Even outside of the racism, this movie was just so, so . . . bad. I took great delight in ripping it to shreds. Academically, of course.
Women are, for the most part, cast in the margins of John McKay’s 2005 Shakespeare biopic A Waste of Shame. There are five named female characters throughout the film: Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway, their daughters Judith and Susanna, the Countess of Pembroke, and Lucie, here identified as the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Each of these characters faces a degree of misogyny; however, differences in race and class of each of these characters intersect to create unique experiences of misogyny.
The first two women we are introduced to in the film are Anne Hathaway and Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (Judith and Susanna appear in only one scene and are not important in the film). In the wake of their son Hamnet’s death, Anne is portrayed as hysterical and overly critical of her husband. Where Anne yells at Will for his transgressions and cries during Hamnet’s funeral, Will remains stoic and pragmatic. Still, there is a degree of sympathy in her portrayal; we are also meant to see Anne as an overworked mother in the throes of grief for her son, understandably upset at her husband for leaving her to take care of the homestead alone while he gallivants in London. While the film does not do much to develop her as a character, the audience is meant to understand why she is acting so bitterly toward Will. The second woman, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, is the mother of William Herbert, identified as the Fair Youth in this film. She commissions Will to write his now-famous procreation sonnets in order to encourage her son to marry and bear heirs. As an aristocratic white woman, Mary is treated with the most dignity out of the rest of her female counterparts. She is portrayed as an intelligent, well-spoken woman, and Will speaks to her as his social superior when he delivers the sonnets to her. Still, her only role in the film is to introduce Will to the Fair Youth of the sonnets. There is no mention of the real-life Mary Sidney’s literary career as a highly influential poet, translator, and greater literary patron. The Poetry Foundation lists her as “the most important non-royal woman writer and patron in Elizabethan England” (“Mary Sidney Herbert”). In the film, Will delivers the sonnets to her in 1597; Mary published her works throughout the 1590s, and would have most likely been well known as a writer at this point. While it is expected that a Shakespeare biopic would focus on Will’s writing career, A Waste of Shame does not value its female characters highly enough to mention their lives outside of their ties to Will.
Finally, we meet Lucie, the Dark Lady of the sonnets, and the only person of color in A Waste of Shame. As a low-class brown woman, Lucie faces a unique intersection of racism, misogyny, and classism unlike Anne and the Countess of Pembroke. The problems with Lucie’s character begin in the casting—Lucie is introduced as a mixed French-Moorish woman with African heritage, but is played by Indira Varma, an Indian woman. This implies that the filmmakers see brown women and their ethnicities as interchangeable. We know nothing of Lucie’s cultural background—Moorish, though accurate for the time period, was a broad term used by Europeans for anyone who was Muslim or had dark skin (Blakemore 2019). Though we know she is African, our only hint to Lucie’s actual ethnicity is the headdress she wears in her introduction, identified by Paul Franssen as a Tuareg headcloth (2015). More specifically, it is a tagelmust, a cloth that covers the head and face, revealing only the eyes. The tagelmust is only worn by Tuareg men; women wear veils, but these do not cover their faces. It is also traditionally dyed indigo, whereas the one that Lucie wears is red (Stearns 2008). Rather than an accurate depiction of a part of Lucie’s culture, the tagelmust here serves as a means of immediately othering and exotifying her. This continues throughout the film at the hands of her white male patrons; she is referred to as a “half-breed” more than once, and Ben Jonson makes a comment about Will having taken a trip to Africa after sleeping with her. The film attempts to give her some semblance of an interior life; she makes reference to her son a few times, and tells Will that she can think for herself and “has a mind”. None of this, however, is enough to overcome the sheer level of dehumanization that she is subject to. In addition to her race and gender, she is low-class, and therefore has no social power against higher-class men such as Will and Herbert. Despite this unbalanced power relationship, she is cast as the villain who destroys Will and Herbert’s friendship, as both a seductress and a source of syphilis. As Starks notes in her essay, by being “depicted as the conduit of the infection between men, Lucie figuratively and literally embodies ‘the French disease’ and carnal lust from which Will suffers” (298). Though this attempts to place the focus on her French heritage rather than her African heritage, this equation of a brown woman to disease still carries a heavy undertone of racism. She is further portrayed as the wedge that drove apart Will and Herbert’s friendship and the corrupter of Herbert’s supposed innocence. We can see this in the sonnets, too, particularly Sonnet 144: “The better angel is a man right fair, / The worser spirit a woman coloured ill. / To win me soon to hell my female evil / Tempteth my better angel from my side, / And would corrupt my saint to be a devil, / Wooing his purity with her foul pride” (lines 3–8). In the context of the film, the Dark Lady—Lucie, a brown woman—is evil, while the Fair Youth—Herbert, a white man—can do no wrong. She is also indirectly cast in a negative light as compared to Anne, a white woman. At the end of the film, Will leaves behind London—and Lucie—to return home to his family. While this is true to real life, in this film, it also demonstrates that his involvement with Lucie could only ever be temporary. As a white man, a brown woman like Lucie can never be a viable love interest for him; his true place is with his white wife and children. As Starks points out, Anne is portrayed as the “good wife” while Lucie embodies the “bad whore” role. This dichotomy further pushes Lucie into the margins of the film while uplifting its white characters.
The women of A Waste of Shame all face misogyny typical of the time period. The blow is softened against Anne Hathaway and Mary Sidney, however, due to their race and class, providing them a degree of sympathy in their portrayal. Lucie, who sits at a unique intersection of race, gender, and class, faces the worst treatment out of the other women; her portrayal is deeply ingrained with racism and classism in addition to misogyny. Perhaps the film was somewhat forward-thinking in its casting of the Dark Lady as a woman of color, but her bigoted treatment and writing as a character negate any possible or intended progressiveness.
A Waste of Shame: The Mystery of William Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Directed by John McKay, BBC Four, 2005.
Blakemore, Erin. “Who Were the Moors?” National Geographic, 2019, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/who-were-moors.
Franssen, Paul. Shakespeare’s Literary Lives: The Author as Character in Fiction and Film. Cambridge University Press, 2015.
“Mary Sidney Herbert Countess of Pembroke.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mary-sidney-herbert.
Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet 144.” The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd ed., edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus, W. W. Norton & Company, 2008.
Starks, Lisa S. “Screening Will and Jane: Sexuality and the Gendered Author in Shakespeare and Austen Biopics.” Jane Austen and William Shakespeare: A Love Affair in Literature, Film and Performance, edited by Marina Cano and Rosa García-Periago, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 291–310.
Stearns, Peter N. The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World. Oxford University Press, 2008.