If Shakespeare Had a Sister
from A
Room of One's Own (1929)
by Virginia
Woolfe (1882-1941)
It was disappointing not to have brought back in the evening
some important statement, some authentic fact. Women are poorer than men
because--this or that. Perhaps now it would be better to give up seeking for the
truth, and receiving on one's head an avalanche of opinion hot as lava,
discoloured as dish-water. It would be better to draw the curtains; to shut out
distractions; to light the lamp; to narrow the enquiry and to ask the historian,
who records not opinions but facts, to describe under what conditions women
lived, not throughout the ages, but in England, say in the time of Elizabeth.
For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that
extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or
sonnet. What were the conditions in which women lived, I asked myself; for
fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground,
as science may be; fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly
perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is
scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there
complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge,
torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by
incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are
attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we
live in.
I went,
therefore, to the shelf where the histories stand and took down one of the
latest, Professor Trevelyan's History
of England. Once more I looked
up Women, found "position of," and turned to the pages indicated.
"Wife-beating," I read, "was a recognised right of man, and was practised
without shame by high as well as low. . . . Similarly," the historian goes on,
"the daughter who refused to marry the gentleman of her parents' choice was
liable to be locked up, beaten and flung about the room, without any shock being
inflicted on public opinion. Marriage was not an affair of personal affection,
but of family avarice, particularly in the 'chivalrous' upper classes. . . .
Betrothal often took place while one or both of the parties was in the cradle,
and marriage when they were scarcely out of the nurses' charge." That was about
1470, soon after Chaucer's time. The next reference to the position of women is
some two hundred years later, in the time of the Stuarts. "It was still the
exception for women of the upper and middle class to choose their own husbands,
and when the husband had been assigned, he was lord and master, so far at least
as law and custom could make him. Yet even so," Professor Trevelyan concludes,
"neither Shakespeare's women nor those of authentic seventeenth-century memoirs,
like the Verneys and the Hutchinsons, seem wanting in personality and
character." Certainly, if we consider it, Cleopatra must have had a way with
her; Lady Macbeth, one would suppose, had a will of her own; Rosalind, one might
conclude, was an attractive girl. Professor Trevelyan is speaking no more than
the truth when he remarks that Shakespeare's women do not seem wanting in
personality and character. Not being a historian, one might go even further and
say that women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from
the beginning of time-Clytemnestra, Antigone, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Phèdre,
Cressida, Rosalind, Desdemona, the Duchess of Malfi, among the dramatists; then
among the prose writers: Millamant, Clarissa, Becky Sharp, Anna Karenina, Emma
Bovary, Madame de Guermantes--the names flock to mind, nor do they recall women
"lacking in personality and character." Indeed, if woman had no existence save
in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost
importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely
beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even
greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points
out, she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room.
A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she
is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She
pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She
dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the
slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most
inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her
lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the
property of her husband.
It was certainly an odd monster that one made up by reading
the historians first and the poets afterwards--a worm winged like an eagle; the
spirit of life and beauty in a kitchen chopping up suet. But these monsters,
however amusing to the imagination, have no existence in fact. What one must do
to bring her to life was to think poetically and prosaically at one and the same
moment, thus keeping in touch with fact--that she is Mrs. Martin, aged
thirty-six, dressed in blue, wearing a black hat and brown shoes; but not losing
sight of fiction either--that she is a vessel in which all sorts of spirits and
forces are coursing and flashing perpetually. The moment, however, that one
tries this method with the Elizabethan woman, one branch of illumination fails;
one is held up by the scarcity of facts. One knows nothing detailed, nothing
perfectly true and substantial about her. History scarcely mentions her. And I
turned to Professor Trevelyan again to see what history meant to him. I found by
looking at his chapter headings that it meant--
"The Manor Court and the Methods of Open-Field Agriculture . .
. The Cistercians and Sheep-farming . . . The Crusades . . . The University . .
. The House of Commons . . . The Hundred Years' War . . . The Wars of the Roses
. . . The Renaissance Scholars . . . The Dissolution of the Monasteries . . .
Agrarian and Religious Strife . . . The Origin of English Sea-power . . . The
Armada . . ." and so on. Occasionally an individual woman is mentioned, an
Elizabeth, or a Mary; a queen or a great lady. But by no possible means could
middle-class women with nothing but brains and character at their command have
taken part in any one of the great movements which, brought together, constitute
the historian's view of the past. Nor shall we find her in any collection of
anecdotes. Aubrey hardly mentions her. She never writes her own life and
scarcely keeps a diary; there are only a handful of her letters in existence.
