Shakespeare’s Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance
By Ramie Targoff
Shakespeare’s Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance
By Ramie Targoff
What most readers remember from (Virginia) Woolf’s polemical work (A Room of One’s Own) is her account of Shakespeare’s imaginary sister, Judith. If there had been a Judith Shakespeare endowed with a talent like her brother’s, Woolf warned, she would have met with the darkest of fates. ‘Any woman, she exclaimed, 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. ‘ –Excerpt from the Introduction
This remarkable work about women writers in the English Renaissance explodes our notion of the Shakespearean period, drawing us into the lives of four women who were committed to their craft long before anyone ever imagined the possibility of “a room of one’s own.”
In an innovative and engaging narrative of everyday life in Shakespeare’s England, Ramie Targoff carries us from the sumptuous coronation of Queen Elizabeth in the mid-sixteenth century into the private lives of four women writers working at a time when women were legally the property of men. Some readers may have heard of Mary Sidney, accomplished poet and sister of the famous Sir Philip Sidney, but few will have heard of Aemilia Lanyer, the first woman in the seventeenth century to publish a book of original poetry, which offered a feminist take on the crucifixion, or Elizabeth Cary, who published the first original English play by a woman, about the plight of the ancient Jewish princess Mariam. Then there was Anne Clifford, a lifelong diarist who fought for decades against a patriarchy that tried to rob her of her land in one of England’s most infamous inheritance battles.
These women had husbands and children to care for and little support for their art, yet against all odds they defined themselves as writers, finding rooms of their own where doors had always been shut. Targoff flings those doors open, revealing the treasures left by these extraordinary women; in the process, she helps us see the Renaissance in a fresh light, creating a richer understand of history and offering a much-needed female perspective on life in Shakespeare’s day.
Ramie Targoff is the Jehuda Reinharz Professor of the Humanities, Professor of English, and Co-Chair of Italian Studies at Brandeis University. She holds a B.A. from Yale University and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author, most recently, of Renaissance Woman, a biography of Vittoria Colonna, and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.