THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 7, 1996 TAG: 9601110546
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 86 lines
Sometimes, like songbirds, books simply happen to people. But they're more likely to be prepared people. Those of us who are unschooled in awareness tend to overlook the landscape.
Take Doris Gwaltney, 63, of Smithfield. Lifetime reader, longtime writer. For upwards of three decades she had been attending the Shakespeare Class, an exclusive weekly gathering of adult women devoted to the study of the Bard. That organization has been meeting every Thursday afternoon from late September to early April since 1905.
So Gwaltney was, in more ways than one, well versed. Three plays from the canon receive close readings each year: ``Hamlet,'' ``Macbeth,'' ``Henry V,'' once more into the breach, dear friends, once more.
Then the former music teacher, mother of three, grandmother of five, chanced upon the following passage from A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf:
Let me imagine . . . what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say . . . as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was.
Eureka. A songbird. A book!
``The idea just came to me,'' Gwaltney said in an interview. ``I began to envision Judith. I started hearing the characters talk.''
She well knew William Shakespeare had a sister, Ann, who lived to adulthood, but almost nothing else is known of her. The Elizabethan playwright also had a daughter, Susanna, and twins, Judith and Hamnet (the boy died young). But no sister Judith.
What if Judith had actually lived?
What if she had attempted to follow in her brother's footsteps, traveling to London to join the theater and write plays?
Even better than that: What if she, not brother Will, wrote ``Romeo and Juliet''?
Nothing stood between this intriguing notion and a finished manuscript except two solid years of applied effort.
``It was,'' maintains first novelist Gwaltney, ``really fun.''
The bawdy, knockabout evidence is out with Shakespeare's Sister (Hampton Roads Publishing Co., 256 pp., $11.95), a romp of a read.
Young Judith finds herself at odds with her father. John Shakespeare has arranged a marriage contract for her with an affluent but unsightly old landowner. Nonsense, says Judith.
Guess again, says her father.
Her mother, Mary, resorts to catechism:
``Love, honor and succor your father and your mother. Submit yourself to all your governors, teachers, spiritual pastors. Order yourself lowly and reverently to all your betters.''
Judith's response:
``Order myself? Submit myself?''
Not only no, but no in thunder.
Judith escapes her parents and heads for the big city, no easy matter for a woman disguised as a boy and traveling solo in ragtag 16th century England; the road is fraught with pox, peril and a vagabond rogue named Arthur Amboid. Errol Flynn might have played him:
``His eyes were a brilliant blue, his hair gold as sunshine. His facial features were chiseled fine, as was the symmetry of his entire person. Yet Judith read in his eyes the word liar.''
But in the course of things Judith finds true love and, if not complete literary credit, artistic fulfillment. Her relentless drive for authorship is not unlike her creator's. Shakespeare's Sister went through several drafts, agents and editors.
``I had to tone down the Elizabethan English,'' Gwaltney admitted, ``but I kept in little touches like `fripperer.' ''
Fripperer: a seller of showy finery.
Does one detect a feminist theme in this text?
``Absolutely,'' Gwaltney said. ``In past times, the most gifted of women had very little chance. Talent was nipped in the bud, and that is still happening in many places in the world today. If Judith were alive now, she would be in the forefront of the women's movement, not only to be able to do what she wanted but to make it possible for others, too.''
Gwaltney herself has never felt oppressed and, in fact, is appreciative of the enduring support of her husband of 37 years, Atwill, retired secretary-treasurer of Gwaltney Inc. pork products.
She dedicated Shakespeare's Sister, ``with love and gratitude,'' to him. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. by CNB