She left no plays or poems by which we can judge her. What one wants, I
thought--and why does not some brilliant student at Newnham or Girton supply
it?--is a mass of information; at what age did she marry; how many children had
she as a rule; what was her house like; had she a room to herself; did she do
the cooking; would she be likely to have a servant? All these facts lie
somewhere, presumably, in parish registers and account books; the life of the
average Elizabethan woman must be scattered about somewhere, could one collect
it and make a book of it. It would be ambitious beyond my daring, I thought,
looking about the shelves for books that were not there, to suggest to the
students of those famous colleges that they should re-write history, though I
own that it often seems a little queer as it is, unreal, lop-sided; but why
should they not add a supplement to history? calling it, of
course, by some inconspicuous name so that women might figure there without
impropriety? For one often catches a glimpse of them in the lives of the great,
whisking away into the background, concealing, I sometimes think, a wink, a
laugh, perhaps a tear. And, after all, we have lives enough of Jane Austen; it
scarcely seems necessary to consider again the influence of the tragedies of
Joanna Baillie upon the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe; as for myself, I should not
mind if the homes and haunts of Mary Russell Mitford were closed to the public
for a century at least. But what I find deplorable, I continued, looking about
the bookshelves again, is that nothing is known about women before the
eighteenth century. I have no model in my mind to turn about this way and that.
Here am I asking why women did not write poetry in the Elizabethan age, and I am
not sure how they were educated; whether they were taught to write; whether they
had sitting-rooms to themselves; how many women had children before they were
twenty-one; what, in short, they did from eight in the morning till eight at
night. They had no money evidently; according to Professor Trevelyan they were
married whether they liked it or not before they were out of the nursery, at
fifteen or sixteen very likely. It would have been extremely odd, even upon this
showing, had one of them suddenly written the plays of Shakespeare, I concluded,
and I thought of that old gentleman, who is dead now, but was a bishop, I think,
who declared that it was impossible for any woman, past, present, or to come, to
have the genius of Shakespeare. He wrote to the papers about it. He also told a
lady who applied to him for information that cats do not as a matter of fact go
to heaven, though they have, he added, souls of a sort. How much thinking those
old gentlemen used to save one! How the borders of ignorance shrank back at
their approach! Cats do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the plays of
Shakespeare.
Be that as it may, I could not help thinking, as I looked at
the works of Shakespeare on the shelf, that the bishop was right at least in
this; it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to
have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. Let me imagine,
since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had
a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say. Shakespeare himself
went, very probably--his mother was an heiress--to the grammar school, where he
may have learnt Latin--Ovid, Virgil and Horace--and the elements of grammar and
logic. He was, it is well known, a wild boy who poached rabbits, perhaps shot a
deer, and had, rather sooner than he should have done, to marry a woman in the
neighbourhood, who bore him a child rather quicker than was right. That escapade
sent him to seek his fortune in London. He had, it seemed, a taste for the
theatre; he began by holding horses at the stage door. Very soon he got work in
the theatre, became a successful actor, and lived at the hub of the universe,
meeting everybody, knowing everybody, practising his art on the boards,
exercising his wits in the streets, and even getting access to the palace of the
queen. Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, 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.
Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly, but was careful
to hide them or set fire to them. Soon, however, before she was out of her
teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighbouring 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 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? Yet her genius was for fiction and
lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their
ways. 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 cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and
Castle.
That, more or less, is how the story would run, I think, if a
woman in Shakespeare's day had had Shakespeare's genius. But for my part, I
agree with the deceased bishop, if such he was--it is unthinkable that any woman
in Shakespeare's day should have had Shakespeare's genius. For genius like
Shakespeare's is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people. It was
not born in England among the Saxons and the Britons. It is not born today among
the working classes. How, then, could it have been born among women whose work
began, according to Professor Trevelyan, almost before they were out of the
nursery, who were forced to it by their parents and held to it by all the power
of law and custom? Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must
have existed among the working classes. Now and again an Emily Brontë or a
Robert Burns blazes out and proves its presence. But certainly it never got
itself on to paper. When, however, one read of a witch being ducked, of a woman
possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable
man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a
suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who
dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed
with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess
that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. It
was a woman Edward Fitzgerald, I think, suggested who made the ballads and the
folk-songs, crooning them to her children, beguiling her spinning with them, or
the length of the winter's night.
