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NOTES FROM PROFESSOR ANDREA SUNUNU
Teaching ENG 451, Senior Seminar, in the Spring of 2020 was a special privilege as twelve intrepid literature majors braved the challenges of COVID-19 by fashioning their own “blazing worlds.”
We revisited the fictional Judith Shakespeare in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) before studying 16th- and 17th-century writing both by and about women. As we read poetry, nonfiction prose, and drama, we examined the extent to which early modern representations of women challenge traditional gender roles in a patriarchal culture that not only shaped women but also dared them to resist the construct of woman as "chaste, silent, and obedient." As we analyzed relationships between women and men in early modern texts, we paid close attention to the emergence of subverters and self-fashioners in the portrayal of women. Throughout the semester we tested the validity of Woolf's insistence that "any great figure of the past . . . is an inheritor as well as an originator."
I began the semester with a jingle in which I tried to capture the multiple roles represented by the women whose works we would read alongside poems by Wyatt, Surrey, Spenser, Sidney, and Donne and four of Shakespeare’s plays: Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Winter’s Tale:
Poet, Playwright, Humanist,
Translator and Polemicist,
Biographer and Essayist,
Panegyrist, Satirist,
Elegist and Sonneteer,
Puritan and Cavalier,
Critic and Observer Rare,
Daughter, Sister, Niece and Heir,
Aristocrat and Commoner,
Subverter and Self-fashioner,
Editor, Inheritor,
Mother and Progenitor,
Dreamer, Martyr, Courtier, Wit,
Authors of texts by Women Writt,
Muse and Patron, Friend and Queen,
Women viewers, Women seen.
The research that underlies each student’s timeline reveals how privileged we are to have evidence unavailable to Woolf nearly a century ago when she gave Shakespeare an imaginary sister, who “never wrote a word.” The twelve students who created the timelines for this project have helped to fulfill Woolf’s wish for the dead Judith Shakespeare. At the end of A Room of One’s Own, first addressed to an audience of Cambridge women at Newnham and Girton in October 1928, Woolf asserts of Shakespeare’s fictional sister,
Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh.
By revisiting Shakespeare’s sister in 2020, I told my students on the first day of class, let’s make Woolf’s wish come true.
With chronologies for Sidney and Donne as models, students wrote a brief chronology for a woman writer; then, with invaluable help from Tenzer Technology Center at DePauw University, they transformed their chronology into an interactive timeline using Timeline JS.
CLICK ON THE IMAGES BELOW TO SEE THE INTERACTIVE TIMELINES
Anne Askew (1521-1546)
by Salma Allam '20
Elizabeth Tudor, Queen Elizabeth (1533-1603)
by Vanessa Balis '20
Mary Sidney Herbert (1561-1621)
by Meaghan Etling '20
Aemilia Lanyer (1569-1645) ***
by Maxwell Cron '20
Lady Arbella Stuart (1575-1615)
by Kyle Munz '20
Elizabeth Cary (1585-1639)
by Emma Krug '20
Lady Mary Wroth (1587-ca. 1653)
by Emma Houston '20
Lady Anne Clifford (1590-1676)
by Beatrice Harvey '20
Rachel Speght (1597-after 1630)
by Madeline Smith '20
Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672)
by Elizabeth Cottingham '20
Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673)
by Austin Lewis '20
Katherine Philips (1632-1664)
by Katarzyna Pukala '20
*** Errata for entry on Aemilia Lanyer (1569-1645)
1611 Heading:
Space needed between Judaeorum and “is.”
“Is published” should be un-italicized.
1611 Entry:
––sentence 1: Comma needed between “her only work” and Salve Deus.
––sentences 2-6: Should be un-italicized.
––sentence 2: Inaccurate and ungrammatical second sentence, in which “women” should be “woman,” should be replaced with this sentence:
It includes “The Description of Cooke-ham,” the first country-house poem written by a woman in English, preceding by five years Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” (Woods, Textual Introduction xxxix).
––sentence 4: Comma needed between “Clifford” and “authors # 3, 5, and 8.”
––sentence 5: An “also” should follow “but.”
––sentence 6, end: xlvii.) should be xlvii).
1617 Entry, line 2:
Comma needed before “but.”
1619-1644 Entry:
“Reclusiviity” Should be replaced with “Reclusiveness”
--sentence 2: Should be un-italicized.
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