I spoke with Duke junior Lily Egol, an English major who is double-majoring in Music and minoring in French. Lily’s independent study, Galls, Grace, & Grief: Women in Shakespeare Revisited, delves into the feminist reconstruction of some of Shakespeare’s most prominent female figures. Composing a number of poetic monologues exploring individual Shakespearean women or groups of women, Lily’s collection retells these great plays from the perspective of their oft-forgotten female characters. She highlights a variety of feminist themes throughout the literature — Women’s Love, Obedience, Madness, and Feminine Agency, to name a few — and spends each week reading secondary sources alongside the original play, before meeting with her independent study advisor, Dr. Werlin, and composing her monologues. I asked Lily about her project and her wider cross-disciplinary research on feminism at Duke.
What first drew you to studying English literature?
I knew I wanted to study English since high school; I’ve always loved reading and have been interested in creative writing in particular. Once I arrived at Duke and started taking classes, I realized although I do love creative writing, I also love academic writing and research as well. English classes are such a great place to learn because they’re small; you get a lot of opportunities to discuss, to get feedback from professors who get to know you over the course of the class. I also love the flexibility, how you get to choose what type of classes you want to take as long as they fit into the general requirements. I’ve been able to take a variety of courses since I’ve gotten here, which have all been very inspiring.
Can you walk us through some favorite English courses you’ve taken over the years?
During my freshman year, I took Jane Austen, which I was so excited to take since she is one of my longtime favorite authors. It was incredible to do a deep dive into all of her novels. I also loved taking, last year, Inventing Childhood in 18th-19th Century Literature. I’m in another English course right now called Shakespeare’s Nature with Dr. Beckwith, and that class is amazing. I also loved taking Introduction to Poetry last year; we read a lot of different poems spanning a number of time periods.
Want to talk a bit about your current project? You’re studying women in Shakespeare from a poetic perspective. Why Shakespeare? Don’t we already know enough about Shakespeare?
Shakespeare comes up a lot in classes; there’s so much written on him. But I think feminist criticism of Shakespeare, in the grand scheme of things in Shakespearean research, is relatively new. I’ve been interested in Shakespeare for a while; I’m very lucky that my parents took me to the theater growing up, so I had a lot of exposure from a young age. I have kept going to plays as I’ve gotten older; this last summer while I was studying at Oxford, I got to see five Shakespeare plays. I was also in a Shakespeare play last year at Duke, Twelfth Night, which was a fantastic experience.
Shakespeare has these really wonderful women characters — Beatrice, Rosalind, Viola, Portia — there’s so many of them. They are witty, intelligent, assertive characters who set the action of the plays in motion. These women usually teach the man a lesson or two, and they are treated as complete human beings. And being as these plays were written in the 16th-17th centuries, that’s always struck me as really inspiring. There are other women too who don’t necessarily get as much attention in his plays, but you can still learn a lot by studying them.
I’ve had opinions about women in Shakespeare for a few years. I used to argue with my AP Literature teacher in high school about whether or not Ophelia is to blame and how much we can justify Hamlet’s anger toward her. At Oxford this summer, I went up to a guest lecturer during a reception and asked about his interpretation of the The Taming of the Shrew — whether there was a possibility of reading the play ironically. And he completely dismissed what I had to say. So I thought it would be really interesting to look at what feminist scholars have written about the plays. There have to be people out there who agree with what I have to say about these plays and who have written scholarship in a similar vein. So that’s one of the motivations for this project. The other is, freshman year, I wrote this piece in the Muse Magazine. The volume theme was “Feminine Rage,” and I ended up writing a piece about women in Shakespeare. I took a number of quotes from women in Shakespeare plays and interspersed them with my own writing to make them sound like they were conversing with each other about what it’s like to be a woman. I had an idea to expand this poem into a larger collection for a few years, but this semester seemed like a great time to do it.
I want to backtrack for a moment and really dive into your history with Shakespeare’s plays. Do you remember your first Shakespearean experience?
The first time I saw a Shakespeare play was when I was around 8 or 9. It was Love’s Labour's Lost, which is not very well known, but is largely about women teaching men a thing or two about love, telling them to grow up. It’s probably significant that that was the first Shakespeare play I ever saw.
You told us about your work with Duke’s Muse Magazine, introducing women’s dialogue into Shakespeare’s works. Is this the first time you took an interest in the feminist angle of Shakespearean study, or is this something you were passionate about pursuing even before university?
