Judith Shakespeare’s Brother

Abstract Virginia Woolf’s account of Shakespeare’s fictional sister, Judith, in A Room of One’s Own offers a productive vantage point for investigating questions of gender, authority, and inheritance in Shakespeare’s late romances. These plays are notable for their formal hybridity and their acute attention to the role of women, particularly daughters, within the patriarchal family and its attendant economic systems. They share Woolf’s interest in the economic, inheritable underpinnings of female authority, the social forms of a patrilineal culture that help demarcate the possibilities for women as subjects. Shakespeare adapts the lost-child device from Roman new comedy to make female loss central to his tragicomic plots—much as it is to Woolf’s tragic narrative of Judith. New-comic plotting offers a provisional, conservative solution to the historical problem of the heiress, but Shakespeare’s romances also at times imagine alternative configurations of genealogical knowledge.