Anne Shakespeare's Feminism is humanism
Anne Shakespeare's feminism has its roots in Renaissance humanism, that was at its most fundamental level, concerned with what it means to be human. And it is this human condition that Anne explores through her plays and poems. The very idea that she does this through engaging humanism from a feminist perspective should not come as any surprise. Her female characters, and indeed as her own feminist voice she uses in her Sonnets attest, the female lived experience goes to the heart of what it means to be human; and fallibility of this humanity is shown in both its positive and negatives aspects in both female and male characters as they contest those forces that would strip them of that humanity. And one key ingredient in this fight against the forces stripping away the humanity of the individual is to be found through each actor exercising their agency of free will.
Nowhere is this contest more openly engaged in than seen through Anne's tragedies. Here we are witness to jealousy, pride, 'vaulting ambition', procrastination, and familial dysfunction. I will leave it up to each reader to match the tragedy with the key word! But in each instance humanism, free will, love and nature combine to force us to witness the raging storms of the psyche as it battles those forces against which they throw themselves in vain. Neither fate nor fortune can match the intensity of the contest of the individual's fight with forces arraigned against them (and within their own spirit, soul and body). And, it is their bodies which carry the scars of this conflict, internally and externally; and it is their spirit which will determine the outcome. In Summers (forthcoming), I define spirit as being one element of the tri-partite selfhood consisting of soul, spirit and body. And the spirit is that part of the self which we would normally call one's temperament, or character.
For Anne, there is no difference between the strength of spirit between a man or a woman; they are both human and thus both are subject to the same fallibilities as the other. What is different is how each gender deals with these forces arraigned against them. But Anne does not shy away from acknowledging that the destructive character of a male cannot be found within the breast of a woman (see Lady Macbeth, Goneril and Reagan, for instance). Indeed, whatever traits are to be found in a man can also also be found in a woman because they are both human. Which leads one to the conclusion that Anne's feminine voice encompasses all genders because at bottom, all genders are human and subject to the same fallibilities, foibles and extremes; all genders are capable of great deeds and despotic deeds; all genders elicit both sympathy and horror in us as audience because they are (quoting a famous metaphor) "holding a mirror up to our own nature's".
More to come.
