6

Remaking the Texts: Women Editors of Shakespeare,
Past and Present

Valerie Wayne

University of Hawai‘i

Few endeavours in the humanities have been so consistently exercised by men to the exclusion of women as editing the texts of Shakespeare. Yet much has changed since Gary Taylor remarked in 1988 that ‘[w]omen may read Shakespeare, but men edit him’,1 and this essay will assess those changes by weighing the current contributions of women as editors of early modern drama. I begin, however, with a look back at the progenitors of those editors, a topic that Ann Thompson briefly addressed in her essay, ‘Feminist Theory and the Editing of Shakespeare’, and that is treated in more detail in entries from her anthology with Sasha Roberts, Women Reading Shakespeare 1660–1900. Since the publication of both works in 1997, women editors have been the subject of more research by Gail Marshall and Ann Thompson, Jeanne Addison Roberts, and Laurie Maguire. What we now know offers something of a lineage for the work that more women are currently doing, although any reconstruction of that history is advised to heed Phyllis Rackin’s warning that ‘overestimating past repression can easily slip into a dangerous complacency about present progress’.2

The tradition of Shakespearean editing began in 1709 with the publication of Nicholas Rowe’s first edition, and the eighteenth-century editors who followed him developed a presentation of the plays that we have now come to expect: with dramatis personae, consistent stage directions, notes with variant readings and critical commentary, and introductions. All the editors of that century were men, and their relationships with one another were often adversarial, sometimes aggressively hostile. When Henrietta Maria Bowdler published her own edition of the plays nearly a hundred years later, then, it is understandable that she did not identify herself within this contentious community. If the Brontës obscured their identities as authors and even as forceful an intellect as Mary Anne Evans assumed a male pseudonym in the century’s second half, it is not surprising that Henrietta preferred not to be known, although she had already been discovered as the author of the much-reprinted Sermons on the Doctrines and Duties of Christianity. Her Family Shakespeare of 1807 appeared anonymously in a four-volume edition published in Bath that included twenty plays. Its preface says it is directed to ‘young persons of both sexes’ and expurgated to remove ‘everything that could give just offence to the religious and virtuous mind’.3 In 1818 a second edition by her brother Thomas was published in London, and it was his text, with thirty-six plays and many cuts restored, that became a best-seller after the Edinburgh Review said it made all other editions of Shakespeare obsolete.4 Henrietta’s editorial method of making cuts concerning ‘religion and sex’ is more extreme than others’, but her predecessors and contemporaries also softened Shakespeare’s obscenities, avoided some sexual language, and made many changes and excisions in their performance texts.5 Discretion and propriety have influenced the editorial tradition more than is sometimes recognized,6 and the popularity of Thomas’ edition suggests that Henrietta had recognized what some of her contemporaries most wanted and did not want in their bard. Shakespeare’s texts vary considerably over time as editors meet and construct the needs of their changing audiences.

Mary Cowden Clarke’s accomplishments are somewhat more akin to later sensibilities. Marshall and Thompson claim she may be ‘the first woman, other than actresses, to make a living out of Shakespeare’. She was prolific as writer and editor, ‘achieved significant renown both in Britain and in the United States’, and exhibited ‘a proto-feminist line’ throughout her work.7 Her major achievement was the first complete concordance to Shakespeare’s plays, sixteen years in the making, that was published in eighteen monthly instalments in 1844–5 and reprinted in ten editions through 1875. In 1860 her Shakespeare’s Works, Edited with a Scrupulous Revision of the Text was published without commentary notes because she saw them as ‘mere vehicles for abuse, spite and arrogance’. Understandably unaware of her predecessor, she announced herself in the preface as ‘the first of [Shakespeare’s] female subjects who has been selected to edit his works’, and her husband Charles disclaimed responsibility for the Glossary after a reviewer assumed it was his. Five years later Mary and Charles collaborated on an annotated, expurgated, and illustrated Shakespeare, and this time a reviewer objected to ‘‘‘the lady editor’’’ for ‘‘‘tampering with our great poet’s language’’’.8 Cowden Clarke is best known today for her Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines (1850–2), which creates back stories for the characters’ lives, accounts full of ‘romance and melodrama’ that offer ‘a form of moral pedagogy’ to young readers. Mary and Charles also prepared an 800-page book called The Shakespeare Key (1879) that addresses a range of topics including style and dramatic time. Mary’s life and work were permeated by ‘the worship of Shakespeare … of a curiously intimate kind’, but she lived when reverence was highly valued, and she was sufficiently revered for her own work that she was presented with a Testimonial Chair carved of rosewood with Shakespeare’s head on it in 1852. Among the 64 subscribers to this gift were Washington Irving and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, together with professors, judges, and state officials.9

