“She was very young, oddly like Shakespeare, the poet in her face, with the same grey eyes and rounded brows.”
From the above description that was given of Judith, I came to the conclusion that she must’ve been William’s twin. I researched it and some sources confirmed that this is the image which Virginia Woolf wanted to portray. By portraying them as twins, she was able to show how gender inequality caused people who were so much alike to be treated so differently.
Allow your imagination to run wild with me for a second. Let’s picture Judith Shakespeare. She had “a gift like her brother’s, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre. The birds that sang in the edge were not more musical than she was”. Yet she was silenced! She was refused the chance to utilize that gift and was forced to be subjected to the norms of a standard Victorian woman. She was expected to marry! She was expected to take care of the household! When she cried out that “marriage was hateful to her”, she was severely beaten by her father.
Judith's unwillingness to get married reminds me of Strachey's Florence Nightingale whom we studied earlier this semester. The same rebellious nature is seen through Judith Shakespeare. Not rebellious in a negative way ofcourse, but simply through her refusal to comply with the standards that her society had imposed on her. It’s quite evident that Marriage was of great importance. “Almost before they [women] were out of the nursery, they were forced to it by their parents and held to it by all power of the law and custom”. But sadly, this was not all that was expected of a woman. She was also expected to kill her dreams and live in the nightmare that had been created by the society in which she lived.
This brings me to Woolf’s point that “Any woman born with a gift in the sixteenth century would certainly had gone crazed, shot herself or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at.” I definitely agree with this claim. As evidently depicted through Judith, the fictional twin sister of William, a woman would be forced to commit suicide. However, Woolf infers that she does not commit such an act on her own. The typical Victorian society along with all of its gender inequalities can be seen as accomplices because once a person’s dream has died or in fact when it has never been given the chance to live, the person no longer has anything to live for.
All in all, a woman as talented as Shakespeare would have never been able to achieve such great success. Through the character Judith Shakespeare, we are able to distinctly see the extent to which society discriminated against women of that time. Truth be told, even if a woman was as talented as Shakespeare, she would’ve never been given the chance to even step on “stage”. Why? Because she lacked a room of her own...
