Lavinia turns to a book when she can no longer speak. In Titus Andronicus 4.1, after her attackers have cut out her tongue and severed her hands, she finds the story of Philomela in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and uses it to tell her family what happened. Her father already knows her as a teacher of poetry and rhetoric to young Lucius; the scene makes her learning part of how she communicates.
TITUS
Ah, boy, Cornelia never with more care
Read to her sons than she hath read to thee
Sweet poetry and Tully’s Orator.
— Titus Andronicus 4.1
“Tully” is Cicero: Lavinia has read rhetoric as well as poetry to the boy. Titus offers her the choice of his library. When she selects the Ovid, Lucius identifies another woman behind the book:
YOUNG LUCIUS
Grandsire, ’tis Ovid’s Metamorphosis.
My mother gave it me.
— Titus Andronicus 4.11
The mother gives the book; the aunt teaches from books and finds in one the means to make herself understood. In her 1996 study “A Woman of Letters,” Sara Eaton describes Lavinia as “the educated and humanist aristocratic woman, the courtier’s lady.” Eaton examines both her learning and the violent constraints imposed upon her. Lavinia’s education is part of the action: she subsequently writes the names of her attackers in the sand.2
Women with books
In Cymbeline, the king’s daughter Imogen reads in bed until almost midnight. Her husband, Posthumus, is away; Iachimo, who has wagered that he can seduce her, has gained admission to her bedroom hidden in a trunk. Before she falls asleep, she tells her attendant:
IMOGEN
I have read three hours then. Mine eyes are weak.
[She hands the Lady her book.]
Fold down the leaf where I have left. To bed.
Take not away the taper; leave it burning.
— Cymbeline 2.23
When Iachimo emerges, he notices that the page is turned down at the story of Tereus and Philomela—the same story Lavinia uses to disclose her rape. In her 2005 doctoral thesis, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Book, Charlotte Scott examines these two scenes together. Lavinia brings the book into a family’s attempt to understand her; Imogen’s private reading is interrupted by an intruder who steals her bracelet and records details of her bedroom and body to fabricate evidence of adultery.4
Learning also enters Shakespeare’s courtship scenes. In The Taming of the Shrew 3.1, Lucentio disguises himself as a tutor to Bianca, the daughter of a wealthy Paduan. He turns a Latin lesson into a declaration of love; she answers through the same pretended translation, setting her own terms. Her lessons in language and music become the setting for her courtship. Before the lesson, she tells her competing tutors:
BIANCA
Why, gentlemen, you do me double wrong
To strive for that which resteth in my choice.
I am no breeching scholar in the schools.
I’ll not be tied to hours, nor ’pointed times,
But learn my lessons as I please myself.
— The Taming of the Shrew 3.15
Ophelia’s book serves a different purpose. In Hamlet 3.1, her father Polonius and the king arrange to overhear her encounter with Hamlet. Polonius tells her to read so that the activity will explain why she is alone, then speaks of “devotion’s visage” and “pious action.” A young woman reading a devotional book provides a plausible cover for the meeting. The book’s title is not specified.6
These four plays place books directly in women’s activities: Lavinia teaches and consults one; Imogen reads for hours; Bianca takes part in a lesson; Ophelia is instructed to appear absorbed in reading. Elsewhere, women read other kinds of texts. Rosalind and Celia read Orlando’s love poems in As You Like It 3.2, and Beatrice’s own poem is produced in Much Ado About Nothing 5.4. Hero identifies it as her cousin’s handwriting.7
Letters in women’s hands
Women write, commission or read letters in at least fourteen of the thirty-eight plays surveyed here. Some letters are read onstage; others arrive already written, or their reading is reported. They carry marriage proposals, political news, private instructions and invitations to murder.8
| Play | Woman and letter scene |
|---|---|
| All’s Well That Ends Well | The Countess and Helen read Bertram’s letters. (3.2) |
| As You Like It | Phoebe writes; Rosalind reads her letter. (4.3) |
| Cymbeline | Imogen reads Posthumus’s letters. (1.6; 3.2; 3.4) |