I saw this one production of Othello, at Interlochen Center for the Arts, where I was a piano and creative writing student for several summers. They have an Alumni Shakespeare Festival every year — some alumni students come back to the camp and put on a play in a beautiful open-air amphitheater. There is a monologue Iago’s wife gives, toward the end of the show, about how unfairly men treat women, how women are real people. That is actually the monologue where I got the inspiration for the title of my project — Galls, Grace, & Grief. Iago’s wife has this line where she says, “Why, we have galls, and though we have some grace / Yet have we some revenge.” She is talking about the condition of women, and I was so inspired by this monologue; it’s incredible that there is something so straightforwardly feminist in this 17th century play. I started thinking, if Shakepseare wrote things like this, how could he have written something like The Taming of the Shrew? That got me thinking about Shakespeare’s collection of plays as a whole. Also, like I mentioned, we read Hamlet in AP Literature, and I definitely disagreed with my high school teacher about the character of Ophelia, and I have wanted to revisit that for a few years now.
You’ve told us a lot about your study of these 16th-17th century plays, but these manuscripts are hundreds of years old, and the modern feminist landscape has changed incredibly since Shakespeare’s time. Why is it important to study the past when the present is so vivid, with pandemics and AI and the rise of political polarization, let alone the contemporary feminist movement?
The written word and storytelling are such powerful tools that humans have always used to make sense of the world. I love looking at different texts throughout history, and often seeing resonances across them. A lot of themes in Shakespeare’s plays, especially pertaining to women — love, obedience, gender roles — these are all things that we are still trying to figure out today. Shakespeare is often described as being particularly resonant in the 21st century, in that his characters are individuals, but almost universal types.
If you look at Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance, she is a kind of representative of all women in unrequited love, and you can read her that way. If you look at Ophelia, she is a fascinating character for questions of women’s madness and mental health. With this project, as I am writing a collection of monologues each inspired by a different woman or group of women, I am using 21st century language, and I am looking at women from a 21st century perspective. It also doesn’t feel like I am changing the characters, or describing the plays in ways that are necessarily different from what Shakespeare might have intended, because these plays have so many echoes and meanings in the 21st century.
What particular professors have also guided you to this point?
I am really grateful to be working with Dr. Werlin right now. It is so inspiring, and sometimes even a little intimidating, to be talking with this expert about a topic that I love and want to learn more about. It’s a little scary sometimes; I am reading these plays and I have opinions about them and then I go to discuss them one-on-one with a professor, and we see how it holds up. Working with her is incredible; I first took Introduction to Poetry with her my sophomore year, and it has been amazing being able to build a relationship with her.
Another class I am taking now, Shakespeare’s Nature with Dr. Beckwith, is an absolute joy to be in. It is great to be reading the plays in class and studying them outside of class as well. I am also really grateful to Effie Harrington, a graduate student. I have been lucky to be in a few classes with her; she has been a TA in two classes I have taken, and I also took her class Inventing Childhood last year. Effie is interested in feminist scholarship in a way that I really admire, and taking her class helped me to develop my own voice and practice analyzing texts from a feminist critical perspective.
Is there anything you are doing beyond the scope of the English Department that you feel is connected to what you are studying in the feminist field or your interest in literature and writing?
I am studying English, but also Music and French. I am a classical pianist, and it has been an interest of mine for a while to study women composers who may have been overlooked or erased from the canon and music history.
Right now I am actually working on a junior recital of music exclusively by women composers; the theme is Four Seasons of Women Composers, so I have some pieces with seasonal themes I have put together in the program that runs March 2nd of next year.
I also love art history and going to museums to look for paintings by women artists. I took a class called Women in Visual Arts 1400-1800 Theory and History last spring, which was fascinating. In English, I love studying women writers and looking at more traditional texts from the feminist perspective. Researching women in the arts as a woman interested in the arts is a really keen motivation of mine as a student.
You are passionate about the study of feminism across fields, from English to Art History to Music, but I want to get to the crux of this academic focus. Why do you think feminism is such an important topic of study? And is this what you see yourself studying in the future?
I think there is a lot of disagreement about what exactly feminism is. As a human and an arts student, being really interested in stories as a testimony to the human experience, I think it is so important that we look at women’s voices, whether these are characters in works written sometimes by men, or especially women writers, artists, composers — women who have created art. Whether or not these works are explicitly what we think of as feminism advocacy of women’s rights, looking at what these women had to say and how they expressed themselves says a lot about what it was like to be a woman at the time and how women responded to these conditions. I am very interested in bringing these voices back into the discussion. I am grateful to live during a time when this is being done; it is trendy, even in art and literary history, to look for these forgotten women. But there is still so much work to be done, and I’m excited to be an undergraduate student, going onto graduate school, and continuing my research at a time when discovering these women is really applicable.
Interviewer’s note:
Muse Magazine is the Duke University feminist magazine associated with the Women’s Center. I highly recommend reading their latest volume, Paper Faces On Parade, which will be available this winter both digitally on their website and physically at the Bryan Center and English Department Lounge.