Anne Shakespeare and her feminine voice

Every poem, sonnet and play Anne Shakespeare wrote has one purpose, it is Anne searching for (and finding) her own voice – a female voice in a male dominated world. The fact that Anne had to hide herself beneath the facade of her husband and yet still project her own voice into her every poem, sonnet and play is something that we need to celebrate, discover, and applaud.

What a journey Anne undertook when she decided that the world had to hear her voice, her story: a story told through presenting herself to this world as a male. But make no mistake, this story is Anne’s own story of her journey to find and to awaken the feminine voice and to speak to not only her male audience but specifically to her female audience. And this message she had to wrap in carefully designed language that appealed to not only her male audience (an audience that she played to their vanity) but also to send a message to her female audience that underneath all of the misery visited on them by men, they were strong and powerful. That women could take control of their own destiny, that they had just as much agency to exercise their free will as did their male counterparts.

Was Anne a revolutionary voice for women? What we witness in her poems, sonnets and plays is Anne talking of women who struggle, women who have dreams, desires and needs, of women’s strength (as witness her female characters speaking out against war, for example), and their willingness to speak out against male patriarchal institutions and power. However, her voice had to be clothed in language that, firstly, pampered to male ego’s, setting them up as custodians of power and dominance, while, secondly, subtly inserting the female voice of reason to counter the vanity of the male ego that put themselves as the powerful and authoritative voice and for which everyone else should pay homage to, until they fell against the impregnable forces of history. And, like in so many wars and conflicts, the women (and children) were the usual casualties of such male folly.

More to come