This may be true or it may be false--who can say?--but what is
true in it, so it seemed to me, reviewing the story of Shakespeare's sister as I
had made it, is that 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. And undoubtedly, I thought,
looking at the shelf where there are no plays by women, her work would have gone
unsigned. That refuge she would have sought certainly. It was the relic of the
sense of chastity that dictated anonymity to women even so late as the
nineteenth century. Currer Bell, George Eliot, George Sand, all the victims of
inner strife as their writings prove, sought ineffectively to veil themselves by
using the name of a man. Thus they did homage to the convention, which if not
implanted by the other sex was liberally encouraged by them (the chief glory of
a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles, himself a much-talked-of man),
that publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire
to be veiled still possesses them. They are not even now as concerned about the
health of their fame as men are, and, speaking generally, will pass a tombstone
or a signpost without feeling an irresistible desire to cut their names on it,
as Alf, Bert or Chas. must do in obedience to their instinct, which murmurs if
it sees a fine woman go by, or even a dog, Ce chien est à moi. And, of course,
it may not be a dog, I thought, remembering Parliament Square, the Sieges Allee
and other avenues; it may be a piece of land or a man with curly black hair. It
is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very
fine negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her.
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? Here I opened the volume
containing the Tragedies of Shakespeare. What was Shakespeare's state of mind,
for instance, when he wrote Lear and Antony
and Cleopatra? It was certainly
the state of mind most favourable to poetry that there has ever existed. But
Shakespeare himself said nothing about it. We only know casually and by chance
that he "never blotted a line." Nothing indeed was ever said by the artist
himself about his state of mind until the eighteenth century perhaps. Rousseau
perhaps began it. At any rate, by the nineteenth century self-consciousness had
developed so far that it was the habit for men of letters to describe their
minds in confessions and autobiographies. Their lives also were written, and
their letters were printed after their deaths. Thus, though we do not know what
Shakespeare went through when he wrote Lear,
we do know what Carlyle went through when he wrote the French
Revolution; what Flaubert went
through when he wrote Madame
Bovary; what Keats was going
through when he tried to write poetry against the coming of death and the
indifference of the world.
And 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. Since her pin money, which depended on
the good will of her father, as only enough to keep her clothed, she was
debarred from such alleviations as came even to Keats or Tennyson or Carlyle,
all poor men, from a walking tour, a little journey to France, from the separate
lodging which, even if it were miserable enough, sheltered them from the claims
and tyrannies of their families. 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 the psychologists of Newnham and
Girton 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? I asked, remembering, I suppose, that dinner of prunes and
custard. To answer that question I had only to open the evening paper and to
read that Lord Birkenhead is of opinion--but really I am not going to trouble to
copy out Lord Birkenhead's opinion upon the writing of women. What Dean Inge
says I will leave in peace. The Harley Street specialist may be allowed to rouse
the echoes of Harley Street with his vociferations without raising a hair on my
head. I will quote, however, Mr. Oscar Browning, because Mr. Oscar Browning was
a great figure in Cambridge at one time, and used to examine the students at
Girton and Newnham. Mr. Oscar Browning was wont to declare "that the impression
left on his mind, after looking over any set of examination papers, was that,
irrespective of the marks he might give, the best woman was intellectually the
inferior of the worst man." After saying that Mr. Browning went back to his
rooms--and it is this sequel that endears him and makes him a human figure of
some bulk and majesty--he went back to his rooms and found a stable-boy lying on
the sofa--"a mere skeleton, his cheeks were cavernous and sallow, his teeth were
black, and he did not appear to have the full use of his limbs. . . . . 'That's
Arthur' [said Mr. Browning). 'He's a dear boy really and most high-minded.'" The
two pictures always seem to me to complete each other. And happily in this age
of biography the two pictures often do complete each other, so that we are able
to interpret the opinions of great men not only by what they say, but by what
they do.
