castles. The exhaustive search through records and legal claims that spurred the rich detail of her autobiographical writing was, in truth, a lifelong effort to validate her right to exist.
If Elizabethan noblewomen had looked for a contemporary role model in Queen Elizabeth I, they would have been disappointed. The queen, in her own speech, played her gender as an anomaly. As Targoff points out, Elizabeth had little in common with most women of the era. The “Virgin Queen,” after all, was never forced to submit to a husband who controlled all legal rights over her person and her property, never experienced motherhood or the pain of a child’s loss.
It is as an alpha scholar and writer that Elizabeth I earns a chapter in this study, crafting translations into Latin, French and Italian from the age of 12 and leaving us speeches, letters and verse of dazzling rhetorical skill.
Her anguished poem about a suitor’s departure is a rare revelation of wounded womanhood behind a queen’s frigid mask: “I am and not, I freeze and yet am burned,/Since from myself another self I turned.”
The search for another self dominates the stories of “Shakespeare’s Sisters.” Often, the women began writing, as the queen did, behind the veil of translating the poems and theological treatises of others. The browbeaten wife, Elizabeth Cary, created her vibrant verse play “The Tragedy of Mariam” from a radical hack of an ancient Jewish history by Josephus. She dramatizes King Herod’s obsession with betrayal through the prism of his unjustly accused wife; the ranting king doesn’t even enter until Act IV.
In Mary Sidney’s case, her voice emerged under the influence of her gifted and much more famous elder brother, the courtier/soldier/poet Philip, who used her as an editorial sounding board and dedicated to her his celebrated pastoral romance, “Arcadia.”
With Mary’s help, Philip translated 150 Hebrew psalms before she was inspired to toss off 107 more of her own with 128 different combinations of stanza and meter. “Fear came upon them and sorrow, as upon a woman in travail,” from the original Hebrew version of Psalm 48, is, Targoff shows us in Mary’s version, rendered in the more empathetic voice of a woman who has given birth herself: “So they fear, and so they fare/As the wife,/whose woeful care/the pangs of childbed finds.” The great John Donne was among the psalm’s many admirers.
Aemilia Lanyer received no such plaudits for her own remarkable literary efforts. The woman was so erudite, for God’s sake, that she dreamed in Latin. The closest she got to high society was as the mistress of the Lord Chamberlain, Baron Hunsdon, son of Anne Boleyn’s sister, Mary. (The book is alive with such juicy incidental details. I had never read that Elizabeth I quietly attempted the restoration of her slain mother’s reputation by elevating her extended family at court.)
Hunsdon kicked Aemilia to the curb when she fell pregnant, fobbing her off on a musician as lowly as her own father. Her “Salve Deus,” an incendiary volume of poetry about Christ’s Passion, was dedicated to a long list of society women for whose patronage she angled, unsuccessfully. Its frank feminist cast probably appalled them.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Pontius Pilate’s wife is a pass-through one-liner, but in Aemilia’s poem she’s already a convert to Christ’s teaching who explicitly warns Pilate that the man he’s about to crucify is the son of God. Aemilia imbues the wife of the Roman governor with powerful agency, arguing not only for Christ’s release but for liberation from the yoke of patriarchy. “ Your fault being greater,” she demands, “why should you disdain/Our being your equals, free from tyranny?” Explosively, she calls the sinning Eve “simply good, and had no power to see.” Or as Targoff puts it, Eve was merely “a victim of misinformation.” Wow.
After its two printings in 1611, “Salve Deus” fell out of print for the next 360 years, but we hear its passionate, resounding message clearly today. My heart hurts for Aemilia Lanyer. Targoff’s intent is to scrape away the layer of literary obscurity from Shakespeare’s sisters and present the pentimento as transcendent survivors. Their work indeed lives on. And yet, I was left with the crushing sensation of women who tried to flee but were buried alive.
SHAKESPEARE’S SISTERS: How Women Wrote the Renaissance | By Ramie Targoff | Knopf | 336 pp. | $33