| 3 Henry VI | Queen Margaret reads political news. (3.3) |
| Henry VIII | Katherine commissions Patience to write to the king. (4.2) |
| King Lear | Goneril writes to Edmund; Cordelia’s reading is reported. (4.6; 4.3) |
| Love’s Labour’s Lost | The princess and her ladies discuss the letters they have received. (5.2) |
| Macbeth | Lady Macbeth reads her husband’s letter. (1.5) |
| The Merchant of Venice | Jessica writes secretly to Lorenzo. (2.3–4) |
| The Merry Wives of Windsor | Mistresses Page and Ford read and compare Falstaff’s letters. (2.1) |
| Pericles | Thaisa writes to her father about marrying Pericles. (2.5) |
| The Two Gentlemen of Verona | Julia reads; Sylvia has Valentine write her letter. (1.2; 2.1) |
| Troilus and Cressida | Cressida sends a letter to Troilus. (5.3) |
| Twelfth Night | Maria writes in imitation of Olivia’s hand. (2.3; 2.5; 5.1) |
In The Merry Wives of Windsor 2.1, Mistress Page and Mistress Ford compare the love letters Falstaff has sent them. The women recognize that he has reused the same text, changing only their names:
MISTRESS PAGE
Letter for letter, but that the name of
Page and Ford differs!
— The Merry Wives of Windsor 2.19
Mistress Page imagines a stock of copies with blank spaces for their recipients’ names. Their reading exposes Falstaff’s method and starts their retaliation. Chapter 25 follows their treatment of him.
In Twelfth Night, the successful forger is herself a woman. Maria, Olivia’s attendant, explains how she will make Malvolio believe that his mistress loves him:
MARIA
I can write very like my
lady your niece; on a forgotten matter, we can
hardly make distinction of our hands.
— Twelfth Night 2.310
The letter is Maria’s composition in Olivia’s hand, not a letter written by Olivia. When Olivia sees it in Twelfth Night 5.1, she recognizes Maria’s handwriting. The plot depends upon two women’s familiar, distinguishable writing habits—and Maria’s ability to imitate another hand.
Women also have letters written for them. In Henry VIII 4.2, the dying Katherine of Aragon asks her attendant Patience about the letter she has commissioned:
KATHERINE
… Patience, is that letter
I caused you write yet sent away?
— Henry VIII 4.211
Katherine gives it to the imperial ambassador Capuchius to deliver to the king. Her requests concern their daughter Mary, the marriage prospects of her women and the unpaid wages of her servants. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona 2.1, Sylvia makes her suitor Valentine write a letter to an unnamed beloved, then gives it back to him: he has unknowingly written to himself. In Love’s Labour’s Lost 4.2, Jaquenetta asks the curate Nathaniel to read a letter for her. Shakespeare includes women who write fluently, women who direct another person’s pen, and women who use a reader.12
Two further scenes widen the picture. Cleopatra calls for ink and paper to send Antony a greeting every day (Antony and Cleopatra 1.5). In Coriolanus 2.1, Volumnia announces letters from her son to herself, the state and his wife, Virgilia, and cites news from Titus Lartius’s letter. Letter-bearing matters too: Isabella carries a letter the disguised duke hands her to deliver to Friar Peter in Measure for Measure 4.3. These activities are kept separate from the fourteen confirmed examples in the table.13
The women in Neville’s family
Neville married into a family whose women translated, collected books and wrote to ministers. His wife Anne Killigrew was Katherine Cooke’s daughter. Katherine’s sisters included Anne Bacon, the translator of John Jewel’s Apologia, and Mildred Cecil, a donor of books to St John’s College, Cambridge. Their family relationships and surviving work are described in Chapter 3. When Anne Neville later petitioned Robert Cecil, she was addressing her first cousin: their mothers, Katherine and Mildred, were sisters.
On 22 June 1601, Anne’s stepmother Jael Killigrew wrote in French to Thomas Windebank about her naturalization. Her postscript included Anne and her sister Dorothy Seymour:
Madame Neville et ma fille Seymour retournent aussi leurs recommandations…
Madame Neville and my daughter Seymour also return their greetings…14
The following chapter develops this family comparison through Katherine’s Latin poem to Mildred and Bianca’s Latin lesson in The Taming of the Shrew.