One of Cowden Clarke’s correspondents was the American scholar Horace Howard Furness, who would launch the Variorum Shakespeare in the 1890s. In 1883 Furness persuaded Charlotte Porter to edit a new periodical called Shakespeariana that ‘claimed to be “the only Shakespearian Magazine in the world” ’,10 to which Cowden Clarke contributed several pieces. When Porter resigned as editor in 1887, she began working with Helen A. Clarke to produce the Pembroke Shakespeare of 1903 in twelve volumes, with several plays to each volume. Over the next ten years they published forty single-volume editions of the plays and poems, the first complete edition to be based entirely on the First Folio, with extensive, strong-minded commentary. Jeanne Addison Roberts commends their ‘examples of early feminist criticism, … their rejection of didactic intention in Shakespeare’s works, and their application of principles of revolutionary change in the perception of literary productions’.11 Their accomplishments during the first wave of feminism were overlooked by later editors until Roberts’ 2006 essay, but their preference for the First Folio has brought them attention from Jonathan Bate, whose ‘Case for the Folio’ justifying editorial procedures in the 2006 RSC Collected Works notes that their ‘attention to the theatrical origins of most of the Folio texts was … nearly a hundred years before its time’.12 Porter and Clarke may finally have found their audience.

In the twentieth century women began to take a larger role in establishing Shakespeare’s texts. Grace R. Trenery edited Much Ado About Nothing (1924) for the first series of the Arden Shakespeare (1899–1944). During the second Arden series (1946–82), Una Ellis-Fermor served as general editor for the first twelve years and Agnes Latham edited As You Like It (1975) after publishing editions of Walter Ralegh’s poems and letters. Alice Walker was an especially important figure in mid-century, succeeding R. B. McKerrow as editor of the Old-Spelling Oxford Shakespeare in 1940 because he ‘considered her accurate beyond his own standards’.13 That edition was never finished, perhaps, as Laurie Maguire conjectures, because Walker came increasingly to doubt that an old-spelling text recorded an author’s spelling.14 What she produced instead was an influential book on compositors, called Textual Problems of the First Folio. For T. H. Howard-Hill, that 1953 volume together with her reviews of Arden and New Variorum editions and textual articles for Fredson Bowers’ Studies in Bibliography ‘revealed her as the most acute and challenging textual critic of the decade’.15 She edited Troilus and Cressida and, with J. D. Wilson, Othello for the New Cambridge Shakespeare. Maguire characterizes Walker’s hallmark as ‘textual heterogeneity – compositor study, stage history, literary criticism, humour, verve, and idiom’.16

Katharine F. Pantzer did not edit any of the plays but had a major role in completing the second edition of The Short-Title Catalogue, first published in 1926. F. S. Ferguson and William A. Jackson began a full revision, and when the project moved to Harvard, Jackson recruited Pantzer in 1962. Then he died unexpectedly two years later, leaving her with much to do on the first half of the alphabet as well as decoding his marginalia on I to Z. The second half was published in 1976 and the first half in 1986. The information we now take for granted on Early English Books Online would not exist without the STC. Jeffrey Masten calls it ‘the reference tool with which all work on Renaissance printed texts must begin’; David McKitterick says ‘no other country can boast such a detailed or full bibliographical record’.17 Pantzer’s sense of humour about the frustrations of dealing with long, complicated entries is recorded in one running head for Henry Smith, Minister, where an intentional typo identifies him as ‘Monster’.18

