What about Hamnet’s twin, Judith?

JEFFREY ST, CLAIR  

+ Chloe Zhao’s film Hamnet wrenched forth a torrent of tears from most of us, as would almost any account of such a cruelly abbreviated life. (Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway’s only son died when he was 11.) But what about Hamnet’s twin, Judith? The most erudite and loquacious (he did tend to go and on) man in English letters, the man who added by far the most new words to the language–more than Milton, Dickens and Joyce combined–didn’t even bother to educate his second daughter, leaving her unable to read his sonnets, epic poems and plays, leaving her illiterate, incapable of writing her own name, so that she had to sign her signature with a “pigtail” mark and have a lawyer or scribe spell it out for her. Another point in favor of my man, Kit Marlowe…

+ This strange to the point of inhumane decision by the glovemaker’s son of a  from Avon is potentially revelatory because there are many literate women in the plays and poems, who read and write letters, in particular: Lady Macbeth, Lear’s daughters, Juliet, Rosalind in As You Like It (a gender-bending play that probably can’t be performed in Florida, Texas and Oklahoma), Ophelia, Desademona and, of course, Miranda, who is tutored by her “father” Prospero, an education which doesn’t keep her from falling for the first shipwreck sailor she sees. Then, of course, there are the sonnets, which, if the “Dark Lady” is really a lady, and not an “unfair” young man (as opposed to the “fair youth”), you would expect her to be able to read. All of this lends some pretty heavy weight to those who contend that Shakespeare wasn’t the main author of the plays attributed to him…

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