Anne Shakespeare and I can’t believe it’s been 400 years!
On the 400 year anniversary of Anne Shakespeare’s death (6/8/1623) I can’t believe that she is still not being given the recognition she deserves as the true author of the Shakespeare canon.However, as the anniversary of her death approaches, the Folger Shakespeare Library has released an anthology of poetry celebrating her life. More importantly, Katherine Scheil, one of the editors asks some telling questions such as the following,
Was Anne a writer, poet or story-teller? How did she cope with Hamnet’s tragic early death? What kind of relationship did she have with her daughters Susanna and Judith, and how might she have reacted to the prejudices attached to women’s social roles? How did she articulate her own gender or sexual identity? Did she navigate her world with a non-normative body or with a neuro-atypical outlook? Could she have struggled with her mental health? How did she engage with, or express her concerns about the natural environment with which she interacted? What might her “voice” sound like if she were to speak through a different set of ethnic or religious influences to those traditionally accorded to her? Was she a rebel, an activist, a businesswoman? What were her deepest secrets?
And
With imaginative free reign, Anne has recently begun to “rise again,” and become the real author of the plays by Shakespeare, the hidden inspiration for the literary masterpieces, and the brains behind the Shakespeare family.
Of course my website is dedicated to answering not only the questions Ms Scheil raised, but also in authenticating Anne as the true author of the plays, poems and Sonnets usually attributed to William. To this end I currently have twin projects on the drawing board: firstly, the most current one is entitled “Reflections on the Feminine: Anne Shake-speare’s Sonnets” and the one I started but have put aside for the moment is entitled “Reflections on the Feminine: Anne Shake-speare’s Problem Plays”. Many of the questions raised by Ms Scheil, I have tentatively answered in the first two books, “Shake-speare: The Hidden Author” and “Shake-speare: The Inside Story” and in the third (and fourth) book I am taking a much more in-depth analysis of Anne’s feminist affirmation in the what I have found to be a Renaissance humanist feminism which is, I believe, closely aligned with Simone de Beauvoir’s (1949) existential feminism. Indeed, taking the theoretical tenets of a Renaissance humanist feminism couple with an existential feminism, Anne puts these theories into practice through the humanist virtues of rhetoric, eloquence and grammar in writing through challenging the oppression of women by the patriarchy in Renaissance England.
Anne’s women are depicted as covering the whole gamut of what it means to be human: they are sad, mad, strong, weak, heroic, virtuous, authentic and inauthentic, transcendent and immanent, emancipated and oppressed.
A final note: it is no coincidence that the First Folio was published after Anne’s death: it meant that no-one could raise questions to Anne as to who the real author was (see my first book for a more nuanced reading of Anne’s death, her epitaph and the First Folio).
