Some Women Editors of Shakespeare: A Preliminary Sketch
Lincoln College, Oxford
Through her own precept and practice, few scholars have done as much as Ann Thompson to challenge and dispel that dangerous but too commonly received notion that women have not played a significant role in the editing of Shakespeare. Her own editions – The Taming of the Shrew (1984, revised 2003) for Cambridge and the three-text Hamlet with Neil Taylor (2006) for Arden 3 – her explorations, especially with Sasha Roberts, of women reading and writing on Shakespeare, her theorizing of the relations between editing and feminist practice have all shown that editing is not and has not always been man’s work alone. As one of the General Editors of the Arden 3 series, she has also helped to promote the precept as practice.
A full scale history of the involvement of women in the editing of Shakespeare would be a major project engaging with a number of related fields, including publishing history, the history of scholarship, of literary societies and of women’s education and their position in society. What follows is a brief outline that might suggest some avenues of enquiry for future researchers. If it is no more than in the nature of literary gossip, then that is more or less inevitable: editions are complicated negotiations between editors, publishers and readers, subject to different demands, not least the endless compromises necessary between the individual editor and the requirements of the series and between the ideal edition and the publisher’s much more pragmatic business – to publish successful books.
***
In the spring of 1924, with the publication of Much Ado About Nothing, Methuen were able to complete the Arden Shakespeare series, an undertaking begun in 1899 with Edward Dowden’s Hamlet. The final play was the work of Grace R. Trenery, the only woman to edit an Arden volume until Agnes Latham produced As You Like It in 1975. Trenery’s edition has a relatively brief introduction and a very full commentary (one page in classic Arden style has only two lines of text on it). The only personal acknowledgement that she makes is to the series’ General Editor, Robert Hope Case (1857–1944), thanking him ‘for advice and sympathy in difficulties, and for encouragement which has extended over many years’. Beyond a few further references to his assistance in the commentary (‘Professor Case notes … Professor Case suggests …’) nothing more is revealed about who Grace Trenery was or the nature of those ‘difficulties’.1 The reviewer of her edition in The Times Literary Supplement (the ineffable John Middleton Murry) reported that ‘Miss Trenery enjoys and admires the play, and sets herself to all the work of elucidating it with an admirable quickness and subtlety of apprehension’.2
Like so many women editors, Trenery’s life is regrettably obscure. Born in 1887 in Stoneycroft, Liverpool, she seems to have spent most of her life in or around the city. At Wallasey High School, she was successful in the Oxford Local Examinations of 1900 and graduated from Liverpool University with a scholarship in English Literature in 1912.3 In 1915, she contributed an article on ‘Ballad Collections of the Eighteenth Century’ to the journal Modern Language Review:4 at this time, one of MLR’s three editors, James Fitzmaurice-Kelly (1858–1923), was Professor of Spanish at Liverpool. Her article surveys the various collections, discriminating between genuine ballads and those that had been fabricated or rewritten for publication in print. Her help in the preparation of William Thomas Young’s edition of Keats’s poems, published at Cambridge in 1917, is acknowledged by Oliver Elton: Young (1881–1917) had been educated at Liverpool where Elton (1861–1945), the King Alfred Professor, would have taught him. The edition shows that Trenery had been awarded an MA. Much Ado was published when she was about 37. During the Second World War, part of Liverpool University was evacuated to Coleg Harlech on the Cambrian coast. Trenery and Alexander James Dow Porteous (1896–1981), Professor of Education, were in charge of the College and, remembering her presence there, a student recalled that ‘one of her asides was “there are streaks in Bacon’’’.5 Her later history is unknown.
***
Grace Trenery was not Shakespeare’s earliest female editor, and the story of her predecessors – Henrietta Bowdler (1754–1830), Mary Cowden Clarke (1809–98) and the ardent American Shakespeareans Charlotte Endymion Porter (1859–1942) and Helen Archibald Clarke (1860–1926) – is sufficiently well known not to need rehearsing again.
