Shakespeare's Sister

by Virginia Woolf

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 the 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, Virgin 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
neighborhood, 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,
practicing 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 neighboring 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 the 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 crossroads 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 Bronte or a Robert Burns blazes out
and proves its presence. But certainly it never got itself on to
paper. When, however, one reads 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 Bronte 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, on 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 has 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 a 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, that publicity in women is
detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood....