Special Guest: Professor Phyllis Rackin – Shakespeare and Women
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In this special episode, Phyllis Rackin, Professor Emerita of English from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and former president of the Shakespeare Association of America talks to Sebastian Michael about the position of women in Elizabethan society, about William Shakespeare's relationship with the women in his life, and about what we can and cannot know specifically of the Dark Lady in his Sonnets.
SEBASTIAN MICHAEL:
Today I have the enormous pleasure and real privilege of welcoming to Sonnetcast Professor Phyllis Rackin to talk to me about Shakespeare and Women. Phyllis Rackin is Professor Emerita of English from the University of Pennsylvania in the United States, where she taught Shakespeare for forty years, and she is also a former president of the Shakespeare Association of America. She has published numerous scholarly articles on Shakespeare and related subjects in anthologies and in such journals as PMLA, which is the Journal of the Modern Language Association of America, Shakespeare Quarterly, and Shakespeare Jahrbuch. She has published five books on Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Tragedies; Stages of History – Shakespeare's English Chronicles; Engendering a Nation, a Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories, which she wrote in collaboration with professor Jean E Howard; An Anthology of Essays on The Merry Wives of Windsor, co-edited with Professor Evelyn Gajowski, and the book that drew my attention for this particular episode of our podcast, Shakespeare and Women. Her awards include an ACLS – that’s the American Council of Learned Societies – fellowship and the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. Welcome, Phyllis, and thank you so much for being on Sonnetcast. Now, perhaps to set the context a bit for us, what do we need to be aware of when it comes to the role of women in Shakespeare's life? The most powerful person in the country for most of this time in England is, after all, a woman, Queen Elizabeth I. But how should we imagine women's position in society in Shakespeare's day generally? PHYLLIS RACKIN: I'm so glad you asked that question, because I think there's a lot of misinformation out there. A few years ago, I was asked to judge some essays submitted by undergraduate students for a prize for the best Shakespeare essay, and three or four of them were on this subject, and they all told the same mistaken story. And I was absolutely horrified. I thought maybe their teacher was misleading them. But then I remembered about AI, which is a great place to find received wisdom. So I went to ChatGPT and I asked it your question, and if I may take the time, I would like to read you what ChatGPT told me. So here it is: “In Shakespeare's England, women held a subordinate position in society with strict expectations shaped by patriarchal norms, religion, and social tradition. Here's an overview of their roles and limitations:” And I'm going to read you most of the overview that ChatGPT gives. “One. Legal and social status. No legal independence. Women were considered legally dependent on men, their fathers before marriage, and their husbands afterward. No voting or formal political role. Women could not vote, hold public office, or attend university. Property rights. Married women had limited property rights. Their property typically became their husband's upon marriage. Marriage and family. Women were expected to marry and bear children. Marriage was often arranged, particularly among the upper classes.” I have to interject here that the social historian Amy Louise Erickson has found that the majority of women in Shakespeare's England were not married at all. They were either unmarried or widows. Sorry about that. Back to ChatGPT: “Obedience to husband. Wives were expected to be obedient and supportive. The church and social codes emphasised female submission.” Now, it is true that there were lots of sermons emphasising female submission. But you don't need to have sermons telling women to submit, if women were already submitting. When you have a whole lot of sermons denouncing a practice, you can be pretty sure the practice is popular and widespread. “Work and economic roles. Most women were engaged in domestic labour, whether in their own homes or in service to wealthier households. Some women participated in trades, but often informally or through their husband's name. Theatre and representation. No female actors. Women were not allowed to perform on the public stage. All female roles in Shakespeare's plays were played by boys or young men.” Now the last is true that all female roles in Shakespeare's plays were played by boys or young men, but there was no law against women performing on the public stage, and in fact women did. French and Italian theatrical companies both included women, and they performed in London, and their performances were very popular. And there were also other performances by women on the public stage, which were apparently