Ann Thompson has told the less happy narrative of Teena Rochfort Smith (1861–83) and her parallel-text edition of Hamlet.6 It was to have presented the texts of the two quartos and the Folio, along with a ‘Revized Text’ of the play for the New Shakspere Society. Frederick James Furnivall (1825–1910) encouraged the project, but although a thirty-six-page sample text was published by Nicholas Trübner, the full edition never appeared because of Smith’s tragic death in 1883. If it had been issued, it ‘would have been the most complex presentation of the texts of Hamlet ever attempted’.7 It would also perhaps have represented the most ambitious piece of Shakespearean textual scholarship undertaken by a woman until well into the next century. It is likely that the intensity of Smith’s friendship with Furnivall broke up his marriage or, at least, contributed to its break up, but his role in promoting literary scholarship by women is characteristic.
***
These early editors represent one path of scholarly work by women. Another might be opened up by looking at editions and translations of the plays and the poems published elsewhere than in the United Kingdom and North America. To take just one example, annotated editions of Macbeth and of The Taming of the Shrew were published at Copenhagen in 1885 and 1886, respectively, edited by A. Stewart MacGregor and Mrs Selma S. Kinney, the second in collaboration with H. C. Damm. In 1898, Mrs Kinney arrived in the US and went on to teach French and German in Hawai‘i. Her work in Denmark shows how towards the end of the nineteenth century another direction for women editors was opening up.
The growth in popular education and in English literature as a suitable subject for study created a need for school editions of Shakespeare’s works. These might be abridged in addition to being annotated, as were the editions that the novelist Charlotte Mary Yonge (1823–1901) prepared for the National Society’s Depository in the mid-1880s.8 Some of the earliest and more professional classroom editions of the plays were produced by Katharine Lee Bates (1859–1929), who edited The Merchant of Venice (1894), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1895) and As You Like It (1896) for The Students’ Series of English Classics.9 Bates, a graduate of and professor at Wellesley College, had published a study of the English religious drama (1893): she is perhaps best remembered as the author of the lyrics of ‘America the Beautiful’. The Shakespeare editions were published by Leach, Shewell, and Sanborn at thirty-five cents, and had cloth bindings, attractively lettered and decorated on their upper covers. The extensive notes for each play were divided into three categories:
textual, for the use of more advanced classes, that are interested in seeing how far the play they read is the play originally printed; grammatical, for the use of students who would familiarize themselves with Elizabethan idiom; and literary; this third group of notes being, in the judgment of the editor, more fruitful and appropriate, especially for beginners, than the two technical divisions. In classes where textual and grammatical work is done, it is believed better to separate these special lines of investigation from the essential study of the play.10
In England, Elizabeth Lee (1857/8–1920), the translator of Jean Jules Jusserand’s The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare (1890) and the sister of Sidney Lee (1859–1926), was responsible for editions of The Tempest (1894 and of Twelfth Night (1895) for Blackie’s Junior School Shakespeare.11
The plays that Bates and Lee chose or were asked to edit are largely characteristic of the publishing practices of the next century: comedies and some histories for women, tragedies for men. This was not always the case, and one of the first editions of a play produced by a woman in Britain for a school series was Phoebe Sheavyn’s King Lear of 1898.12 Sheavyn (1865–1968) was then in her second year as a tutor at Somerville College, Oxford, having studied at Aberystwyth and Bryn Mawr; her famous monograph The Literary Profession in the Elizabethan Age was not to be published until 1909. The Lear edition, published by Adam and Charles Black as part of Black’s School Shakespeare, cost a shilling and was attractively presented in green cloth with dark blue lettering. The series General Editor was the prolific Lionel William Lyde (1863–1947), then of Glasgow Academy. Sheavyn’s edition is a conventional school one, with an introduction dealing with such subjects as the play’s sources, date, characters, and construction. The twenty pages of notes in double columns concentrate on the play’s vocabulary; they are followed by a brief index which allows the reader to locate examples of ‘Prothesis’ and of ‘Abstract for concrete’ nouns.
