The women writers who matched Shakespeare measure for measure
Shakespeare’s Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote The Renaissance
Elizabethan England was a tough time for aspiring woman writers. Any woman with literary gifts in the 16th century, wrote Virginia Woolf, ‘would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village hall’.
But in this dismal landscape some tiny shoots appeared. Ramie Targoff, an American expert on Renaissance poetry and religion, shines an encouraging light on a quartet of talented female scribes.
Mary Sidney’s mother was one of Queen Elizabeth’s gentlewomen. Her brother
Philip Sidney wrote his prose romance, Arcadia, for her. After his death, Mary revised Philip’s 43 unfinished translations of the Old Testament’s Hebrew Psalms into English poetry – then finished off the remaining 107 psalms herself, displaying a startling command of poetic form. John Donne was a big fan, as was
T.S. Eliot, 300 years later. Elizabeth Cary’s father was a successful lawyer. Unhappily married, she wrote The Tragedy Of Mariam, the first known play written by a woman. The author praises its feminist message about a wife’s right to follow her conscience over her husband’s will. Lady Anne Clifford, only child of the Earl of Cumberland, was 15 when her father died and left his estate to his brother rather than her. She responded by conducting a 40-year legal fight. Her claim to literary fame was the cache of letters and diaries she left behind.
The wild card in the quartet was Aemilia Bassano, who came from a family of Venetian Jewish musicians. She became the mistress of Queen Elizabeth I’s first cousin but married Alfonso Lanier, a court musician. In 1611, she became the first 17th-century woman to publish a book of poetry, whose proto-feminist title poem imagines the wife of Judas, at the time of Christ’s crucifixion, speaking up for Eve. Sadly it wasn’t reprinted in her lifetime and only resurrected when Aemilia was wrongly identified in the 1970s as Shakespeare’s ‘dark lady of the sonnets’.
Ms Targoff’s book appealingly shows how her writers’ lives overlapped and is also strong on period detail: on witchcraft prosecutions and treatises that told a wife her speech and gestures to her husband ‘must carry the stamp of fear about them’.