very popular. Finally: “Exceptions and influence. The reign of Queen Elizabeth was an extraordinary exception.” Now, okay, talk about that in a minute. “Summary. Women in Shakespeare's England were legally and socially subordinate, expected to focus on domestic life and conform to ideals of chastity and obedience.” They may have been expected, but I'm not sure they did. Okay, ChatGPT is a great place to find out the prevailing wisdom on an issue, but here, as in many cases, the prevailing wisdom is either wrong or incomplete. So I want to go back over some of these points that ChatGPT made. Let's start with political power. As you point out, as ChatGPT acknowledges, the most powerful person in England for most of Shakespeare's life was Queen Elizabeth. But ChatGPT calls her an “extraordinary exception.” It forgets, perhaps, that Elizabeth's predecessor was another woman, Mary Tudor, and in Scotland another Mary ruled, and in France Catherine de Medici ruled as regent. So it looks more as if a male ruler would have been an extraordinary exception. ChatGPT also tells us that women could not vote or hold public office. But this is simply not true. Women who were freeholders regularly voted in parliamentary elections because the right to vote was grounded not in gender but in one's property ownership. Women continued to vote well into the seventeenth century in parliamentary elections in England. Next point: economic power. Women possessed considerable economic power both through inheritance from their fathers, mothers, husbands, and other relatives, but also from their own gainful employment. Women were usually named as executors in their husbands’ wills and frequently in their fathers’ wills as well. Shakespeare's own mother, although she had two older brothers as well as many older sisters, inherited the only freehold property her father left, and she also served as an executor of his will, and this was by no means atypical. Women were also very prominent figures in the marketplace, and they also practised a variety of trades, and their participation was not at all informal. Historical records show that until late in the seventeenth century, women were admitted into almost every English trade or guild, including some that we might think of as masculine preserves such as blacksmiths, armourers, boot makers, printers, pewterers, goldsmiths, and farriers. ChatGPT claims that women's participation in trades was often informal, but there's ample evidence that it was not. The statute of artificers referred to apprentices not as ‘boys’ but as ‘persons’, and the written regulations mentioned both ‘girls’ and ‘boys’, and both ‘mistresses’ and ‘masters’: women were legally entitled not only to enter apprenticeships, but to take on apprentices of their own. Finally, one more: ChatGPT tells us that women were not allowed to perform on the public stage, but this is not true either, as I mentioned. Shakespeare's theatrical company, like the other London based professional companies, did not include women players. They did include women in various capacities, including gatherers who stood at the entrances of the playhouses to collect the playgoers' fees. But there was absolutely no legal prohibition against performances by women. And as I mentioned, there are plenty of records of performances by women that were popular. The reason the English professional companies, some of which actually had women as shareholders and patrons, did not include women players has never been satisfactorily explained, but I have a guess, so I want to tell you my guess: I think one of the reasons might have been insecurity about their status. Professional playgoing of that sort in London was a relatively new business in Shakespeare's time and it was considered disreputable. When Shakespeare applied for his coat of arms, you know, William Shakespeare, player: great contempt. I think that maybe the fact that they didn't include women means that they wanted to have the higher social status and respectability of the boys who performed Latin plays at Oxford and Cambridge, and not the low social status of the itinerant players who had travelled the English countryside from time immemorial and had a very low social status, coupled with vagabonds and thieves. So it might have been an attempt to assert how ritzy they were. One thing that supports my hypothesis, or my guess, is Thomas Nashe in 1592 published a defence of playing and playgoing, saying, you know, it's not such a bad thing. It's really a rare exercise in virtue. And one of the things he said, you know, it will really improve you, make you more patriotic. Best possible thing for you. But one of the things in his defence was, and this is a quote, he said: “Our players are not as the players beyond sea,” that is the foreign players, “a sort of squirting, bawdy comedians that have whores and common courtesans to play women's parts.” So that was one of the… – masculine purity of the companies was one of the things that made it okay to go watch plays put on by the professional companies. So that is my end of my diatribe against ChatGPT. