Jodi Picoult is a great writer. Her sentences are impeccable. Her stories intrigue. We seem to have the same interests/obsessions. And sometimes she goes a bit overboard with her research. When I learned her latest novel was about how Shakespeare is really a woman, well, I was upset. Not that old argument again…I’d been hearing Shakespeare’s writing was really the work of the Earl of Oxford or Christopher Marlowe or both for a long time. I did not believe it. The “proof” was not valid, imo. It seemed discriminatory to me. Shakespeare could not have written his wonderful works because he was middle class and didn’t have the education or talent. How dare they? They are the Anti-Stratfordians.
What finally drew me in was Jodi’s take on this old rumor was that Shakepseare fronted not just for Marlowe and other men with better educations but also a woman. A woman who just happened to be the first published female poet in England. Picoult’s novel is a “reimagined” life of Shakespeare and his collaborators. How it might have happened. And why. As I read my rage lowered to a simmer and by the end of the book I believed it.
The “why” this time makes sense. Women were not even allowed on the STAGE to act (Yes, males played Juliet) and certainly there had never been a female playwright. Women were supposedly not smart enough, and didn’t have the means or opportunity either. So if they were going to write and publish, they had to pretend they were male. Like, as Picoult points out, our own JK Rowling. Sexism is alive and well. Men still rule the world.
I write this a few days before the election in USA, so we’ll see if women are able to steal back their ownership of their bodies. In Shakespeare’s time, a woman’s body and all possessions belonged to her husband. Sometimes we don’t seem too far away from that. It’s only been a hundred years since we could vote. When I was born it was more like thirty years. I came of age thinking because we were burning our bras, we were equal.
Sorry, no. Part of it is built in. I remember when I fell in love with a baby. I was eighteen. We visited my boyfriend’s sister. She invited me to come see her new baby, who was a sleeping angel in a crib. I had never felt baby lust before but it hit me upside the head. Hard. I asked my boyfriend, who was thirty and had a band, if he wanted to try for a baby. He said no. I broke off with him and started looking around for someone who would be a good dad. Not in a band. I found him.
But he was not a great husband as far as equal rights. We had our roles…and I liked mine as Mom. I loved my babies. It was harder to love my husband when he acted like a MCP. But that’s the way most men having families in the 70s had been raised. And me too. I bought the dream, even though, almost by accident, I was a writer. I figured I’d stop writing when I had kids. And I did for a short while. Maybe a year or so.
I had a belief about my writing. I believed it was weird. I was strange. Journalism was okay but poetry?!? Who wrote poetry in 1972? Um. I did. I tried not to but eventually I’d feel compelled to pull out the notebook and pen. And write. I moved on from journalism and poetry to short stories. My husband did not like it. He told me to grow up, I’d never be Erica Jong. I grew up and became a novelist. And found out that most of the book-buying public were women, while most of the writers being published were men.
Things have changed, of course, but not that much. I think Jodi is right. Shakespeare didn’t write Romeo and Juliet or any of the many women-centered plays. A woman did. Not convinced? Read “By Any Other Name.”
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