In Plain Sight: Visible Women and Early Modern Plays
Yale University
It is a cliché of literary history that the extraordinary drama professionally produced in early-modern England was exclusively the achievement of men. No female playwrights wrote for the commercial stage, and, of course, no actresses played the female roles that male playwrights imagined. The cliché has, of course, been qualified by recent scholarship that has begun to recover not only what Ann Thompson has called ‘the relatively hidden tradition of female performance’,1 but also the only slightly less hidden traditions of female playwrights, patrons, spectators, and readers, who did create, support, attend, read, and collect plays. But the professional theatre was a bastion of male activity, with the exception of the labour of women who certainly made up part of the ancillary work force that a theatre company depended upon to mount a play.2 Their names for the most part are lost to history, as the names of such subsidiary workers in every field inevitably are. Yet there is one place within the collaborative activities defining the early modern theatre where women are regularly named – indeed where they were themselves often responsible for their naming: the world of print.
Women were involved in the normal activities of the book trade, and their names regularly appear on title pages as printers, publishers, or booksellers,3 although in the book trade too their role has sometimes been misrepresented, in part because the extant records inevitably serve only as imperfect snapshots of the complex realities of early-modern book trade practices, but also because gender-based assumptions have sometimes led to misunderstandings of the records that do exist. For example, Edward Arber, who was responsible for the magisterial edition of The Registers of the Company of Stationers, transcribed an entry of 25 September 1605, when William Cotton ‘Entred for his copy by assignement from Nathanael Butter. A booke called The Resolued Christian … which was entered to Nathanael mother.’4 Arber, however, ‘corrects’ the transcription with his addition ‘[or rather Butter]’. Yet, as Helen Smith has shown, an entry for 9 March 1604 ‘indicates that the copy was entered by Nathaniel Butter’s mother, the widow Joan Newbery, who purchased the copy from Thomas Busshell but appears to have entrusted its further transmission to her business partner: her son from her first marriage’.5 Although it is unquestionably odd to have an entry referring to Joan Newbery in terms of her relationship to her son, the proper correction would seem to have been to add an ‘s’ after ‘Nathanael’ rather than to emend ‘mother’.
But, even if Smith is right in this case, usefully calling attention to what would be only one of several places where Arber has seemingly assumed male agency in his reading of the registers, the effort to uncover and rectify the errors stemming from unconscious gender bias ironically can produce its own. For example, Smith herself, cataloguing the activities of women stationers, says that Joan Broome published four plays by John Lyly: one printed by Thomas Scarlett ‘for I.B.’, two printed by John Charlewood ‘for the widdowe Broome’ and one, Sappho and Phao, printed by ‘T. Orwin for W. Broome’.6 Smith seemingly has taken the publisher’s first initial in the imprint to indicate ‘widdowe’, thus adding to Joan Broome’s accomplishments, but it refers, in fact, as the actual title page makes clear in spelling out both names of the stationers, to her husband William.7
If, then, it is difficult, even with the best of scholarly will and enterprise, fully to recover the role of women in the print trade, nonetheless, it is true that Joan Broome on her own did publish three plays by Lyly, editions of Endymion (1591), Gallatea (1592), and Midas (1592). She inherited the rights to Sapho and Phao, though she never published an edition of it, as was true also of Campaspe; and the Stationers Company records the transfer to George Potter of the rights to the five Lyly plays as well as eight other titles ‘whiche belonged to mystris Brome Lately Deceased’ on 23 August 1601 (Arber, III, 191). Perhaps she was indeed, as Tara Lyons suggestively hints, the first person to imagine a collection of an English playwright’s work any more substantial than the few editions of two-part plays like 1 and 2 Tamburlaine published by Richard Jones in 1590.8
Joan Broome was only one of a number of women involved in the printing and publication of playbooks. Among the seventy-four women whose names appear on imprints of early printed books are thirteen women involved in the publication of over forty playbooks, which included, in addition to the three plays by Lyly published by ‘the Widdowe Brome’, editions of Dido, Queen of Carthage (printed by Joan Orwin in 1594), Arden of Faversham (printed and published by Elizabeth Allde in 1633), Bussy D’Ambois (printed by Alice Norton [A.N.] in 1641), and Fanshawe’s translation of Il Pastor Fido (printed and published by Ruth Raworth in 1647) – although as we inevitably want to know, only one of these was a play by Shakespeare, Q3 of King Lear, printed, published, and sold by Jane Bell in 1655 (of which, more later).9
Virtually all of these women were like Joan Broome: wives who inherited a business in which they had no doubt worked alongside their husband while he still lived and who took control of the business upon his death. Although as women they were not eligible for full membership in the Company, they functioned formally as stationers, assuming the responsibilities and properties of the inherited business, including the rights to titles, like those established in 1597 as belonging to Joan Broome ‘To enioy Duringe her widowe[hood] or that shalbe a free Stationers wife of this companye’ (Arber, III, 82).