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: I find this totally fascinating because I do use ChatGPT a lot for research purposes, and one has to watch it like nobody's business because it does make mistakes, of course. I absolutely do not use it for writing purposes, but of course it draws on what's out there and what the prevailing view is. So it kind of finds a lowest common or a common denominator on virtually any subject, does it not? And you've busted quite a few myths there, which I was really not aware of either. I did not know, for example, that women could not only become apprentices, but have apprentices. Do you have a view on why our perspective is so distorted on the role of women across society in Elizabethan England? PHYLLIS RACKIN: Yes, I do have a theory about that. I don't know if it's true. I think there are two factors going on. Part of it is nostalgia on the part of some men who like to think about the good old days, when women knew their place and men were men and women stayed home and served them. But I also think it… – I don't know if you had this in England, or you're probably not old enough to remember: years ago there was a cigarette brand in the United States called Virginia Slims that was specifically designed for women. And their slogan was, “you've come a long way, baby.” And they would put up advertisements showing the purported oppression of American women in the past. And then the liberated modern woman smoking a Virginia Slims cigarette. So you're really liberated. You can give yourself lung cancer. But no, that wasn't what they were saying. But, so I think that one of the reasons we tend to overestimate the oppression of the past is to make ourselves more complacent about the present. I think that women still have a long way to go. And I think if you think, oh my goodness, I am so lucky, I can, you know, actually get a job and make some money. They couldn't do that. Well, they could, and I think it has a political purpose, and a bad one, to make us accept present disadvantages by saying, oh, it's so much worse back then. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Yes, I can see that that would be an important factor. And it is worth bearing in mind, probably for our generation and the one behind me, and the two generations now behind me, just how recent certain developments are. My mother had me before she had the right to vote in Switzerland, because I grew up in Switzerland, and the menfolk of Switzerland only granted the women the right to vote in national matters in something like 1971, it might have been; it’s fascinating this. Perhaps to move a little bit closer to Shakespeare himself and to him as a person, now that we have an overview of the cultural framework, if you like: Shakespeare marries young, at the age of 18 to Anne, who is a woman eight years his senior, which we consider to be quite a lot at that time, and I would be interested to know what you're thinking on this. But also he then has first a daughter Susanna, and then the twins, Judith and Hamnet. But of course, he leaves the family shortly after the twins’ birth, and for the next roughly twenty years or so, spends little time with them, while conducting a very complex love life in London. But he also never abandons them, and he returns to Stratford towards the end of his life. What, if anything, can we say from this about Shakespeare's attitude towards and relationships with women quite generally, and with his wife in particular? To us this seems very strange behaviour. Does this say something about Shakespeare himself, or does it say more about the time? PHYLLIS RACKIN: I think the fact that she stayed home and managed the household in Stratford, and may have engaged in business dealings that helped to make him rich isn't so atypical, you know. But I think the whole problem with speculating about Shakespeare's marriage is that we know almost nothing about Anne. For instance, it's generally thought that she was eight years older than he was, but maybe she wasn't. Lena Cowen Orlin, I don't know if you know her work, but she has done more archival work on Anne than anybody else, I think, who has ever lived. And she says, first of all, the inscription on the tombstone of the date of her birth could be wrong because many were. Secondly, we have no baptismal record for the Anne we think was Shakespeare's wife. There is a baptismal record for another woman named in the registry, Johanna Hathaway, that could have been Anne. Names were often recorded wrongly. If so, he married a woman younger than he was. So we don't know. The only evidence we have… – we don't have Anne's baptism. We have a document attesting to her marriage, to the baptisms of her children, to the bequest of a second best bed in William's will. The record of her own death. And then one more thing. There's the will of Anne's father's shepherd, a man named Thomas Whittington. He bequeathed to the poor people of Stratford forty shillings. And it says forty shillings, “in the hand of Anne Shakespeare, wife unto Mr. William Shakespeare, and is due debt unto me.” But that's all we have. And none of it tells us very much about Anne. There's only one thing that I find suggestive, and it's just a hint. The Latin epitaph on her tombstone, translated into English. It was probably commissioned by one of her daughters. And it begins, “Thou, my mother, gave me life, by breast and milk.” And that’s… – maternal breastfeeding, for women who could afford a wet nurse was very unusual in Shakespeare's England, and it was worthy to be commemorated on a tombstone as a major achievement. Puritan preachers were urging women to stay home and breastfeed their children, even if the family lost money. 'A mother that hath a trade will neglect much business by nursing her child'. So it was a money loser, but it was God's commandment. But it wasn't until the second half of the eighteenth century that maternal breastfeeding became the norm. So Anne is doing something very unusual for her time. Does that mean she was more domesticated than the average woman in Shakespeare's time? Does that mean that the whole household was organised more according to the modern division between a woman confined at home while a man was out there making money, as opposed to what was the norm in that time of the household as an economic unit where everyone participated? The household wasn't just a residence, it was a place of business. So to me, that's the only thing we have that distinguishes Anne at all. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: It's an interesting point, which hadn't occurred to me, I confess, which is that, of course, if you have a house in a town like Stratford and you have a family, you have a household which you need to run and manage, and if you are left there while your husband is away much of the time that means you are running a business, effectively, you're running the operation. It's taking on a great responsibility, quite apart from looking after the children. PHYLLIS RACKIN: Orlin thinks that Anne was a maltster, because there are records of the Shakespeare household having inordinate quantities of malt, and that it was used for brewing, and this was a trade that women often practised. But, you know, as I said, Orlin knows more about Anne than anybody else, but even she has to resort to a lot of conjecture because there aren't very many records SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Yes, and I suppose once a myth or a supposed truth establishes itself, it becomes very difficult to rid oneself of it because they become cherished truths, such as the much older wife. I use the, I almost use it as a catch phrase, I say “everything is conjecture except the words” a lot in relation to the sonnets. And it is obviously the case that we really have very little other than the actual words. PHYLLIS RACKIN: I must… – my memory might fail me, but I'm pretty sure one of Shakespeare's daughters married a man who was younger than she was. His daughter, Judith, was 31 years old when she married a 26-year old. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: That's a five year difference thereabout, isn't it? Yes. PHYLLIS RACKIN: There's a record of that. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: And incidentally, because you mentioned it, do you make anything… – what is your reading or your interpretation of the ‘second best bed’? One reads marvellous stories about what this may or may not mean. What's your take on this? PHYLLIS RACKIN: Oh, I haven't thought… – people argue back and forth that the second best bed might have been the bed that the two of them slept in, and the first bed was used for something else. And then others use it to make a lot out of. And I don’t, you know, I was bereaved a few years ago of a husband whom I adored, and we had a great marriage, and I have been giving away his stuff. And if you looked at who got what you might say, oh, it means she loved this person more, or she didn't love her husband. All it means is I gave stuff to people who I thought would have liked it and appreciate it. So I'm not sure we should make that much of it. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Yes. My mother found herself in a comparable situation coming up three years ago when my dad died. And I've been witnessing this, of course, the wrench on the one hand, of objects, things, clothing, objects that belonged to him, and the fact simply also that you want to declutter and realign your physical environment. But yes, it doesn't necessarily mean all that much if a cherished item suddenly goes to the charity shop. I think one needs to be careful what one reads into things. You mentioned already the fact that in Shakespeare's theatre companies and in the majority of English theatre companies we know about, it's accepted as fact that women don't act the female roles. Although I was not aware, I confess also, that there was no law or no real strictures against that, that this is something that is effectively self-imposed by theatre makers rather than an edict by law. What interests me, though, about this, about this culture of young men and boys playing women's parts, is what it does