Ramie Targoff is the author of the book Shakespeare's Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance. Her other books include Renaissance Woman. She is the Jehuda Reinharz Professor of the Humanities, Professor of English, and Co-Chair of Italian Studies at Brandeis University, and she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Q: You begin Shakespeare's Sisters with a discussion of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Why did you choose to start there?
A: The impetus for the whole book was a response to Virginia Woolf’s seminal feminist essay. I always teach it. It provokes me to think about why Virginia Woolf was so unaware of the talents of the women I write about in the book. The answer is that they were all out of print; they had been forgotten. She dismissed some of the women that she didn’t know about. She was aware of Anne Clifford but was condescending toward her.
The power of that text—it had a foundational role in how we thought about women’s writing. She was right that women had a hard time compared to men. She was wrong about what it meant to be a woman writer at the time of Shakespeare. In a funny way, it was meant on her end as a feminist intervention, but it shut down some of our understanding. My title came from her; it’s a direct response. There wasn’t just one [actual] sister; there were a lot of hypothetical sisters.
Q: You write about Queen Elizabeth I in the book—how would you compare her to the other women you write about?
A: She had a very demanding day job! Not by vocation did she imagine herself as a writer. But she was very important to aspiring women writers of the period--that the Queen put herself forward as a thinker. She wrote sophisticated poems and was a very accomplished translator. She spoke good Italian and French and knew Latin. She was very scholarly as a girl.
The intellectual role model she provided—she was held up as an extraordinary talent. She gave the women I talk about a shining example of what women could do, as a complement to her political acumen. Having her pave the way and break the glass ceiling was super important to the women I wrote about.
Q: How did you choose the women to write about?
A: I’ve taught at Brandeis for 24 years. I teach a course on women writers in the Renaissance, and I committed to focus in depth on four writers. They had to be roughly contemporaries of Shakespeare because I wanted the structure of Shakespeare’s sisters. They had to have published works or works that circulated so people knew about them.
That brought me to six writers, and [to narrow it down] I chose a playwright, a Biblical translator, a poet, and a historian.
Q: In The New York Times, Tina Brown wrote of the book, “Targoff’s intent is to scrape away the layer of literary obscurity from Shakespeare’s sisters and present the pentimento as transcendent survivors. Their work indeed lives on. And yet, I was left with the crushing sensation of women who tried to flee but were buried alive.” What do you think of that description?
A: Tina Brown was particularly struck by the struggles of one woman, Aemilia Lanyer. She was the first woman in the 17th century to write a book of original poetry with her name on the front, which was an extraordinary accomplishment.
On the other hand, Tina Brown was expressing anger toward men and toward the system about what happened to Aemilia Lanyer. She seems to have struggled, to have been involved in lawsuits, to have been financially unstable. She didn’t establish herself as a literary giant like Ben Jonson and other male figures of the time.
We celebrate women being able to publish, but people at the time questioned whether they could have written the books themselves. Aemilia Lanyer feels like the one who lost out the most.
The impetus behind Tina Brown’s remark is a feminist one—yes, they were survivors, but my God, it took a lot out of them. There was a lot of sacrifice that their male counterparts didn’t have to make. I hope I make it clear that this wasn’t an easy path. It was hard and steep.
Q: Given that you’ve taught this material for many years, did you need to do much additional research to write the book?
A: In teaching a class like that, one doesn’t talk much about the writers’ biographies. The book combines literary history and biography, and their childhood homes, the circumstances of their life stories, I didn’t know enough about that to write a book.
I’m an advocate for primary sources, letters—the bulk of my research was done by going to archives. England is very strong on literary and family archives, and it was terrific to be able to do this. Going through the documents that survived, I had access to the women’s voices.
I also visited the places they lived. To describe where Mary Sidney grew up, I had to go to Ludlow Castle. This is my second book of this kind—the first was an Italian woman’s biography, and I tried to go everywhere she lived. To conjure for readers their circumstances, I needed to experience them firsthand. I spent one semester on sabbatical traveling around, and made additional research trips.
Q: Did you learn anything that particularly surprised you?
A: I was really struck by Anne Clifford’s set of castles and their physical location in North Yorkshire and the Lake District. I was amazed by the castle I got to sleep in, Appleby Castle, which is now a hotel. I supposedly slept in her actual bed!
Feeling the landscape was so convincing once I’d read her diaries and seen her attachment to the landscape. Her mother was her best friend, and she set up a monument to her mother—it was the most moving experience to find it. The site was where she had last said goodbye to her mother. The monument is in the middle of an open field. Standing there I could feel the poignancy of that farewell.. Clifford was very attached to place.
Also going to the Chancery Court Archives in London—it’s on the top floor of the National Archives. I was opening a box with Aemilia Lanyer’s lawsuit records, and when I opened the box, dust fell out, and I felt it was 17th century dust. The box was the size of a table for six, and it had to be wheeled over on a cart. I was reading the testimony of someone from 400 years ago and touching those pages—experiencing that, the material artifacts, was very powerful.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m just starting on a prequel. When I was writing Shakespeare’s Sisters, I got interested in the older generation at the court of Henry VIII. You hear about the tragic endings of Henry’s earlier wives, but there was a pretty sizeable group of intellectual women who survived his queens. Many of them were painted by Hans Holbein. I am interested in the circle around Katherine Parr, Henry VIII’s last wife, who survived him. It was a circle of strong Protestant educated women who were fighting back against tyrannical rule.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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