William Camden, the antiquary and historian, also wrote a Latin epitaph for Katherine Cooke Killigrew, Anne’s mother, who died in 1583.15
The family’s surviving papers also show women negotiating marriages, choosing estate officers and seeking help for a suspended preacher. Phyllis Rackin’s Shakespeare and Women (2005) places such work within the substantial economic responsibilities of early modern women, including women who controlled property and managed households and estates.16
“This book is mine Mary Sidney”
Mary Dudley Sidney (c.1530–1586), mother of Philip Sidney, Robert Sidney and the poet Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, left her claim to a manuscript in verse. On 28 November 1552 she wrote in a fifteenth-century copy of John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes:
This book is mine Mary Sidney.
If it [be] found before it be lost,
Let them that find it of it make no boast
In saying they found it before it was lost,
For of such gain is like to come much pain.17
The warning is a book curse: a would-be finder is told not to profit from her loss. The manuscript later belonged to the Audley End collection. Yale acquired it in 2018, and it is now Beinecke MS 1222. A panel of sixteenth-century leather, preserved in its later binding, bears her initials “M.S.”
Christie’s identifies a faint “Elizabeth N[…]” below Mary’s inscription with Elizabeth Bacon Neville, the ambassador’s stepmother, and suggests a gift from Mary. That remains the catalogue’s interpretation. Neville’s mother, Elizabeth Gresham Neville, is another possible identification; neither the woman’s identity nor the manner of transfer is settled here.18
Mary was the mother of Neville’s travelling companion Robert Sidney and of Philip Sidney, whose letters discuss Neville and Savile’s studies (Chapter 2). The manuscript preserves a woman’s signed ownership of English poetry within that Sidney family.
![Mary Dudley Sidney’s ownership leaf, dated 28 November 1552. John Lydgate, Fall of Princes, Beinecke MS 1222, preliminary leaf [ii]v. Yale University Library, image 16655103.](/assets/3bd7700d3b70f24c-full.jpg)
Women writing to Neville
On 3 November 1604, Neville’s stepmother Elizabeth Bacon, by then Lady Periam, wrote to him from Greenland about appointing a steward. She opened “Good son” and explained that she was “not yet resolved who to make my steward.” She knew that “the tenants have been badly used.” Her letter also promised help to Neville and his friends:
I desire you make this account of me, that wherein I may pleasure you or any friend of yours, you shall find me as ready as you shall wish or desire.19
Neville’s sister Katherine, wife of Edmund Doyly of Shottisham, consulted him about a marriage for her son. In a letter dated 30 January, probably 1605, she described abandoning one proposed match because the executor would not make the girl’s estate clear. Another proposal, involving a daughter of Sir Robert Jermyn, required care over age and money. Her husband feared that the expected provision would exceed what they could afford, with other children to support. Katherine wanted Neville’s advice. She then turned to a public cause:
Good brother, let me entreat you if by any means you can procure the liberty of a very worthy preacher here in the city of Norwich which is suspended.
The preacher was Thomas Newhouse of St Andrew’s, Norwich. Katherine reported that his parishioners were willing to contribute money to obtain relief and asked whether Neville could help.20
Anne’s sister Dorothy Killigrew Seymour also wrote about religion, family business and Parliament. In a letter of 18 January, probably 1605, she hoped Parliament’s postponement would allow Neville to visit Bath for his troublesome leg. She asked for news of a family matter in which he had helped, then expressed her fear about its outcome:
I fear the end of this matter will be the fulfilling of the proverb that might will overcome right.
She also reported ministers losing their livings. Parliament’s timetable, religious disputes and family interests met in the same letter.21
Anne’s appeals
During Neville’s disgrace after the Essex rising, Anne wrote to Thomas Windebank, the clerk of the signet and their neighbour, asking him to approach Cecil. Her letter of 6 March 1600/1 acknowledged Cecil’s insistence on impartiality but urged compassion:
From my heart I reverence his sincerity: but love, a thing approved by God himself, covereth a multitude of infirmities.