to these plays and to these roles. I mention this every now and then in my podcast, that Shakespeare exploits this to great comedic effect. For example, with Rosalind in As You Like It. What do you think, if anything, does this tell us about gender and sexuality in Elizabethan England, and about maybe the audience's relationship with the women they see portrayed and characterised on their stage? Considering also perhaps just how many people of all layers of society go to the theatre regularly in London, or get to see plays at Court and in the stately homes of patrons and other nobility? I think this is another element that I try to every now and then, bring back to our minds, just how high the proportion is of people in London who go to the theatre regularly, in order for these theatres to be profitable and to thrive in the way they do. PHYLLIS RACKIN: I think the boy player was an attraction. I mean, I don't think it was a disadvantage. You know, the movie Shakespeare in Love holds that it's a disadvantage. I don't think it was a disadvantage. It's interesting to me that the two biggest roles that Shakespeare ever wrote for women were Rosalind in As You Like It and Cleopatra. They have the longest parts. They dominate the action. Antony and Cleopatra, although his name comes first in the play title, he dies at the end of Act Four. You know, she has a much bigger part. And both of those characters call explicit attention to the fact that they were portrayed by a boy. The epilogue to As You Like It, as you know, is – I think you might want to read it, since you're an actor, you know if you want to put it out there on the podcast – it's wonderful. And he is Ganymede, who is the boy persona that she adopts during the represented action. She's Rosalind, and she's also the boy who plays the part. There's been debate as to whether she should be dressed in her women's clothes or her boy's clothes when she delivers it, so she explodes the whole thing. Cleopatra just before she commits suicide, which is her big, big scene and which she keeps referring to as a show. “Show me, my women, like a queen.” “Bring [our] crown and all.” And she says if I let them lead me in triumph to Rome, they're going to put on this awful show: “The quick comedians Extemporally will stage us… …Antony Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness In the posture of a whore.” So we're reminded again: a boy. Some critics have said, oh, the reason Shakespeare keeps putting his female leads in male disguise, as he repeatedly does, is that it would have been easier for the boy player dressed as a woman. I don't think that's it at all. I think, you would know this better than I, as an actor, but I think it's much harder to portray a woman pretending to be a man, if you are a man than it is to simply portray a woman. It's a double cross. It's not just one cross. You're not going to play a pretend man the same way you play a real man. So it's like a dazzling, acrobatic trick to show off the skill of the boy player. And I think the boy player was a real attraction. And as far as the sexual angle, there are denunciations of female sex workers in London during the period who wore males' clothes to be sexier and attract patrons. So a woman in men's dress was considered a sexual attraction. And within the – okay, one more thing about that – within the plays, the crossdressed heroines are objects of sexual attraction for both men and women. The best example of that is Twelfth Night: Viola dresses as Cesario, and both Orsino and Olivia desire that character. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Yes, it's fascinating, this, isn't it, and I will do: I will record the epilogue from As You Like It because that belongs to there, definitely, as an example, I'll do this after the recording; because you're right, of course – I'd forgotten about that, but it is one of my favourite plays, As You Like It, one of several, but I'd forgotten that, of course she does – she makes direct reference to the fact that she is a man playing a woman who has pretended to be a man. And how interesting: this is something that I certainly didn't know, that there were female sex workers who dressed as men to attract business. This speaks to me of a great deal of what one might consider fluidity; and I mean the very, very strict and very fierce laws – they were called the 'buggery laws', weren’t they, still, notwithstanding – there seems to be a great deal of fluidity and flexibility in how we relate to men and women as men and women. And it's fascinating, of course, in the context of the sonnets in particular as well, where one of the early sonnets, Sonnet 20, makes it abundantly clear: “A woman's face, with nature's own hand painted, | Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion,” and he goes further and becomes very explicit about the fact that he's now in love with a man who looks a bit like a woman. And so this segues us beautifully into the sonnets specifically, and of particular interest to us, of course, where we are at now in the podcast – I am now discussing, as we're recording