But though this
is possible now, such opinions coming from the lips of important people must
have been formidable enough even fifty years ago. Let us suppose that a father
from the highest motives did not wish his daughter to leave home and become
writer, painter or scholar. "See what Mr. Oscar Browning says," he would say;
and there was not only Mr. Oscar Browning; there was the Saturday
Review; there was Mr. Greg--the
"essentials of a woman's being," said Mr. Greg emphatically, "are that they
are supported by, and they minister to, men"--there
was an enormous body of masculine opinion to the effect that nothing could be
expected of women intellectually. Even if her father did not read out loud these
opinions, any girl could read them for herself; and the reading, even in the
nineteenth century, must have lowered her vitality, and told profoundly upon her
work. There would always have been that assertion--you cannot do this, you are
incapable of doing that--to protest against, to overcome. Probably for a
novelist this germ is no longer of much effect; for there have been women
novelists of merit. But for painters it must still have some sting in it; and
for musicians, I imagine, is even now active and poisonous in the extreme. The
woman composer stands where the actress stood in the time of Shakespeare. Nick
Greene, I thought, remembering the story I had made about Shakespeare's sister,
said that a woman acting put him in mind of a dog dancing. Johnson repeated the
phrase two hundred years later of women preaching. And here, I said, opening a
book about music, we have the very words used again in this year of grace, 1928,
of women who try to write music. "Of Mlle. Germaine Tailleferre one can only
repeat Dr. Johnson's dictum concerning a woman preacher, transposed into terms
of music. 'Sir, a woman's composing is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It
is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.'" So accurately
does history repeat itself.
Thus, I
concluded, shutting Mr. Oscar Browning's life and pushing away the rest, it is
fairly evident that even in the nineteenth century a woman was not encouraged to
be an artist. On the contrary, she was snubbed, slapped, lectured and exhorted.
Her mind must have been strained and her vitality lowered by the need of
opposing this, of disproving that. For here again we come within range of that
very interesting and obscure masculine complex which has had so much influence
upon the woman's movement; that deep-seated desire, not so much that she shall
be inferior as that he shall
be superior, which plants him wherever one looks, not only in front of the arts,
but barring the way to politics too, even when the risk to himself seems
infinitesimal and the suppliant humble and devoted. Even Lady Bessborough, I
remembered, with all her passion for politics, must humbly bow herself and write
to Lord Granville Leveson-Gower: ". . . notwithstanding all my violence in
politics and talking so much on that subject, I perfectly agree with you that no
woman has any business to meddle with that or any other serious business,
farther than giving her opinion (if she is ask'd)." And so she goes on to spend
her enthusiasm where it meets with no obstacle whatsoever upon that immensely
important subject, Lord Granville's maiden speech in the House of Commons. The
spectacle is certainly a strange one, I thought. The history of men's opposition
to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that
emancipation itself. An amusing book might be made of it if some young student
at Girton or Newnham would collect examples and deduce a theory--but she would
need thick gloves on her hands, and bars to protect her of solid gold.
But what is amusing now, I recollected, shutting Lady
Bessborough, had to be taken in desperate earnest once. Opinions that one now
pastes in a book labelled cock-a-doodle-dum and keeps for reading to select
audiences on summer nights once drew tears, I can assure you. Among your
grandmothers and great-grandmothers there were many that wept their eyes out.
Florence Nightingale shrieked aloud in her agony. Moreover, it is all very well
for you, who have got yourselves to college and enjoy sitting-rooms--or is it
only bed-sitting-rooms?--of your own to say that genius should disregard such
opinions; that genius should be above caring what is said of it. Unfortunately,
it is precisely the men or women of genius who mind most what is said of them.
Remember Keats. Remember the words he had cut on his tombstone. Think of
Tennyson; think--but I need hardly multiply instances of the undeniable, if very
unfortunate, fact that it is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what
is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded
beyond reason the opinions of others.
And this
susceptibility of theirs is doubly unfortunate, I thought, returning again to my
original enquiry into what state of mind is most propitious for creative work,
because the mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of
freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent, like
Shakespeare's mind, I conjectured, looking at the book which lay open at Antony
and Cleopatra. There must be no
obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed.
For though we say that we know nothing about Shakespeare's
state of mind, even as we say that, we are saying something about Shakespeare's
state of mind. The reason perhaps why we know so little of Shakespeare--compared
with Donne or Ben Jonson or Milton--is that his grudges and spites and
antipathies are hidden from us. We are not held up by some "revelation" which
reminds us of the writer. All desire to protest, to preach, to proclaim an
injury, to pay off a score, to make the world the witness of some hardship or
grievance was fired out of him and consumed. Therefore his poetry flows from him
free and unimpeded. If ever a human being got his work expressed completely, it
was Shakespeare. If ever a mind was incandescent, unimpeded, I thought, turning
again to the bookcase, it was Shakespeare's mind.