University of Roehampton
In 1946 Una Ellis-Fermor became General Editor of the New Arden Shakespeare (hereinafter ‘Ard2’). When she died in 1958 Harold Brooks wrote eloquently and movingly of her life and work, including her importance as the person who had established the principles of the series. He noted that she was held in honour and affection ‘for her service in countless personal ways to the international brotherhood of scholars.’1
That final phrase was telling. Editing Shakespeare was indeed the province of brothers rather than of sisters.
In 1992, Ann Thompson was appointed a general editor of the third Arden Shakespeare (‘Ard3’). Five years later, she noted that still only eight women had edited plays in the Oxford, New Cambridge, Penguin or Ard2 series.2 Since then, as Valerie Wayne observes elsewhere in this volume, women have begun to edit more frequently. But if one analyses the history of the 1,004 major British and American editions of Shakespeare texts which have been published since the original Arden Shakespeare was launched in 1899,3 one finds that 216 of the 262 editors have been men. That means that men have outnumbered women five to one. And only thirty women have ever edited a text on their own. Even in the eighteen years since Ard3 launched in 1995, the gender ratio has only moved to three to one.
If one looks back at the whole period of 114 years, one finds that, while there have been forty-three general editors or sole editors of a series, only two of them have been women.4 And only one of these women has ever been in sole charge. That was Una Ellis-Fermor.
This male-dominated culture extends into other related areas. Shakespeare Survey (founded 1948) has had four editors, all male. Each time an editor has retired he has then joined the advisory board and served on it for at least eleven years. While the board began with eight men and one woman, Ellis-Fermor, after her death it waited until 1973 to appoint another woman. Since then the number of women members has steadily grown to seven, but they are still well outnumbered by the other members – the male editor and ten other men. Shakespeare Quarterly (founded in 1950) has a man as chair of an editorial board consisting of four men and one woman, and an advisory board (chaired by a man) consisting of nineteen men and two women. At the time of submitting this essay for publication the editor is a man.5 He is currently assisted by two female consulting editors, two male and one female associate editors, and an editorial board of eleven men and seven women. Finally, Shakespeare (founded in 2005) has five editors (three men and two women), and an editorial board consisting of 28 men and six women. While these figures indicate that, in the cases of Shakespeare Survey and Shakespeare Quarterly at least, the gender imbalance has lessened, if one puts the current numbers of editors and editorial board members from each journal together, men still outnumber women by more than two to one.
What about Shakespeare conferences? To take an arbitrary example, attendance at the biennial International Shakespeare Conference in Stratford-upon-Avon is restricted to invited delegates (and until recently at least only repeated non-attendance removes the invitation). The conference’s advisory committee in 1994 (the first conference I attended) consisted of nine men and three women; in 2012 it was nine men and four women. In 1994 there were 147 male, as opposed to seventy-six female, delegates; in 2012 male attendance had dropped to 123 while female attendance had risen to 92. A marked change, but still the men outnumber the women.6
Ellis-Fermor went to Oxford. By 1918 she was teaching in the University of London. But that was two years before Oxford fully admitted women to the University and thirty before Oxford appointed its first female professor. Indeed, in 1939 women still made up less than twenty-five per cent of the university student population.7 Yet, by 1992, that figure had risen to 50 per cent and, at the time of composing this essay, the most recent UK figures reveal that women undergraduates now make up fifty-seven per cent of the undergraduate population.8 Furthermore, while the majority of academic staff in UK institutions of higher education in 2010–11 were male,9 my own calculations of academic staff teaching and/or researching in UK English departments suggest that, in 2012, women just outnumbered men (1,193 to 1,157).10
So, while the history of education clearly provides reasons why women for many years found it difficult to break into the male preserve of scholarly editing, one might expect the problem to have resolved itself by now. Why is it, then, that female editors are still such a minority? It’s not as if English departments are short of female students or female staff. But since almost all general editors are men, when it comes to appointing the editors of individual texts, I can only assume that they turn first (unconsciously, I have no doubt) to other men.
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Books are not made by one man. Or, indeed, by one woman. Acknowledging this fact has become increasingly widespread. Glancing along the fiction shelves of my local bookshop, I find that these days even novelists include a section labelled ‘Acknowledgements’. Among those doing it are names as diverse as Jeffrey Archer, Margaret Atwood, Dan Brown, Peter Carey, J. M. Coetzee, Geoff Dyer, Ken Follett, Andrea Levy, Hilary Mantel, Tom McCarthy, Ian McEwan, D. B. C. Pierre, Alice Sebald, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, Sarah Waters, Irvine Welsh and Jeanette Winterson. Perhaps under the influence of Oscars ceremonies, the extent of some novelists’ thanks would seem to know no bounds. For example, in her most recent book, Jilly Cooper not only devotes as many as fourteen pages to acknowledging the help of 152 men, 124 women, three dogs and a cat, but bemoans the fact that she has mislaid the names and contact details of many others (Jump!, London, 2010, pp. 909–22, 920).