this conversation, I am also in the process of recording the episode on Sonnet 136 – 135, 136 – these are the almost obsessively punning sonnets where William Shakespeare puns on six different meanings of the word ‘will’. But we are, in the process of this podcast, we are now firmly in the Dark Lady segment of the collection. And so the question obviously raises itself automatically what, if anything, can we say about this woman whom William Shakespeare has this very complicated and involved and complex relationship with? Can we even speculate about her identity? Should we? What do we know about the Dark Lady? PHYLLIS RACKIN: Well, there's been a lot of speculation, as you know, about the Dark Lady. The leading candidate is Emilia Bassano Lanier – I don't know how it would have been pronounced – and her father was a musician at the Court of Queen Elizabeth, so that's one connection that made Shakespeare acquainted with her. She was a mistress for a time of the patron of Shakespeare's company. So that's another connection, he could have known her that way. In Sonnet 128 she's playing music. So if her father was a musician, maybe Emilia knew how to play music. Shakespeare named a character in The Merchant of Venice Bassanio, which is an alternative spelling of Bassano. She may have had a dark complexion because her doctor, who was Simon Forman, who left extensive notebooks behind, talked about her and said she was brown, I think. So all this seems very persuasive. There's a problem, though. The problem is… – oh, she was also one of the first women to write poetry. Published poetry in England. Her life is remarkably well documented. There must have been tens of thousands of women in Shakespeare's London about whom the records are entirely lost. I've been trying for years to find anything I could about the wife of Thomas Heywood, because I think she probably helped write his plays. I can't find a damn thing. Many of those women, tens of thousands of women, would have had dark hair. Perhaps even more of them betrayed their husbands. So Emilia Lanier seems to fit great. But is it the accident that we know an awful lot about her? I mean, if you narrow the field to the women about whom we have extensive records, it becomes much easier to put your finger on one. But if you think about how many women there were in London, it becomes less probable. So that's why I don't think that we're ever going to know for sure who the Dark Lady was. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Do you think it matters? PHYLLIS RACKIN: Well, I think what matters more is what Shakespeare says about whoever she was. Sonnets are always, they’re always ostensibly about the beloved, and they're always actually about the sonneteer. They're always about the writer, from Petrarch on, okay? It’s like, Orsino at the beginning of Twelfth Night has this long speech where he talks about the spirit of love and looks that he's in love with Olivia at the time, he thinks he is. And he talks all about himself. It's an incredibly narcissistic speech. It just shows you that he's really in love with the thought of himself being in love. He's not in love with anybody outside himself. And the sonnets aren't as silly as Orsino, so I think what matters about the Dark Lady isn't who she was, it’s what Shakespeare thought about her. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Yes. And that's actually almost exactly the next question that I have, because it's striking, is it not, that Shakespeare's relationship with this particular woman, whoever she is, comes across in the sonnets as highly conflicted. He on the one hand appears to have an intense desire for her and calls her his ‘love’. But on the other hand he also gives expression to self-loathing, even disgust, and frames some of his experience with her in positively troubled and actually quite troubling terms. What can we say about him, then, from this, do you think? PHYLLIS RACKIN: Well, that's a really tough question, because if you read some of the sonnets where he, you know, he compares her vagina to hell, where he says she is “the bay where all men ride,” you know, they sound like a kind of almost pathological misogyny; the way he describes his sexual desire for her: “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame.” It really is, sounds, mentally ill and quite horrible and I don't know, you know, I don't like to think that Shakespeare… – and I remind myself that he was capable of writing the most brilliant and convincing speeches from the point of view of every kind of character, including, you know, cold blooded murderers. And, you know, Richard III, Shylock, I mean, think about various villains and the great speeches they have. The only really good speech in Titus Andronicus is spoken by Aaron the Moor, who was the worst villain in the play. So he's capable of writing very convincing expressions of the worst bigots. So I'd like to remind myself of that when I read those sonnets, because they are quite upsetting. One thing, I'm glad that he postulates her as dark. Whether she was dark, you know, Sidney had