What Is The Thesis Of If Shakespeare Had A Sister

Virginia Woolf’s article entitled “If Shakespeare had a Sister” which is in Forming a Critical Perspective shows a case on how women in the Elizabethan age would have never been allowed to write the plays or literature works of Shakespeare. Woolf talks about how it would have been impossible it would be for women in that time period to write. She makes some valid arguments, but overall the inequality of ethos, logos, and pathos makes this article unpersuasive.
Firstly, Virginia Woolf does not really use ethos in her article. The only credibility she has is that “she was a poet, essayist, editor, and a novelist” (223). You do not really know much about her. In the article, she does not talk about herself at all. This is contradicting because
She states that “it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare” (Woolf 224). Here she is logically saying that women did not have much or any education in the Elizabethan age. Women were not allowed to go to school. They had to stay at home. They had to marry certain people. Their conditions were very harsh. Women were excluded throughout many things. Men were basically relying on women’s lowliness to expand themselves. It does not seem like women had any power or control in the Elizabethan age. Another example of logos is when Woolf states that “genius like Shakespeare’s is not born among laboring, uneducated, servile people. It was not born in England among the Saxons and the Britons. It is not born today among the working classes” (225). In these sentences, Woolf believes that to have genius the person must have no obstacles, like Shakespeare. The only weak aspect of logos is that in the third paragraph of the article Woolf lacks historical evidence. She uses her fictional mind to describe Shakespeare’s sister. Judith is just a rhetorical device to help Virginia Woolf get her point
The main emotion used in this article is through Judith. “She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil” (Woolf 224). She portrays Judith as weak and vulnerable in society back then. Another example of pathos is when Woolf says “Judith had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother’s, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager- a fat, loose- lipped man- guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting- no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress” (224). In these sentences, Woolf is using Judith to get the reader to feel remorseful so the reader can see her point. In this article, Judith is basically a tragedy. She is overwhelmed by a number of factors. A weak flaw in the usage of pathos in this article is that Woolf does not show any strengths of Judith. Woolf could have shown what Judith is capable of or at least not made her so hopeless in a