Gordon McMullan, Lena Cowen Orlin and Virginia Mason Vaughan
1Edward III: Women and the Making of Shakespeare as Historical Dramatist
3‘Bride-habited, but maiden-hearted’: Language and Gender in The Two Noble Kinsmen
4Gender, the False Universal and Shakespeare’s Comedies
5In Plain Sight: Visible Women and Early Modern Plays
6Remaking the Texts: Women Editors of Shakespeare, Past and Present
8Some Women Editors of Shakespeare: A Preliminary Sketch
9Bernice Kliman’s Enfolded Hamlet
10Women Making Shakespeare – and Middleton and Jonson
11Juliet and the Vicissitudes of Gender
12Women Painting Shakespeare: Angelica Kauffman’s Text-images
13Women Reading Witches, 1800–1850
14Joanna Baillie: The Female Shakespeare
15The Girlhood of Mary Cowden Clarke
16‘A Sacred Trust’: Helen Faucit, Geraldine Jewsbury, and the Idealized Shakespeare
17Invisible Women: Mary Dunbar and The Shakespeare Birthday Book
18‘A marvelous convenient place’: Women Reading Shakespeare in Montana, 1890–1918
19Remembering Charlotte Stopes
20‘Or was it Sh—p—re?’: Shakespeare in the manuscript of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
21The Vere Street Desdemona: Othello and the Theatrical Englishwoman, 1602–1660
22Lady Forbes-Robertson’s War Work: Gertrude Elliott and the Shakespeare Hut Performances, 1916–1919
23Editing Olivier’s Hamlet: An Interview with Helga Keller
24Trusting the Words: Patsy Rodenburg, Laurence Olivier and the Women of Richard III
26Women Playing Hamlet on the Spanish Stage
27Re-making Katherina: Julia Marlowe and The Taming of the Shrew
28Class, Identity, and Comic Choice: Bill Alexander’s The Taming of the Shrew
29Re-creating Katherina: The Taming of the Shrew at Shakespeare’s Globe
30Ms-Directing Shakespeare at the Globe to Globe Festival, 2012
31Sexing up Goneril: Feminism and Fetishization in Contemporary King Lear Performance
33‘Miranda, where’s your mother?’: Female Prosperos and What They Tell Us
34Joseph Cornell: A poem by John Thompson
for Ann Thompson
This volume was compiled in tribute to Ann Thompson. It continues the process she began, with Sasha Roberts, in the 1997 anthology Women Reading Shakespeare. Thanks to Ann and Sasha and others who sought to rehabilitate writers such as Henrietta Bowdler and actors such as Helena Faucit, we have become very aware both of the extent to which women have ‘made’ Shakespeare and also of the considerable amount of material yet to be uncovered and understood about the ways in which that ‘making’ came about. With Women Making Shakespeare, we aim to take the project forward.
Women Making Shakespeare offers a series of short readings, histories and interviews that demonstrate the power of women’s engagement with Shakespeare from the sixteenth century to the present. Contributors were invited to write about any aspect of the agency of women in the field known as ‘Shakespeare’ – anything, that is, from Shakespeare’s characterization of women to the history of women’s involvement in Shakespeare criticism, textual studies, performance or reception history.
Thus these case studies address the difference women have made to our understanding of Shakespeare across a range of achievement: Shakespeare writing about, and for, women; women printers and booksellers in Shakespeare’s day; women as pioneering Shakespearean critics; women as editors of Shakespeare; women painting Shakespeare; women teaching Shakespeare; women’s use of Shakespeare for memorialization; women as Shakespearean anthologists; women’s literary groups and ‘Shakespeare Clubs’; the role of Shakespeare in the women’s suffrage movement; Shakespearean performance as women’s war work; women’s theatrical management; women writing Shakespeare-inspired fiction; women in the contemporary publishing industry; women directing and acting Shakespeare in anglophone and non-anglophone contexts; women playing Shakespeare as a form of dissent; women as understudies; women as voice coaches; women in the Royal Shakespeare Company and at the reconstructed Globe; women on the operatic stage; women as film directors and film editors; women’s engagement with postcolonial Shakespeares; and women in cross-gendered roles. Throughout, the contributors celebrate an astonishing range of women Shakespeareans, well known and less so, from Mary Cowden Clarke to Sarah Siddons, from Anne Radcliffe to Mary Dunbar, from Charlotte Stopes to Virginia Woolf, from Peggy Ashcroft to Ann Thompson herself.
Ann is the connecting factor between the contributors, as friend, colleague, mentor, exemplar, and as someone whose breadth of interests is intimated here. She studied at King’s College London, taught at the University of Liverpool, and moved to a chair at the then Roehampton Institute (now University of Roehampton). In 1999 she returned to King’s as Professor of English, becoming Head of Department and then Head of the School of Arts and Humanities (that is, in general parlance, Dean). She is the founding director of the London Shakespeare Centre, based at King’s, and co-organizer of the London Shakespeare Seminar. Ann is, as we hardly need to tell the readers of this collection, a general editor of the Arden Shakespeare; she is also on the advisory boards of Shakespeare Survey and Shakespeare, and is a general editor of the Arden State of Play series. Lecture engagements have taken her to the United States, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and elsewhere. She has written on Shakespeare and Chaucer, on Shakespeare and language, on editing Shakespeare, and on the difference women have made to the phenomenon known as ‘Shakespeare’. As an Arden general editor, Ann has not only been instrumental in bringing an unprecedented number of women into the editorial field but has also, with Neil Taylor, produced a landmark three-text edition of Hamlet.
It was only as the idea of this collection developed that the full reach of Ann’s professional acquaintance and influence became clear to us. Our authors represent some of the many who are grateful to Ann for friendship, intellectual stimulation, advice, mentorship and, occasionally, productive disagreement. To a person, they responded enthusiastically to our invitation – ‘just try and stop me’, said one – and we are grateful for the good will, energy and learning each brought to the undertaking. Ann has provided the impetus for a wide-ranging set of essays by a formidable group of scholars, and for that we again have reason to remark our admiration for her and our appreciation, in personal as well as professional terms.
Gordon McMullan, Lena Cowen Orlin and Virginia Mason Vaughan