already, as you probably know, gone against the sonnet tradition in his sonnet sequence in writing about a woman with black eyes, his Stella. So it's the opposite, because the idealised lady of the sonnet is supposed to be fair haired. She's supposed to be fair, both in the sense of ‘beautiful’ and fair, in the sense of having a kind of northern European complexion, hair, and eyes. My favourite sonnet, which the Dark Lady enables, which her darkness enables, is My Mistress’ Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun, because in that sonnet, you know, he gives us a living, breathing woman who is not only, doesn't have – you know, “If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head” – not only isn't blonde, not only isn't blue eyed, not only doesn't have rosy cheeks, she has smelly breath: “And in some perfumes is there more delight | Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.” And a lot, if you get yourself an authorised book of The Sonnets, you'll always get a footnote saying, oh, ‘reeks’ didn't mean ‘smells bad’ at that time, but it did. If you go in the OED: it did. So he's saying she had smelly breath and she doesn't walk like a goddess. She treads on the ground. “And yet, by heaven, I think my love is rare | As any she belied with false compare.” So he uses that to send up the whole sonnet tradition. And the sonnet tradition is itself very misogynistic, because if you can't be lovable unless you have starry eyes and golden hair and breath like roses, which I don't think anybody would have unless you took a kind of lozenges, then no woman's body is worthy. No woman is worthy. So he's saying, I love her. She's a real woman. She breathes, she walks. I love to hear her speak, yet music has a far more pleasing sound: you don't have to have a voice like music. So I think the fact that she's dark and that she's not idealised is wonderful because it enables him to write that sonnet, which is, as I said, my favourite. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Yes, I make that point precisely in my discussion of the sonnet that it essentially humanises her rather than deifying this idealised, supremely artificial ideal of an unattainable love object, he brings her down to earth, but I love her still. Or I love her as she is. And he does that interestingly as well, with the young man at one point where he says: So is it not with me as with that muse, Stirred by a painted beauty to his verse, Who heaven itself for ornament doth use And every fair with his fair doth rehearse… And then he says effectively, that his love is as beautiful “as any mother's child,” though of course not so bright as those gold stars that sit in the sky. So he has a strong, intense dislike for artifice and for hyperbole, which actually comes through in the sonnets every so often, that he compares his truth and his true telling poetry to the fakery of other poets, and that is, I'm sure, a really, really important element that plays into the sonnets about the Dark Lady, too. One of the reasons I love these sonnets quite as much as I do is because I totally agree with you that they are far more about the sonneteer than about the object of desire, whichever that object now may be. And I think we glean a wonderful insight into Shakespeare, the man, through how he talks about the people he's attracted to and loves. PHYLLIS RACKIN: There's one thing I was thinking when you were saying about the young man sonnet, where he says, I'm not writing artificial stuff. By now, the sonnet tradition was so outworn that even that was a trope. Sydney has a sonnet where he's trying to write, he can't do it, and then he says, “‘Fool’, said my Muse [to me], ‘look in [thy] heart and write’.” So I'm sorry, but I just thought, that's wonderful, that the tradition is so outworn that saying it’s outworn is outworn. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: That is brilliant. That's like the meta stage of sonneteering almost. – I'm a little bit conscious of the time. And so I wanted to ask you, if you're being invited to talk about women and Shakespeare, is there anything else that you think, well, he really ought to have asked me this. Is there anything that you think when we talk about women and Shakespeare, what we really need to mention is the following. PHYLLIS RACKIN: Well, I have a sort of a pre-written talk that when I'm asked to, you know, lecture to non-scholars, I always give and it's about Merry Wives of Windsor and Taming of the Shrew, and it's about our own preference on the plays. We… – Taming of the Shrew is enormously popular in contemporary America, I imagine in England as well. I've seen it in England several times, and I don't go there that often. Okay. And Merry Wives, until recently, hasn't been popular at all. And in Shakespeare's own time Merry Wives was more popular. Taming of the Shrew was not very popular. It, actually, there was a play called The Tamer Tamed that was written pretty quickly afterward as a response to it, in which Petruchio gets his comeuppance. Why do we like Taming of the Shrew better than Merry Wives of Windsor? Merry Wives of Windsor is set in a recognisable contemporary English town where women have a fair degree of autonomy, and the man who thinks he's been cuckolded is made a fool of. Taming of the Shrew is set in Italy. It doesn't purport to be a realistic picture of contemporary English manners, but that's the one that we take as our favourite. That's telling us something, I think. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Yes, I am sure it does. I have a feeling that every age probably finds in Shakespeare the truths it most seeks to hear, and so that doesn't surprise me. Plays that come into favour and go out of favour, that surely is almost par for the course, isn't it? With literature that sustains, with great works that last. PHYLLIS RACKIN: What I think is very interesting about that subject is that it tells you about the period in which they are being favoured or disfavoured. The reason it's interesting to me that Shrew has been so popular is what does that say about our own culture? SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Yes. Of course. Do you have a favourite play? PHYLLIS RACKIN: Antony and Cleopatra, of course. Of course, of course. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: This is sort of the questions that I have prepared. The bonus question, or not, as you may see it, that I ask all my guests, that has nothing specifically… – well, it does have to do with the sonnets, insofar as my take on the sonnets, the way I relate to the sonnets, I see them as very personal works. I tend to align myself with Wordsworth, who sees in the sonnets a key to Shakespeare's heart. And this presupposes, of course, that there is a William Shakespeare. And so you can refuse to answer this if you find it too tedious. But I ask all my guests, what do you make of the still ongoing proliferation of theories that Shakespeare isn't really William Shakespeare? That the works must have been written by somebody else, that the man from Stratford couldn't possibly be the man who we think it is. What's your take on this? PHYLLIS RACKIN: I think they're silly, and I think they're partly the result of snobbery. They want to make him a nobleman because they're snobs. And they can't believe that the son of a glover could have been the most brilliant playwright who ever wrote in English. I think there's plenty of evidence that Shakespeare was William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon. You know, people have all sorts of motivations, and some people, you know, genuinely are sincere believers. But I don't place any stock at all in them. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Yes, I'm glad to hear that. I totally agree, and I have not found one credible scholar yet who actually espouses the Earl of Oxford or any of the other – apparently there are in excess of one hundred different theories about who may or may not have been Shakespeare. PHYLLIS RACKIN: Including Queen Elizabeth. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Including Queen Elizabeth. Yes, quite. PHYLLIS RACKIN: In her spare time, when she wasn't running the country. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Yes, because running the country, especially during a time of great religious strife and when the Spaniards are coming with their ships, is just a part time job. So we have plenty of time to write plays, narrative poems and sonnets. PHYLLIS RACKIN: Yeah, sure. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Thank you. Thank you so much for this. This has been a wonderful conversation. PHYLLIS RACKI: I really enjoyed it thoroughly. Thank you so much. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: And so here, as an apt coda to our conversation with Professor Phyllis Rackin, is the epilogue from As You Like It as spoken, unusually, by the lady, by Rosalind, who, of course, in Shakespeare's day would have been played by a young man: It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue, but it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord the prologue. If it be true that good wine needs no bush, tis true that a good play needs no epilogue. Yet to good wine they do use good bushes, and good plays prove the better by the help of good epilogues. What a case am I in then, that am neither a good epilogue nor cannot insinuate with you in the behalf of a good play? I am not furnished like a beggar; therefore to beg will not become me. My way is to conjure you, and I’ll begin with the women. I charge you, O women, for the love you bear to men, to like as much of this play as please you. And I charge you, O men, for the love you bear to women – as I perceive by your simpering, none of you hates them – that between you and the women the play may please. If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me, and breaths that I defied not. And I am sure as many as have good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths will for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell. |
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If you would like to donate, you can do so here. Thank you!