Latin formed part of the same plea. Anne wrote “perii quoad hoc mundum”—“I am lost as far as this world is concerned”—as she described her dependence on Cecil’s help. Her movement between Latin, religious argument and family obligation shows the resources she could bring to a letter. Asking Windebank to polish her speech did not prevent her from constructing a forceful argument of her own.
She ended by asking Windebank to improve the presentation of her appeal:
My trust remaineth now in you my excellent friend, that you will polish my rough-hewn speech proceeding from a mind that never knew how to dissemble.22
Anne also addressed Cecil directly. In a petition endorsed 23 May 1602 she sought Neville’s release from the Tower, describing the damage imprisonment had done to his health:
I can bear the loss of anything, so I lose not him.
Her increasing deafness, she explained, was why she wrote instead of attending Cecil herself. It had also hindered a personal appeal to the queen. She was nevertheless prepared to present a petition if Cecil advised it, and asked him to tell her bearer what it should contain. Chapter 7 follows her efforts during Neville’s imprisonment.23
Notes and sources
William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, 4.1, Folger Shakespeare Library. Cornelia was the mother of the Gracchi. The scene establishes Lavinia’s reading and teaching, but does not call Ovid her favourite book.↩︎
Sara Eaton, “A Woman of Letters: Lavinia in Titus Andronicus,” in Shirley Nelson Garner and Madelon Sprengnether, eds., Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender (Indiana University Press, 1996), pp.54–74; text reproduced by eNotes. Eaton relates Lavinia’s education to contemporary humanist ideals and their restrictions on learned women.↩︎
Shakespeare, Cymbeline, 2.2, Folger Shakespeare Library. Iachimo identifies “The tale of Tereus” and the point “Where Philomel gave up”; the dialogue does not name the volume’s author or title.↩︎
Charlotte Scott, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Book (PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2005), chapter II, pp.25–64, especially pp.48–56; Warwick Research Archive Portal. Scott identifies Imogen’s book as Ovid’s Metamorphoses and also discusses Bianca and Ophelia as readers.↩︎
Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, 3.1, Folger Shakespeare Library.↩︎
Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.1, Folger Shakespeare Library. The devotional character of the book is inferred from Polonius’s accompanying words; no particular prayer book is named.↩︎
Shakespeare, As You Like It, 3.2; Much Ado About Nothing, 5.4, Folger Shakespeare Library. Beatrice’s poem is not counted as a letter. The supposed letter-writing described in Much Ado 2.3 forms part of the deception of Benedick and is not counted as an actual event.↩︎
The table gives a conservative minimum from the thirty-eight plays in the Folger Shakespeare texts, including the collaborative Pericles, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Each play counts once. Writing, commissioning and reading qualify whether enacted or explicitly established by dialogue; Maria’s forgery counts under her name. The women’s comments on their received letters establish their reading in Love’s Labour’s Lost 5.2. Mere receipt, carriage, preparations to write, petitions, poems and metaphorical “reading” are excluded from this letter count. The four book examples are a separate minimum, not four additional plays to add to the fourteen. Act and scene references in the table identify the evidence, not every occurrence in each play. Folger’s King Lear combines quarto and Folio material; Cordelia’s reading in 4.3 is in the quarto-only scene, but Goneril’s letter in 4.6 independently qualifies the play for the count.↩︎
Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, 2.1, Folger Shakespeare Library. The quotation is prose, as is Maria’s statement from Twelfth Night below.↩︎
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, 2.3 and 5.1, Folger Shakespeare Library. Olivia recognizes the forged hand as Maria’s; the women’s hands are similar, not literally indistinguishable in all circumstances.↩︎
Shakespeare, Henry VIII, 4.2, Folger Shakespeare Library. The omitted beginning of the verse line is “Banished the kingdom.” Katherine says she caused Patience to write; the scene does not establish whether she dictated every word.↩︎
Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 2.1; Love’s Labour’s Lost, 4.2, Folger Shakespeare Library. Jaquenetta’s recourse to a reader is not by itself proof that she could read nothing.↩︎
Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, 1.5; Coriolanus, 2.1; Measure for Measure, 4.3, Folger Shakespeare Library. Cleopatra’s request establishes preparations for writing; Volumnia’s knowledge of a letter’s contents does not establish who read it aloud or privately. Queen Margaret reads petitions in 2 Henry VI 1.3; that is another kind of written document, excluded from the letter total.↩︎
Jael Killigrew to Thomas Windebank, Lothbury, 22 June 1601, The National Archives, SP 12/279, f.215. French postscript quoted with spelling and capitalization normalized; English translation supplied here. The excerpt ends before the concluding formula of commendation. Mary Anne Everett Green, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, Elizabeth, 1601–1603 (1870), pp.53–54, no.115, summarizes it: “Mrs. Neville and my daughter Seymour send remembrances.” Jael was Sir Henry Killigrew’s second wife and the women’s stepmother; Anne and Dorothy were Katherine Cooke’s daughters. Printed calendar.↩︎
William Camden, Latin epitaph for Katharine Killigrew, wife of Sir Henry Killigrew, British Library, Add MS 36294, f.43v (formerly cited as f.43b), undated. The British Library catalogue identifies the undated Latin epitaph at f. 43b, equivalent to 43v; no composition date is assigned here.↩︎
Phyllis Rackin, Shakespeare and Women (Oxford University Press, 2005), chapter 2, especially pp.33–36, on property, work and household management. Rackin emphasizes the variety of women’s situations and distinguishes restrictive prescriptions from the activities documented in surviving records.↩︎
John Lydgate, Fall of Princes, c.1450, Yale, Beinecke MS 1222, preliminary leaf [ii]v, Yale Digital Collections, image 16655103. Spelling and punctuation modernized; “[be]” supplied. The dated ownership verse is also transcribed in Christie’s, Valuable Books and Manuscripts, 11 July 2018, lot 50. Yale records its purchase at that sale.↩︎
Christie’s, 11 July 2018, lot 50, provenance and binding description. The gift and identification with Elizabeth Bacon Neville are the catalogue’s proposals. Its further description of the ambassador as her son is inaccurate: she was his stepmother. The faint inscription alone does not distinguish her from his mother, Elizabeth Gresham Neville. For the preserved initials, see Yale, image 16655096.↩︎
Lady Elizabeth Periam to Sir Henry Neville, Greenland, 3 November 1604, Royal Berkshire Archives, D/EN/F44/1–4; catalogue. Quotations from the manuscript, spelling modernized. She signs herself his “loving mother in law,” an expression then also used for a stepmother.↩︎
Katherine Doyly to Sir Henry Neville, 30 January [1604/5], Royal Berkshire Archives, D/EN/F6/2/8; parent catalogue record. The dateline supplies day and month, not year; 1605 is a contextual dating. Quotation from the manuscript, spelling modernized.↩︎
Dorothy Seymour to Sir Henry Neville, 18 January [1604/5], Royal Berkshire Archives, D/EN/F6/2/7; parent catalogue record. The year is inferred, not written. Quotation from the manuscript, spelling modernized. The parliamentary context fits the proclamation of 24 December 1604, which postponed the next session from 7 February to 3 October 1605; the letter itself gives no year. This supports the inferred context without proving the date or that Dorothy read the proclamation. Published TCP text, B12719.↩︎
Anne Neville to Thomas Windebank, 6 March 1600/1, The National Archives, SP 12/279, f.30; State Papers Online, Gale document MC4304680023. Quotations from the manuscript, spelling modernized. See also Mary Anne Everett Green, Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1601–1603 (1870), p. 12, no. 20, for the identity, date and summary; the exact quotations remain manuscript-derived. Green also prints perii quoad hoc mundum: the unusual hoc is retained, not silently changed to hunc.↩︎
Anne Neville to Sir Robert Cecil, Hatfield House, Cecil Papers 93/72, endorsed 23 May 1602; quotation from the manuscript, spelling modernized. Also calendared in HMC, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Salisbury, XII (1910), p.164.↩︎