Why William and Judith Both Need Their Own Rooms

Abstract

I TAKE THE FIRST EPIGRAPH FOR THIS ESSAY from one of the student responses to my teaching of The Winter's Tale with The Tragedy of Mariam. The second quotes a statement in Ann Rosalind Jones and Betty S. Travitsky's introduction to a special issue of Women's Studies, which included papers presented at a session of the 1989 Modern Language Association convention. The subject of my essay is the space between these points of view rather than the particular pedagogical strategies I enacted in the classroom as I juxtaposed these two plays for a group of fifteen graduate students. I will admit that discovering this space has discomfited me. This essay is partly an overt professional activity, in that I am writing it for eventual publication; it is partly a personal and private act as well, in that, through the composition process, I hope to understand better these apparently contradictory points of view so that I might more effectively engage them in the classroom. This is an unusual rhetorical position for me, and I feel somewhat display as I mediate these two writing tasks. From its beginning, however, the feminist perspective has recognized the interweaving of public and private, and I believe that this conjunction allows me access to the questions raised by the epigraphs' divergent viewpoints. Given our own knowledge of the early modern period, can Virginia Woolf's postulation of a Shakespeare-a woman with the artistic genius of William Shakespeare whose culture denied her both education and employment-be valid? What kind of Judith Shakespeare can we imagine? What follows is a record of my experience teaching Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam with Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale in a graduate seminar on Shakespeare. The context is significant, for this is probably an infrequent, possibly rare, strategy by which to introduce Mariam to students,