Virginia Woolf’s Shakespeare’s Sister

The expected role of a woman in Shakespearian time was to be a man’s possession. By this I mean that women were nothing compared to men. They were just a part of life that was not given any credit, nor very much acknowledgment. “But what I find deplorable, I continued, looking about the bookshelves again, is that nothing is known about women before the eighteen century”(Woolf 768). Here Woolf states that there is no information about women in this period; this right here shows the presence of women in Shakespearian time. Women were not considered intelligent or something that would have thought, they were beings that men beat and possessed, that had no say in the matter. Another point of Woolf’s that made me understand the low credibility women has was when she said, “…I thought of that old gentleman, who is dead now, but was a bishop, I think, who declared that it was impossible for any woman, past, present, or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare” (Woolf 768). This does not surprise me at all because traditionally from the past men have always been thought of as superior, however what shocked me was how the bishop also states that cats cannot go to heaven, even though they might have souls. This together kind of baffled me, but I feel like Woolf was trying to prove the point that this bishop tells someone that cat’s can not go to heaven, when this Bishop had not gone to heaven himself, so how can he say if cat s go to heaven or not, just like how can he state that a woman of the future or even the past could have been a genius like Shakespeare. Basically what I got out of it was that if you do not know is what to come or every little thing about the past then how can you make such a bias comment.


Works Cited
Woolf, Virginia. “Shakespeare’s Sister.” A World of Ideas: Essential Reading for College Writers. Ed. Lee A Jacobus. Trans. Stephen Mitchell. 7th ed. New York; Bedford St. Martins, 2006. Pp 764-776.