Anne Barton and Molly M. Mahood were two important women editors from the second half of the century. In addition to their other distinguished work, Barton wrote introductions to the comedies for The Riverside Shakespeare; Mahood edited Twelfth Night for New Penguin and The Merchant of Venice for New Cambridge. Yet it was not until the last decade of the twentieth century that women became significantly more visible in editorial roles. One mark of that transition is the difference between the general editorial teams of two collected works: the Oxford Shakespeare and the Norton Shakespeare. The former, under general editors Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor working with John Jowett and William Montgomery, focused on textual scholarship. They produced a revisionary text of the plays in 1986, but it was published without introductions and commentary notes, making it unsuitable for the lucrative college market. In 1997 the Norton Shakespeare was published using the Oxford text along with critical introductions, glosses, and bibliographies of criticism. These were prepared under the general editorship of Stephen Greenblatt together with Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus, editors valued for their cutting-edge critical expertise. The presence of two women on this team signalled the edition’s attention to gender as well as theatricality, history, and culture. By 1997 feminist criticism of Shakespeare had established its credentials. The editing of early modern women writers was creating a substantial body of work, and essays clarifying the contributions of feminist editing had begun to appear.19

The appointment of women as general editors began as early as 1992, when Ann Thompson joined Richard Proudfoot as a general editor of the Arden 3 Shakespeare, making her the first contemporary woman editor of a single-volume, scholarly series. Two men were later added to the team. The first instance of full gender parity among general editors was the Folger Shakespeare Library’s complete revision of its single-volume series for general readers, launched in 1992 and recently completed by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. As the decade continued, women became increasingly active as editors and general editors. In 1994 I became an associate general editor of The Oxford Middleton, joining two general editors and three associate general editors. The edition recruited twenty-three women and was published in 2007. Suzanne Gossett became one of three general editors for Arden Early Modern Drama, which published its first texts in 2009, and she is one of two general textual editors for the forthcoming Norton Shakespeare 3. A New Oxford Shakespeare is also in preparation, and Terri Bourus serves as general editor along with two others. Tiffany Stern is one of three editors of the current New Mermaids series, which focuses on non-Shakespearean drama. The other major single-volume Shakespeare series (New Cambridge, New Variorum, Oxford, Penguin, Signet) and the collected works (Bevington, Pelican, Riverside, RSC and The Cambridge Works of Ben Jonson) have no women in general editorial roles. Jean E. Howard is sole general editor for the Bedford Shakespeare contextual series, which uses previously published texts. Women’s increasing presence as general editors matters in part because, as the first readers of an edition, they are in the best possible position to encourage or redirect an editor’s perceptions and can also recruit others.

The presence of women as contributing editors for complete works or volume editors for single-volume series has increased more significantly, and a table is a concise way to convey this information. Listed below, according to data available as of January, 2013, are the numbers of women who serve as contributing editors on fully re-edited editions and their percentage of the total number of editors for collected works or editions in single-volume series.20 The editions listed are already published except where ‘commissioned’ signals that some volumes are still in progress and editors are under contract. Dates given are for the publication of the first volume in the series or collected works.

Series or collected works	Women editors	% of total
Cambridge Ben Jonson (2012)	9 out of 33	27%
Arden Early Modern Drama (2009)	5 out of 8 as editors 1 more as co-editor	68%
Oxford Middleton (2007)	10 out of 57 as editors 13 more as partial editors	29%
Norton Critical Ed. of Shakespeare (2003)	6 out of 12	50%
Arden 3 Shakespeare (1995) 79% published; 21% commissioned	9 out of 42 as editors 4 more as co-editors	26%
Folger Shakespeare Library (1992)	1 out of 2	50%
New Mermaids (1987)	15 out of 53 as editors 1 more as co-editor	29%
New Cambridge Shakespeare (1984)	5 out of 42 as editors 9 more as co-editors	23%
Oxford Shakespeare (1982)	2 out of 39	5%
New Variorum Shakespeare (1977)	0 out of 5 as editors 1 as co-editor	10%

The highest proportions of women editors appear in non-Shakespearean editions and two Shakespeare series for general or undergraduate readers. The more scholarly series directed to specialists and graduate/postgraduate students have fewer women, although more recent series in this category have higher percentages. Taken as a whole, the data show women have made quite remarkable progress over the past two decades in editing Shakespeare and early modern texts, especially if their work is viewed in the context of the last three centuries. All women editors are not feminists, of course: the texts that women produce are diverse in ideology and editorial choices, and those recently edited by men can be very attentive to gender and sexuality. On the other hand, earlier editions reveal that gender-neutrality among editors, even if it were possible or desirable, has rarely been aimed for much less achieved.21 A consideration of some ways in which women’s editions do and do not differ from their predecessors’ appears in Suzanne Gossett’s essay in this volume.22 Beyond the numbers, women have earned serious respect for their editorial and scholarly work and have repeatedly demonstrated the value of their contributions. There is more to be done, but women are well underway in rethinking and remaking the texts of Shakespeare.

