Welcome!
Have a seat.
Your Graphic organizers are due today.
Learning Targets:
-I can read and annotate texts for comprehension.
-I can identify and explain appropriate textual evidence.
Essential Question: How are gender roles reflected in the imagined life of Judith Shakespeare?
Vocabulary Review
-I can identify and explain appropriate textual evidence.
Essential Question: How are gender roles reflected in the imagined life of Judith Shakespeare?
Vocabulary Review
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1XVT0xkK52RiCMpet5ZL6sHApj3nKBM8lRxYMIp_9pqw/edit?usp=sharing
I want you to take out a single sheet of notebook paper and respond to the following statement.
"Identity is the intersection of how you see yourself and how the world sees you."
Do you agree or disagree? Have you had any personal experiences that you can connect with this statement?
After you write out a paragraph-length response, we will direct you to share your with a small group.
Then, the groups will share their thoughts--did you agree or disagree? Why?
The School of Life Virginia Woolf 6:52-8:44 YouTube https://youtu.be/d1W7wqXD_b0?t=6m52s
https://youtu.be/NeEjkAFDLw4?t=9m38s
From “A Room of One’s Own” by Virginia Woolf
Be that as it may, I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works of Shakespeare on the shelf, that the bishop was right at least in this; it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.
- What words does Woolf use to describe the task of writing Shakespearean-quality literature in the Elizabethan era? Why do you think she puts it this way?
Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say.
- Why do you think Woolf says that "facts hard to come by"--what facts?
- Why are they hard to come by?
Shakespeare himself went, very probably—his mother was an heiress—to the grammar school, where he may have learnt Latin—Ovid, Virgil and Horace—and the elements of grammar and logic.
- How does Woolf describe Shakespeare's education?
He was, it is well known, a wild boy who poached rabbits, perhaps shot a deer, and had, rather sooner than he should have done, to marry a woman in the neighbourhood, who bore him a child rather quicker than was right.
- What was Shakespeare like as a young man, according to the text? What kinds of things does she imagine he might have done?
That escapade sent him to seek his fortune in London. He had, it seemed, a taste for the theatre; he began by holding horses at the stage door. Very soon he got work in the theatre, became a successful actor, and lived at the hub of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing everybody, practising his art on the boards, exercising his wits in the streets, and even getting access to the palace of the queen.
- What kinds of experiences did Shakespeare have in London?
Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil.
- How does Woolf describe Judith's education?
She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother’s perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers.
- How did her family react to Judith's interest in reading?
They would have spoken sharply but kindly, for they were substantial people who knew the conditions of life for a woman and loved their daughter—indeed, more likely than not she was the apple of her father’s eye. Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly but was careful to hide them or set fire to them.
- How did her family react to Judith's interest in writing?
- What does Woolf mean by "the conditions of life for a woman"?
Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighbouring woolstapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. He would give her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart? The force of her own gift alone drove her to it.
- What is the meaning of the word betrothed?
- How did Judith react to being "betrothed"?
- How did her father respond to Judith's feelings about being betrothed?
She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer’s night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen. The birds that sang in the hedge were not more musical than she was. She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother’s, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre.
- How does Woolf describe Judith's talent and interest in writing and theatre here?
She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager—a fat, loose-lipped man—guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting—no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress.
- Compare Judith's experience coming to the theatre to that of her brother. How does Woolf imagine others would have reacted to Judith coming to the theatre?
He hinted—you can imagine what.
- What does Woolf imply when she says "he hinted--you can imagine what"?
She could get no training in her craft. Could she even seek her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight?
- Why could she get no training in her craft?
- What do you think Woolf means when she asks, "Could she even seek her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight?"
Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways. At last—for she was very young, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her face, with the same grey eyes and rounded brows—at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so—who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?—killed herself one winter’s night and lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.
- What do you think Woolf means when she says "who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?"
This may be true or it may be false—who can say?—but what is true in it, so it seemed to me, reviewing the story of Shakespeare’s sister as I had made it, is that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.
- Why does Woolf bring up insanity here?
- What is the impact of social pressures on Judith Shakespeare's well-being in this paragraph?
No girl could have walked to London and stood at a stage door and forced her way into the presence of actor-managers without doing herself a violence and suffering an anguish which may have been irrational—for chastity may be a fetish invented by certain societies for unknown reasons—but were none the less inevitable. Chastity had then, it has even now, a religious importance in a woman’s life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest.
- What is chastity? Why does she mention chastity here?
To have lived a free life in London in the sixteenth century would have meant for a woman who was poet and playwright a nervous stress and dilemma which might well have killed her. Had she survived, whatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination.
- What does Woolf mean when she says "had she survived, whatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination?
And undoubtedly, I thought, looking at the shelf where there are no plays by women, her work would have gone unsigned. That refuge she would have sought certainly. It was the relic of the sense of chastity that dictated anonymity to women even so late as the nineteenth century. Currer Bell, George Eliot, George Sand, all the victims of inner strife as their writings prove, sought ineffectively to veil themselves by using the name of a man.
- What does "anonymity" mean? What is Woolf saying about women writers in this paragraph?
Thus they did homage to the convention, which if not implanted by the other sex was liberally encouraged by them (the chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles, himself a much-talked-of man) that publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood.
- What do the words "publicity" and "detestable" mean?
- Who does Woolf say "did homage to the convention...that publicity in women is detestable?"
- What does she mean by this?
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Vocabulary for this week (Quiz Friday, November 18)
- wits (noun) – the ability to think or reason
- forsooth (adverb) – in truth; in fact; indeed
- stoop (verb) – to do something that is not honest, fair, etc.; to bend down or over
- munificence (noun) – the quality or action of giving or bestowing liberally
- ample (adjective) – fully sufficient or more than adequate for the purpose or needs; plentiful; enough
- warrant (noun) – something that serves to give reliable or formal assurance of something; guarantee, pledge, or security
- pretense (noun) – a claim made or implied, especially if it is false
- dowry (noun) – the money, goods, or estate that a wife brings to her husband at marriage
- disallowed (verb) – decided that (something) is not acceptable or valid
- avowed (verb) – openly declared
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