However, in respect of more academic writing, David Scott Kastan has written that ‘[n]o form of scholarly work more obviously reveals itself less as an individual labour and more as a collective activity than an edition of a Shakespeare play.’11 He spreads the net wide, for he sees himself as collaborating with the dead as well as with the living: ‘not only is this edition an effort to commune with Shakespeare, to attempt to recover his intentions from the Ouija board of the surviving texts, but it is also a series of vigorous conversations through the medium of print with all previous editors’.12
My interest here, however, is in those living collaborators who help make Shakespeare editions. The original Arden Shakespeare and Cambridge New Shakespeare editors rarely thanked anyone other than the occasional fellow scholar. But as the century wore on the number of acknowledgements grew steadily and the 36 Ard3 titles so far published have amassed 1,079. (Indeed, one Ard3 editor has alone accounted for eighty-one.) Most thanks still go to fellow scholars, and here the gender imbalance is again apparent. Between them, the male scholars acknowledged by the editors of the editions mentioned in this essay have outnumbered their female counterparts by more than two to one.
Most editors, even the most unprofligate, have dutifully thanked their general editors: for obvious reasons the men once again outnumber the women – this time by more than five to one. And many editors have mentioned the help they have received in libraries. But for long what appeared in the Acknowledgements were the names of the libraries rather than those of individual staff members. In recent years, however, individuals have begun to be singled out for thanks and praise. As a result women have begun to come into their own: Ard2 editors mentioned by name twelve men and six women librarians, but Oxford mentioned fourteen men and twenty-eight women and New Cambridge nine men and thirty-three women. Ard3 mentions 20 men and 58 women.
Who else gets thanked? Very occasionally, but not very recently, a male editor has thanked a female secretary or administrator for typing up his manuscript. Much more frequently, and always right at the end of the Acknowledgements, loved ones are thanked for their forbearance. Usually that loved one is a woman, and usually she has no name. Often her love and support have been needed because her man has found editing almost unbearable. One reads of the editor ‘lost in the dark room of the editing process’, and of wives enduring their husbands’ ‘groans’, and even ‘despair’, on ‘the long ascent’. If editing is such hell, perhaps women are better off out of it?13
Some wives, however, seem to have been operating as editors themselves. One editor confessed that his wife had worked with him on ‘every aspect of the volume’. Another drew on his wife’s ‘intimate and wide-ranging knowledge of things Elizabethan’. One thanked his wife for ‘diligently revising the commentary and amplifying the notes’, while another felt that his wife had done ‘more proof-reading than any wife should be asked to undertake.’ (How much should that be?) And one editor of a Complete Works told how his wife ‘with truly Spartan endurance read aloud to me the complete text (including all the punctuation marks).’14
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One group is still missing from my analysis of those whose contribution editors have learnt to acknowledge – the staff of the publishing house. The earliest of these to be mentioned was Mrs Margaret Pearce, who copy-edited the 1975 Twelfth Night for Ard2. Two more Ard2 editors also acknowledged their copy-editors by name, one in 1979 and one in 1982. In that last year, Oxford editors took up the practice, and by the time the series was complete, had thanked members of OUP staff fifty-one times. The earliest New Cambridge editors had refrained from mentioning such people, but they began in 1984 and eventually thanked individuals sixty-two times.
The prize, however, goes to Ard3, whose editors have so far thanked individual publishers, editors, copy-editors and proof-readers 128 times. And ‘prize’ seems not be an inappropriate word since, not only is their praise often fulsome, and sometimes more than fulsome, but there is a competitive edge to what many of them have written. Copy-editors are often commended for being ‘eagle-eyed’, but one pair of co-editors write that ‘If there is a bird with sight even sharper than that of an eagle, it is to this that we liken our brilliant copy-editor’ (The Poems, 2007, p. xviii). One editor thanks his ‘meticulous, self-effacing’ copy-editor, for having ‘sharpened my logic and clarified cloudy sentences, and … not infrequently bettered the substance as well as the accidents of this book’ (Richard II, 2002, p. xviii). Another writes at length of how his copy-editor’s ‘encyclopedic editorial experience’, ‘formidable critical faculty’, and ‘unwavering commitment to the strictest accuracy and to the very highest standards of clarity’, have transformed his manuscript (The Merchant of Venice, 2010, p. xix). Indeed, one editor admits that his copy-editor has served as ‘virtually another co-editor’ (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 2004, p. xviii), while another goes further and abandons the concept of virtuality: ‘I don’t exaggerate when I say that in places … [she] has become my co-editor.’ He describes her ‘quizzing, correcting, and gently nudging me towards what she’s sure I meant to say’ (The Winter’s Tale, 2010, p. xx). Finally, one editor goes for broke and claims that the expertise of the Ard3 publishing team ‘puts all other publishing houses to shame’ (Much Ado About Nothing, 2006, p. xix).
