SHAKESPEARE'S 'LADY EDITORS' : a new history of the shakespearean text

The basic history of the Shakespearean editorial tradition is familiar and well-established. For nearly three centuries, men – most of them white and financially privileged – ensconced themselves in private and hard-to-access libraries, hammering out 'their' versions of Shakespeare's text. They produced enormous, learnèd tomes: monuments to their author's greatness and their own reputations. What if this is not the whole story? A bold, revisionist and alternative version of Shakespearean editorial history, this book recovers the lives and labours of almost seventy women editors. It challenges the received wisdom that, when it came to Shakespeare, the editorial profession was entirely male-dominated until the late twentieth century. In doing so, it demonstrates that taking these women's work seriously can transform our understanding of the history of editing, of the nature of editing as an enterprise, and of how we read Shakespeare in history. Copyright_page 2 Dedication 6 Epigraph 8 Contents 10 Figures 11 Acknowledgements 13 A_Note_on_Citations 16 Abbreviations 17 Prologue 18 1 ‘We Have Lost Our Labour’ 32 2 ‘It Is My Lady’s Hand’ 55 Sidenote: On Women Editing Not-Shakespeare (or Not Editing) 89 3 ‘Give Ear, Sir, to My Sister’ 96 Sidenote: A Primer on Early Student Editions of Shakespeare 128 4 ‘This Story the World May Read in Me’ 154 5 ‘We Few, We Happy Few’ 187 Epilogue 215 Appendices 223 Women_Editors_of_Shakespeare_18001950 225 Shakespeare_Editions_Prepared_by_Women_18002021 263 Works_Cited 313 Index 343 Prologue: The Mystery of Mrs Valentine -- 'We Have Lost Our Labour': Recovering Women Editors of Shakespeare -- 'It is My Lady's Hand': Female Collaborators and Ambiguous Literary Labour -- Sidenote: On Women Editing Not-Shakespeare (or Not Editing) -- 'Give Ear, Sir, to My Sister': Women Editors and Scholarly Networks in America -- Sidenote: A Primer on Early Student Editions of Shakespeare -- 'This Story the World May Read in Me': Biography and Bibliography -- 'We Happy Few': Women and the New Bibliography "The basic history of the Shakespearean editorial tradition is familiar and well-established. For nearly three centuries, men - most of them white and financially privileged - ensconced themselves in private and hard-to-access libraries, hammering out 'their' versions of Shakespeare's text. They produced enormous, learnèd tomes: monuments to their author's greatness and their own reputations"-- Provided by publisher From novelists and professors to suffragists and Irish revolutionaries, Shakespeare's women editors lived extraordinary lives and produced editions that, throughout England and America, were read and used by people of all ages. This compelling book draws on book history, literary studies and women's history alike to tell their remarkable stories.