The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines | ||||||||
John Crowley | ||||||||
Subterranean Press, 92 pages | ||||||||
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A review by Georges T. Dodds
Woven in there is a good bit of detail about speculations and arguments regarding Shakespeare's identity which the
less literarily inclined might find tedious, but are quite interesting and much easier to take when presented in 92
pages of John Crowley than the near 1000 pages of Ignatius Donnelly [The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher
in Shakespeare's Plays (1888)].
The title of the novella is drawn from a collection of the same title published in 1850-1851 by Mary Cowden
Clarke, who along with her husband was a noted Shakespeare scholar. In her The Girlhood of Shakespeare's
Heroines, Mrs. Clarke imagined the childhood of Shakespeare's heroines in a series of
tales (e.g. "The Girlhood of Ophelia") which were groundbreaking
in their portray of free-spirited women, and of a number of women's issues which were not spoken of at the
time (see here). Similarly to Clarke's emancipated Victorian
women, Crowley presents the main female character as a free-spirited young woman, born perhaps ten years too
early — having her Summer of Love in 1959 instead of 1969 — who doesn't fit in with the role she is
supposed to fill in society. I'm not entirely sure what her rather unfortunate ultimate fate is meant to represent,
perhaps a comment about the ravages of age from an author now in his sixties, perhaps some parallel with the not
always happy fates of Shakespeare's adult heroines, but it is not incongruent with the rest of the tale. Whether
the story has a autobiographical feel because it is so in part, or whether it is simply well enough written to
appear to be so I'm not sure, but certain the author conveys a great deal of emotion, in this brief but delightful tale.
Georges Dodds is a research scientist in vegetable crop physiology, who for close to 25 years has read and collected close to 2000 titles of predominantly pre-1950 science-fiction and fantasy, both in English and French. He writes columns on early imaginative literature for WARP, the newsletter/fanzine of the Montreal Science Fiction and Fantasy Association and maintains a site reflecting his tastes in imaginative literature. |
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