More school editions by women may well exist; some may lurk unidentified behind editors’ chaste initials and others are hard to locate since even major libraries acquired copies only sporadically. The demand from schools led publishers to embark on a number of series, and women editors were commissioned to edit volumes for them. For example, the University Tutorial Series, whose General Editor was William Briggs (1861–1932), Principal of University Correspondence College, London, had the rather interesting novelist Agnes Russell Weekes edit As You Like It and The Tempest in 1909 and Cymbeline a decade later.13 In 1924, Magdalene Marie Weale edited Love’s Labour’s Lost, and in 1929, Gertrude Eleanor Hollingworth produced Henry VIII for the same series.14 The blue-grey cloth, blocked with black lettering, of these books is unattractive and the format of the introductions allowed their writers little space for their own views or ideas as characters, metre, rhyme and prose were all analysed. The notes to the editions are, however, quite generous and are well indexed.
None of these school series employed editors who had or later established reputations as Shakespeare scholars. The same is not true for the Heath or Arden Shakespeare, published by D. C. Heath in London. Lilian Winstanley (1875–1960), who had a first in English from what became Manchester University, was a lecturer at Aberystwyth and later wrote critical-historical studies of the major tragedies, edited 2 Henry IV in about 1918 for this series which also included editions by such familiar male scholars as J. C. Smith, E. K. Chambers, A. J. Wyatt, G. C. Moore Smith, F. S. Boas, and David Nichol Smith.15 Similarly, the Tudor Shakespeare, whose general editors were William A. Neilson and Ashley H. Thorndike, and which was published at New York by Macmillan, commissioned several women to edit plays for it: As You Like It (1911) from Martha Hale Shackford (1875–1963); 1 Henry VI (1911) from Louise Pound (1872–1958); The Winter’s Tale (1912) from Laura Johnson Wylie (1855–1932); 2 Henry IV (1914) from Elizabeth Deering Hanscom (1865–1960); King Lear (1914) from Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve (b. 1877).16 Among the male editors of plays in this series were W. W. Lawrence, F. M. Padelford, J. W. Cunliffe, J. S. P. Tatlock, E. E. Stoll and Carleton Brown.
For many of these editors, the plays of Shakespeare were not their first editorial projects. Katharine Lee Bates, for example, had already prepared Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1889) and a Ballad Book (1890) for the same school series as the Shakespeare volumes she produced. Similarly, before turning to Shakespeare Lilian Winstanley had taken on the task of editing some of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes (1907) and the first two books of The Faerie Queene (1914–15) for Cambridge’s Pitt Press series. A similar path from Book I of The Faerie Queene (1905) to Shakespeare was followed by Martha Hale Shackford. For others, such as Agnes Russell Weekes and Gertrude Eleanor Hollingworth, the Shakespeare editions seem to have been among their earliest publications in the form of books.
***
The fact that these women were commissioned as editors of school and more scholarly editions shows that publishers or general editors were ready to make use of the new generation of university-educated women to produce the works they wanted to sell. ‘The names of Shakespeare’s editors are legion’, Andrew Murphy wrote and went on to ask mournfully, ‘who now remembers H. Bellyse Baildon, Henry Ten Eyck Perry, N. Burton Paradise, Thomas M. Parrott or Virginia Gildersleeve?’17 In fact, Gildersleeve, the editor of King Lear for the Tudor Shakespeare, had a doctorate from Columbia University for a thesis on Government Regulation of Elizabethan Drama (1908) and is also remembered – at least in ODNB – as the founder in 1919, with her companion the Chaucer and Shakespeare scholar Caroline Spurgeon (1869–1942), of the International Federation of University Women.
If, in the end, commercial demands drove the production of these Shakespeare editions and the employment of women editors, it is interesting to see female scholars before Grace Trenery being commissioned in their own right to produce distinctive editions. One example of this is the volume of the Sonnets that Charlotte Carmichael Brown Stopes (1840–1929) produced for Alexander Moring’s De La More Press in 1904. This was part of his attractive series called the King’s Classics and described itself as the King’s Shakespeare, although no other plays or poems were issued. The feminist Stopes wrote extensively on Shakespeare and Elizabethan history: the edition of the poems (quarter-bound antique grey boards for 1s. 6d.), her only Shakespeare edition, is characteristically idiosyncratic (‘I have been unable through lack of space to give reasons for my difference of opinion on so many points from all previous editors’).18
Presumably Moring commissioned the edition but, although publishers evidently had the final say as to who was given a contract, the role of the general editor of the series should not be forgotten. Learned societies provide an early model for this; for example, women edited volumes or parts of volumes for the Camden Society from as early as 1847 when Charlotte Augusta Sneyd (1800–82) translated and annotated Andrea Trevisano’s A Relation, or rather a True Account, of the Isle of England. In 1856, Mary Everett Green (1818–95), recently appointed an editor of the calendars of state papers, edited the diary of John Rous for the Society. Furnivall’s role in promoting Teena Rochfort Smith’s work on Hamlet has already been referred to; it may be possible to detect his influence in the employment of women editors for the publications of the Early English Text Society that he founded in 1864. Lucy Toulmin Smith (1838–1911) completed her father’s work on English gilds for the Society in 1870 and Octavia Richardson generously acknowledged Furnivall’s encouragement in her edition of The right plesaunt and goodly historie of the foure sonnes of Aymon for the Society in 1885: many other women subsequently edited volumes for the Main and the Extra Series.