The last-mentioned editor refers to the publishing team as ‘all these women’ (idem). Just as men dominate textual editing, so women dominate publishing,15 and the acknowledgements pages, now that they have begun to include the publishers, reflect this fact. The New Cambridge editors, for example, have thanked men twenty-two times and women forty times; the Oxford editors have thanked men four times and women forty-seven times. And once again the Ard3 figures are the most dramatic. Its textual editors have so far thanked men five times, but women 123 times.
In The Shakespeare Wars (New York, 2006), Ron Rosenbaum reported that Ann Thompson had told him that her rapid rise to become a general editor of Ard3 ‘may in part have been a response to her critique of the male-dominated textual-editing establishment’ (p. 78). While the numbers of women editors may still disappoint her, it is possible that she will be heartened by my last statistic. Her own editors, the majority of whom are men, have shown themselves to be more prepared than most to acknowledge not only that ‘[e]diting a play, like staging a play, is a collaborative exercise’ (Keir Elam, Preface to Ard3 Twelfth Night, 2008, p. xviii), but that the exercise normally involves a good number of women collaborators – above all when it comes to ensuring that their editions are presented to readers, and presentable.
1In G. K. Hunter ed., All’s Well That Ends Well, New Arden Shakespeare (London, 1959), p. 7.
2‘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), pp. 83–103, p. 85.
3I am including series (three Arden, two Cambridge, two Folger Library, and two Pelican, along with Oxford, Penguin, Shakespeare Originals and Signet) and complete works (Arden, Norton, Oxford, Riverside and RSC, along with those edited by Peter Alexander, David Bevington, Hardin Craig, Wilbur L. Cross and C. F. Tucker Brooke, G. B. Harrison, G. L. Kittredge and C. J. Sisson).
4Virginia A. Lamar co-edited the Folger Library General Readers Shakespeare and Barbara Mowat co-edited the Folger Library Shakespeare.
5I am informed, however, that by the time the essay is published he will have been replaced by a woman.
6By contrast, at the 2013 Shakespeare Association of America conference, women represented fifty-three per cent of the delegates. Membership of SAA is open and not restricted to invitees or previous attendees.
7See Stijn Broecke and Joseph Hamed, Gender Gaps in Higher Education Participation: An Analysis of the Relationship between Prior Attainment and Young Participation by Gender, Socio-Economic Class and Ethnicity, DIUS Research Report 08–14 (2008), para. 1.
8Enrolments and qualifications figures for 2011/12, published on the Higher Education Statistics Agency website, SFR 183, Table 5.
9Ibid., SFR 185, Table 1. The numbers are 100,610 males out of 181,385 (55.34 per cent).
10My figures are based on the English departments listed on the CCUE (Council for College and University English) website at the time of submitting this essay, and trying as far as possible to be consistent in disentangling English staff from staff in other disciplines where there is a department or school or other unit which mixes English staff with others.
11Preface to the Ard3 Henry IV Part One (2002, p. xv).
12Idem.
13The phrases quoted in this paragraph come from Prefaces in the Ard3 Twelfth Night (2008, p. xx), Oxford King John (1989, p. ix), Oxford A Midummer Night’s Dream (1994, p. vi) and Oxford Julius Caesar (1984, p. v).
14The phrases quoted in this paragraph come from Prefaces and Acknowledgements in the New Cambridge Othello (1984, p. x), Ard2 Hamlet (1982, p. ix), Ard2 2 Henry IV (1966, p. ix), Oxford Othello (2006, p. vi), and The Riverside Shakespeare (1974, p. vi).
15See, for example, Sue Ledwith and Frances Tomlinson, ‘Women in Book Publishing – A “Feminised” Sector?’, in Sue Ledwith and Fiona Colgan eds, Women in Organisations: Challenging Gender Politics (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 44–77, p. 48.