Judith Quiney - Literary References

Literary References

Judith is the subject of the 2003 novel My Father Had a Daughter: Judith Shakespeare's Tale by Grace Tiffany. She is portrayed in William Black's Judith Shakespeare: Her Love Affairs and Other Adventures, published serially in Harper's Magazine in 1884. She is one of the main characters in Edward Bond's 1973 play Bingo, which portrays the last years of her father, in retirement in Stratford on Avon. She also appears in one of the final stories in Neil Gaiman's graphic novel, The Sandman. Gaiman compared Judith with the character Miranda from Shakespeare's The Tempest.

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf created a character, "Judith Shakespeare", although she is supposed to be Shakespeare's sister rather than his daughter. Besides the similar names and setting, there is no other direct connection between Judith, Shakespeare's daughter, and Woolf's creation, and in fact Shakespeare's sister was named Joan. In Woolf's story Shakespeare's sister is denied the education of her brother despite her obvious talent. When her father tries to marry her off, she runs away to join a theatre company but is ultimately rejected because of her gender. She becomes pregnant, is abandoned by her partner, and commits suicide. Woolf's Judith was created in an attempt to fill a historical gap. Woolf intended to make a point about the struggle that a female poet and playwright would have had in the Elizabethan age. Woolf speculated as to why there were so few talented women from that time. "What I find deplorable," she observed, "is that nothing is known about women before the eighteenth century."