Similarly, it is possible that W. W. Greg (1875–1959) encouraged Willy Bang (1869–1934) to commission Evelyn Mary Spearing’s edition of Studley’s Translations of Seneca’s Agamemnon and Medea (1913) for Bang’s Materialen zur Kunde des älteren englischen Dramas. Spearing is more immediately recognizable as Evelyn Simpson (1885–1963), the great editor of Jonson and of Donne’s sermons. By the time her edition came out (‘the second volume of her endeavours was lost when the Louvain University Press was destroyed’ during the First World War),19 the Malone Society had been in existence for six years, but it was not until the 1920s that, with Greg as General Editor, women began to edit volumes for the Society. The first was Anthony Munday’s John a Kent and John a Cumber (1923) edited by Muriel St Clare Byrne (1895–1983), followed by Edmond Ironside (1927) by Eleanore Boswell (b. 1897), Philip Massinger’s The Parliament of Love (1928) by Kathleen Marguerite Lea (1903–95) and Thomas of Woodstock (1929) by the Dutch scholar Wilhelmina Paulina Frijlinck (1880–1965).
In this context of school and scholarly editions of Shakespeare, of volumes for learned societies, Grace Trenery’s Much Ado seems less of a phoenix and more of a sign of what was still to come. During the next sixty or so years, the work of women editors and of women general editors, like Ann Thompson, was increasingly to be recognized by the publishing and scholarly worlds.
1Much Ado About Nothing, ed. Grace R. Trenery, The Arden Shakespeare (London, 1924), pp. xxvii, 116, 134, 135.
2TLS, 15 May 1924, p. 293.
31901 Census; Liverpool Mercury, 21 August 1900; Manchester Guardian, 8 July 1912.
4‘Ballad Collections of the Eighteenth Century’, Modern Language Review 10 (1915), 283–303.
5P. E. H. Hair, ed., Arts, Letters, Society: A Miscellany Commemorating the Faculty of Arts at the University of Liverpool (Liverpool, 1996), p. 54; Manchester Guardian, 28 December 1940.
6Ann Thompson, ‘Teena Rochfort Smith, Frederick Furnivall, and the New Shakspere Society’s Four-Text Edition of Hamlet’, Shakespeare Quarterly 49 (1998), 125–39; not in Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print: A Hisory and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge, 2003).
7Thompson, ‘Smith’, p. 131.
8Not in Murphy.
9Thompson and Roberts, Women Reading, p. 225; not in Murphy.
10Shakespeare’s Comedy of As You Like It, ed. Katharine Lee Bates (1896), pp. iii–iv.
11Not in Murphy; for Elizabeth Lee, see ODNB.
12Not in Murphy.
13Murphy, nos. 943, 963, 966. Weekes gained a first in English and French in 1907 and an MA in English in 1910 from London University.
14Murphy, nos. 949, 968; the first edition of Henry VIII may be considerably earlier. Hollingworth also edited Coriolanus (1924), Hamlet (1926), Macbeth with Stephen Edwardes Goggin (1927) and 1 Henry IV (1929) for The Matriculation Shakespeare which is not in Murphy.
15Murphy, nos. 842, 865.
16Murphy, nos. 1058, 1059, 1062, 1070, 1074, 1084.
17Murphy, p. 13.
18Sonnets (1904), p. lv; not in Murphy.
19ODNB.