Notes

I am grateful to Suzanne Gossett, Ann Thompson, and to members of the Early Modern Forum at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, including Urvashi Chakravarty and Elizabeth McCutcheon, for their readings and suggested revisions of this essay.

1Gary Taylor, ‘Textual and Sexual Criticism: A Crux in The Comedy of Errors’, Renaissance Drama 19 (1988), 195–225, quote at 195.

2Phyllis Rackin, Shakespeare and Women (Oxford, 2005), p. 2.

3Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts (eds) Women Reading Shakespeare, 1660–1900: An Anthology of Criticism (Manchester, 1997), pp. 46–8. Henrietta’s Sermons went through fifty editions from 1801 to 1853.

4Noel Perrin, Dr. Bowdler’s Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England and America (Boston, 1992), pp. 83–4.

5Perrin, Dr. Bowdler’s Legacy, p. 80, pp. 87–96.

6See Valerie Wayne, ‘The Gendered Text and its Labour’, in Valerie Traub ed., The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, Race (Oxford, forthcoming).

7Gail Marshall and Ann Thompson, ‘Mary Cowden Clarke’, in Gail Marshall ed., Jameson, Cowden Clarke, Kemble, Cushman (London, 2011), vol. 7, Great Shakespeareans, pp. 58–91, quotes at p. 59, p. 73, p. 90.

8Marshall and Thompson, pp. 60–2, pp. 69–71.

9Marshall and Thompson, p. 63, p. 72, pp. 86–9.

10Thompson and Roberts (eds) Women Reading, pp. 160–2.

11Jeanne Addison Roberts, ‘Women Edit Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Survey 59 (2006), 136–46, quote at 145–6.

12Jonathan Bate, ‘The Case for the Folio’ (2007), 1–69, quote at 67, www.rscshakespeare.co.uk/pdfs/Case_for_the_Folio.pdf

13T. H. Howard-Hill, ‘Alice Walker’, in H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 61 vols. (Oxford, 2004), vol. 56, p. 812.

14Laurie Maguire, ‘How Many Children Had Alice Walker?’ in Douglas A. Brooks ed., Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 327–50, information at p. 331.

15Howard-Hill, ‘Alice Walker’, ODNB, vol. 56, p. 812.

16Maguire, ‘How Many Children?’, p. 345.

17Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge, 1997), p. 11. David McKitterick, ‘Obituary: Katharine F. Pantzer, 1930–2005’, The Library 7, 1 (March 2006), 87–9, quote at 87.

18McKitterick, ‘Obituary’, 87–9. See A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, 2nd edn rev. W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson, Katharine F. Pantzer, Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1475–1640, 2 vols. (London, 1976), vol. 2, 340.

19Ann Thompson, ‘Feminist Theory and the Editing of Shakespeare: The Taming of the Shrew Revisited’, in D. C. Greetham ed., The Margins of the Text (Ann Arbor, 1997), 83–103; Valerie Wayne, ‘The Sexual Politics of Textual Transmission’, in Laurie E. Maguire and Thomas L. Berger (eds), Textual Formations and Reformations (Newark, 1998), pp. 179–210; Laurie E. Maguire, ‘Feminist Editing and the Body of the Text’, in Dympna Callaghan ed., A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford, 2000), 59–79.

20The Pelican, Penguin, and Bedford Shakespeare series are excluded from this table because their most recent texts have not been completely re-edited, and the focus here is on textual editing. Norton Critical Editions are included because editors are responsible for developing a text. I am grateful to Bill Carroll, a general editor of New Mermaids, for information on that series and its procedures. Other information is taken primarily from publishers’ websites. The contributions of ‘partial editors’ on the Middleton range from preparing introductions, annotations, or both, to co-editing a text.

21See Wayne, ‘The Gendered Text’, forthcoming.

22Suzanne Gossett, ‘Women making Shakespeare – and Middleton and Jonson’, in this volume.