In retrospect, The Smiths’ seventh single, Shakespeare’s Sister feels like the one that got away. Given a standalone release in March 1985, it peaked at No.26 in the UK, but its tenure in the charts was brief and the band weren’t even invited on to Top Of The Pops to perform it. That said, Shakespeare’s Sister was hardly typical of the glossy pop dominating the Top 40 back then, bringing as it did an unexpected literary reference into the mainstream.
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The backstory: “A suicide drama set to a demented rock’n’roll rhythm”
“I listened to it again recently and was struck again by what a very odd song it is,” author and music critic Jon Savage wrote, of Shakespeare’s Sister, in a Smiths retrospective published in The Observer in 2007. “It’s essentially a suicide drama set to a demented rock’n’roll rhythm. I mean, how did that become a hit? It’s not your regular pop song, is it?”
Regular pop song or not, Shakespeare’s Sister excited The Smiths when they first wrote and rehearsed it early in 1985. The song’s starting point was its title, which derived from Virginia Woolf’s 1929 essay A Room Of One’s Own, one of the many feminist tracts that frontman Morrissey first embraced during his adolescence.
“[A Room Of One’s Own] argued in part that if Shakespeare had had a sister of equal natural intellect, she would have been driven to suicide by her lack of opportunities in Elizabethan England,” Smiths biographer Tony Fletcher wrote in his book A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga Of The Smiths. “The song was titled, accordingly, if cryptically, Shakespeare’s Sister.”
