Anne Shakespeare’s feminine voice (Part 1)
While it is difficult to pin Anne Shakespeare down to a specific (20th-21st century) feminine movement, what is obvious is that Anne is a humanist. And being a humanist in the Renaissance meant that the focus was on what it means to be human and what virtues are the most valuable for both the individual and society at large? Classifying oneself as belonging to that universal class of being human, carries with it those universal attributes that belong to all human beings (regardless of sex or gender) or what is described as the “facticity” of existence, such as a body. But these universals are not confined to either gender (male/female). This “facticity” of existence is what, in existential terms, comes to designate the immanence of existence; the “in-itself” (Sartre) or the objective side of existence because this part of existence is factual, there is no room for transcending the facticity of existence. However, what makes the human existence human is that through consciousness of their existence, the human being has the power to transcend their current situation; they have freedom to choose what their future existence could be (Jean-Paul Sartre). And while this freedom leads, in existential terms to a series of dilemmas such as anguish (if I am free, then I am responsible for what I will become), abandonment (if God does not exist, then man (sic) is condemned to be free and is responsible for everything he does), despair (we can only act on what is in our power to do).
However, I also believe that this form of existentialism has to also accommodate two other strands of existentialism; that of Peter Zapffe (1933) and of Sartre’s companion, Simone de Beauvoir. From Zappfe we need to account for his four major pillars of existence; isolation (where we consciously dismiss from our mind all disturbing and destructive thoughts and feelings which would open us up to the reality of existence), anchoring (where we fixate on certain points within consciousness such as God, church, morality, the State, the future, the people), distraction (where we use ruses to change the focus, such as we do with children, “look over there!”) and finally sublimation (turn the existential angst of existence to artistic pursuits, such as we see with Anne). Just a couple of points on these pillars of avoidance, or what Zapffe (1933) calls repression systems; these can operate separately or in combination to “hide” from us the reality of existence and if we were to look at our dreams then I think we could see this as a place or a condition of our consciousness that is not fettered by our repressional systems (especially in our “nightmares”). The other strand of existentialism that I am interested in and which has as its focus a more feminine turn is that offered by Simone de Beauvoir. And I think this is where I believe Anne comes closest to a specific feminine voice: that espoused by Simone de Beauvoir. This is not to say that I don’t think that the other stands of Sartre and Zapffe do not have their place within Anne’s humanism (and as we will see, Summers, forthcoming) in her existentialist crisis that came to the fore around the turn of the 16th century.
De Beauvoir set out in two of her more important works, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) and particularly in her 1949 book, The Second Sex, her feminist views. That is, taking de Beauvoir as coming closest to Anne’s feminine voice, means taking a feminine existentialist position. However, where de Beauvoir differs from the existentialism of her partner, Jean-Paul Sartre, is where de Beauvoir does not classify everyone within the broad remit of existentialism per se, but for her women face a double existentialist threat; not only is she the Other (what Sartre would call the “in-itself” as an “immanence” or object), but the woman is also positioned within specific situations. And these “situations” she finds herself in are dependent upon the social, cultural, economic, political, religious constraints that she inhabits; but this is not to say that her situation qua these constraints do not, or cannot be changed over time (either through changing historical circumstances, or through exercising her agency for free will). That is to say, that while being human carries with it the “facticity” of one’s existence (one’s body, for example), what de Beauvoir is pointing to is that for the male, their situation is markedly different from that of the female simply by dint of them being a part of the patriarchy (but also not to discount that Anne also portrays males in situations that closely echo that of her female characters). De Beauvoir also denies that a woman is just a “body”; something that is seen (especially by men) as a reproductive “machine” for the continuation of the species (which also points toward a more Marxist interpretation of class and gender). For de Beauvoir, a woman is more than her body or the site for male gaze, desire and lust; she is more than the Other, more than a pure object or “immanence” (an in-itself). But what she is also pointing to is that the notion of woman needs acknowledgment to have the power for transcendence; a transcendence that is accorded “naturally” to men. In existential terms, transcendence is associated with being human; having the capacity to project oneself into the future (to “transcend” the present moment, a moment that Sartre calls “nothingness” and which he titled his book Being and Nothingness). That is to say, the past cannot be lived again, the present is the moment in which a being can project themselves into the future and transcend this present moment.
How is Anne’s existentialist feminine voice presented through her plays? One must be careful here to separate a number of factors that Anne brings to her plays. Firstly, how she presents her male and female characters, such as what she has each male or female character say and do; how her female and male characters are portrayed within their situations (social class, economic, political and religious power, for instance); how characters exercise their freedom; how she represents love, nature and free will. Before addressing that issue, I want to return to the existentialism espoused by Peter Zapffe (1933). While I have no doubt that his take on repression systems of isolation, anchors, distraction and sublimation have validity, I do not actually think that his underlying assumptions as to why these are necessary is correct. For instance, I do think that his existentialism borders on nihilism and that this seems at odds with lived experience for other existentialist philosophers (even though nihilism as a philosophical school would argue that even if his underlying assumption of an overabundance of consciousness is the cause of his pessimism, that existence is fundamentally nihilistic in its outlook). That is, I do think that one can argue that de Beauvoir is not a nihilist (nor for that matter, Sartre) even though her existentialist femininity is gloomy, she would argue that one cannot give up the hope for justice and equality between genders (and Sartre is mostly positive regarding the fact of humanist freedom, see his essay, Existentialism is a Humanism for instance). Secondly I do not think that we can reduce the reasons for suicide to a neat formula of announcing that because one has come to see the reality behind existence that this necessarily would lead one to commit suicide; there are so many factors behind any suicide (no denying though that the nihilistic reality behind existence may be one cause).
Returning to the Sonnets (see Summers, 2021; 2022) for example of where we can see Anne’s existentialist feminism guiding her thoughts about such of her core beliefs as love, nature and free will. Anne, during this later period of her life when she was writing those sonnets where she is questioning William’s love for her; a question which she tries to justify because the “reality” that William did not love her is very painful for her to contemplate. But in these later sonnets, while she does not go so far as to deny her own love for William, she is questioning how little love is reciprocated by William and the pain this causes her. Here, in her use of nature, she turns from nature as benign, toward a nature that is corrupted, especially by a ‘canker’ in the rose (her early metaphor for William untainted by corruption), or weeds turning sour. And then there is the matter of how William attempts to deny her the agency to exercise her free will and the concomitant urging by her for William to exercise his free will in denying his lust and ultimate consummation of this desire with the dark lady of the sonnets.
More to come in Part 2!