Joan Broome did not remarry a free stationer, or anyone else for that matter, although many women who inherited businesses did. Henry Overton entered thirteen titles on 13 May 1630, ‘which were the Copies of Master Sheffard whose wydow the [said] Overton lately married’ (Arber, IV, 235). John Kingston’s widow, Joan, remarried twice, first George Robinson, who had been their apprentice, and then, upon Robinson’s death, Thomas Orwin. Orwin’s entry of various books in 1593 confirms the way in which a widow’s inheritance was used to establish rights to copy, recording these as titles ‘which were first kingstons and after George Robinsons whose widowe the said Orwin hath married’ (Arber, II, 630). A widow might also lease titles to a member of the Company if she did not want to continue in the business herself, though such transfers were inevitably conditional, as in the case of Elizabeth Winnington’s transfer of three copies inherited from her late husband John to John Wright in 1595, where the transfer depended upon the copies actually having belonged to Winnington and also ‘Provyded alwaies that yf the said Elizabeth marrie againe to any of the Companie. That then she shall haue their copies againe as in her former estate’ (Arber, III, 51). The rights to copy inherited by a widow who then remarried someone who was not a Stationer would revert to the Company and were eligible to be reassigned.
The rights of widows were vigorously protected by the Company, if only to preserve them for a liveried member who might marry their owner. An interesting case with bearing on the theatre world was William Jaggard’s effort in 1593 to secure the monopoly on printing playbills, which had belonged to John Charlewood. The Court of Assistant offered only provisional approval of his claim: ‘Whereas William Iagger hath made request to haue the printinge of the billes for players as Iohn Charlwood had[,] yt is graunted: that if he can gett the said Charlwood his Wydowes consent hereunto or if she die, or marry out of the company. That then the company will haue considerac[i]on to prefer him in this sute before another.’10 But Charlewood’s widow did not give her consent and soon married James Roberts, who assumed the useful monopoly worth about £3 a year with little work involved and no risk.11 In 1602, when Jaggard pursued these rights again, the claim was again ‘found to be the right of the said James Robertes in the right of his wife’, though Roberts did allow Jaggard to assume the printing of playbills for the Earl of Worcester’s men for a fee of four shillings a month.12
But perhaps it is the one example of a Shakespeare play published by a woman that provides the most notable example of how women worked within the densely interrelated familial and commercial world of early print, as well as an extraordinary case of confusion about a title. In 1655 Jane Bell printed and published an edition of King Lear, though the rights to Shakespeare’s play had originally belonged Nathaniel Butter (Arber, III, 366), who must have leased them (unrecorded) to Jaggard and Edward Blount to allow them to appear in the first and second Shakespeare folios in 1623 and 1632. Butter’s rights to the play were preserved, however, and were assigned along with twenty-five other titles to Miles Fletcher in 1639 (Arber, IV, 466). At first glance, we might guess that there was an unrecorded arrangement of Fletcher with Bell to allow her to publish the play, but the truth is more interesting and more useful for a reconstruction of the role women stationers played in the transmission of playbooks. And the actual circumstances reveal something surprising about how the system of entrance on the basis of title might complicate rather than clarify the question of what we have come to think of as copyright, or, put more simply, what it might mean to own a text.13
In 1594 the anonymous ‘most famous Chronicle historye of Liere kinge of England and his Three Daughters’ was entered to Edward White (Arber, II, 649). Seemingly White never published an edition, and on 8 May 1605, Simon Stafford entered ‘for his copye The Tragicall history of King LEIRE and his Three Daughters &c’, a title that was immediately reassigned to John Wright, reserving for Stafford the right to print the play (Arber, III, 289). Wright’s edition of King Leir, widely known as one of the sources of Shakespeare’s play, appeared later that year, printed by Stafford as specified. Nonetheless, in 1624, the rights to the play were again reassigned when the widow of Edward White transferred ‘Leire and his daughters’ to Edward Allde (Arber, IV, 120). Almost certainly by reasserting her late husband’s original claim from 1594, White’s widow successfully transferred the rights to King Leir to Allde, establishing his rights to the title.
Allde died in 1627, survived by his second wife, Elizabeth, who took over the business and continued working until her death in 1637. The title to King Leir would then have belonged to her. Her career looks much like that of most of the women who worked as printers and publishers. She was active in the trade, and worked according to the rules of the Company, eligible for its protections and liable to its regulations, even though she had not been formally admitted. In a list of Master Printers dated 8 October 1634, the ‘Widdow Aldee’ appears as having ‘succeeded her husband who was a Master Printer’ (Arber, III, 700), but another list written sometime after ‘the fall of 1635’ states that now ‘she keepes her trade by her sonne’ (Arber, III, 701), Richard Oulton (her son from a previous marriage, misnamed ‘Robert’ on the previous page in Arber), probably an indication that her health was failing. By the end of 1636, she was dead. Four years later, Oulton entered twenty-one titles (immediately assigning one to John Benson), including Lear and his 3. Daughters, all titles that ‘lately did belong to Mistris Aldee his mother in Law deceased’ (Arber, IV, 507), although this Lear, as the convoluted history makes clear, was really Leir.
Oulton never published an edition of either play. But Jane Bell did. Although there is no record of the transaction,14 it is clear that his titles were acquired by Bell sometime before her edition of King Lear appeared in 1655. In the back of her edition of Q3 Lear is an advertisement of ‘Books Printed: And are to be Sold by Jane Bell at the East-end of Christ Church.’ Bell’s list contains the nineteen titles (other than King Lear, which of course is the title in which the advertisement appears)15 that Oulton had entered and kept for himself and prints them in the exact order in which they appear in the Stationers Register, although she adds two new titles to her list at the end. Although she printed and published Shakespeare’s King Lear, basing it closely on a copy of Pavier’s falsely dated Q2 (1608 for 1619), it seems therefore certain, as Kirschbaum claims, that she did so on the basis of a right to copy that in fact was of the anonymous King Leir – but it seems almost equally certain that she did not know this to be the case.
What is also certain, as the convoluted story of the publication of Q3 of King Lear makes clear, is that printed plays, like printed books of all sorts, often demanded and recorded the activity of women, here as the rights to the anonymous King Leir were transferred to and by women stationers, until one of them unwittingly vested them in an edition of the ‘other’ King Lear, the only quarto of a Shakespeare play to be printed and published by a woman. Even, then, if it is accurate to say of the professional English stage, as Thomas Nashe wrote in his characteristically fervid idiom, that ‘Our Players are not as the players beyond [the] Sea, a sort of squirting baudie Comedians, that haue whores and Common Curtizens to playe womens parts’,16 and similarly true that the words these ‘Players’ spoke on stage were written by men, it is no less the case that many professionally proficient and respected women17 did appear among the actors in the world of early print, which enabled the achievement of the early modern theatre to be shaped and preserved for the future.
1‘Women / ‘Women’ and the Stage,’ in Helen Wilcox ed., Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 103.
2See Natasha Korda’s Labors Lost: Women’s Work and the Early Modern Stage (Philadelphia, 2011).
3Helen Smith’s ‘Grossly Material Things’: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2012) is the first extended and much welcome treatment of women’s involvement in the making of early modern books. See also Maureen Bell, ‘Women in the English Book Trade 1557–1700,’ Leipziger Jahrbuch zur Buchgeschichte, 6 (1996), pp. 13–45.
4Edward Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London; 1554–1640 A.D. (London: n. p. 1875–9), III, 301.
5Smith, p. 105.
6Smith, p. 89, fn. 8.
7Smith seems here to have relied on the STC, which represents the imprint as ‘T. Orwin f. W. Broome’ rather than accurately reproducing what reads on the title page: ‘Thomas Orwin, for William Broome.’ Although Joan was certainly working with her husband, and, as he neared his death, probably taking on the majority of the responsibilities, the two 1591 Lyly imprints attributed to him must be considered his own. Joan’s solo career seems to have begun with her publication of Endymion, one of the three Lyly plays that she did publish, as she remarks in her ‘Note to the Reader’ that ‘There are certain Commedies come into my hands by chaunce … This is the first, and if in any place it shall displease I will take more paines to perfect the next’ (sig. A2r).
8Joan Broome never did publish such a collection, but she seemingly published her three plays by Lyly as a series and at very least must have imagined these bound together by owners. See Tara Lyons’s remarkable dissertation, ‘English Printed Drama in Collection before Jonson and Shakespeare’, University of Illinois, 2011.
9The STC lists 74 women among the 1,367 stationers it names in the Index, which no doubt under-represents the number of woman active in the trade given how much is inaccurate or occluded in imprints and how many editions of books have not survived (see Smith, pp. 100–1). By 1700, according to Maureen Bell, over 300 women can be identified as being active in the print trade. The figures on women involved with playbook publication come from DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks, Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser (eds). Created 2007. http://deep.sas.upenn.edu. I am grateful to both Alan Farmer and Zach Lesser, as well as to Aaron Pratt, for reading and commenting on various drafts of this essay.
10Smith, p. 102.
11Records of the Court of the Stationers’ Company 1576–1602, W. W. Greg and E. Boswell (eds) (London, 1930), p. 46.
12See Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2009), p. 42.
13Records of the Court of the Stationers’ Company 1602–1640, ed. William A. Jackson (London, 1957), pp. 1–2.
14Copyright in early modern England, of course, belonged to publishers not to authors. On this particular case, see Leo Kirschbaum’s brillant reconstruction of the history, ‘How Jane Bell came to print the Third Quarto of Shakespeare’s King Lear,’ Philological Quarterly 17 (1938), 308–11.
15Jane Bell’s business was inherited in 1649 from her husband, Moses Bell, and was located, like Oulton’s, ‘near Christ-Church.’ Presumably, as working neighbours, they reached an agreement for a fee for Oulton’s titles, which, like many others, was never recorded in the Company’s register.
16Pierce Pennilesse his Supplication to the Diuill (London, 1592), sig. H3r.
17On 7 February 1624/5, Nathaniel Butter was fined 6s. 8d. by the Stationers’ Court for ‘vnfitting Speaches’ to Hannah Barrett, including calling her a ‘durtye slutt.’ See Jackson ed., Records of the Court of the Stationers’ Company 1602–1640, p. 173.