This welcome collection honors Ann Thompson by extending her own innovative and influential feminist scholarship. Inspired by Thompson’s wide-ranging significance as a textual editor, historian of women, critic, and mentor, the thirty-four contributors scrutinize the many different ways in which women have collaboratively participated in the cultural reproduction of Shakespeare. Women Making Shakespeare provides a spectrum of answers to the question advocates for women have long puzzled over: what can women make of Shakespeare?
Most essays in part 1, “Text,” analyze the contributions of women textual editors of Shakespeare from the nineteenth into the twentieth-first century. Valerie Wayne traces their progress, stretching from Henrietta Bowdler’s 1807 Family Shakespeare to the present — represented by a chart showing percentages of women who edit plays in contemporary early modern drama series, ranging from 5 percent (1982 Oxford Shakespeare) to 68 percent (2009 Arden Early Modern Drama). Suzanne Gossett raises the complex issue of what difference women editors make. By comparing how male and female editors treat the same play in introductions, glosses, and cruxes, she concludes that women foreground gender, treat sexuality more frankly, and choose different emendations. Other contributions to textual transmission are uncovered: David Kastan finds evidence of women printers and booksellers of early modern plays; H. R. Woudhuysen studies women who edited popular school editions of the plays in England and America.
Many essays in part 2, “Reception,” uncover the contexts that nurtured nineteenth-century female Shakespeare scholars by providing the intellectual exchanges that substituted for formal education: stimulating childhoods, female role models, women’s friendships, Shakespeare clubs, the suffrage movement. Lucy Munro investigates revisionary nineteenth-century interpretations of the witches in Macbeth as female, poetic, and tragic in powerful staged readings by Sarah Siddons and Fanny Kemble and in Anna Jameson’s critical interpretations. Lois Potter shows that the first portraits in actress Helen Faucit’s On Some of Shakespeare’s Female Characters (1890) were letters written to her dying friend, Geraldine Jewsbury, whose novel The Half Sisters likely influenced Faucit’s interpretations. Kate Chedgzoy reveals how Mary Cowden Clarke’s extensive publications on Shakespeare (the first Concordance, an edition of Shakespeare’s works, and her better-known The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines [1851]) were made possible by “the incorporation of Shakespeare into liberal pedagogic practice” (153) in her childhood — through structured reading, her professor father’s loving introduction of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, and the tutoring/mentoring of Mary Lamb herself. The networks supporting women scholars were likewise heterosocial, their impetus, political and financial, as Kathleen McLuskie demonstrates in her essay on Charlotte Stopes, who wrote ten books to support herself and her daughter and whose lectures on the suffrage circuit and study of British women’s legal rights provided the theoretical framework that shaped her archival scholarship on Elizabethan theater history and women’s roles in early modern Stratford.
The fourteen essays in part 3, “Performance,” bring to light many dazzlingly unconventional twentieth-century productions that remake Shakespeare. Women are directors, film editors, and speech coaches, but mostly actors who make surprising feminist performance choices. José Manuel Gonsález examines performances by three Spanish actresses who played Hamlet in ways that unsettled the gender and sexuality of the prince: Margarita Xirgu’s transvestite Hamlet in 1938 in Buenos Aires, Nuria Espert’s overtly homosexual Hamlet in 1960 in Barcelona, and Blanca Portillo’s Hamlet as a sexually ambiguous woman, one educated as a man (2009, Madrid). Equally subversive was Julia Marlowe’s feisty, farcical, and playful 1905 performance of Kate in The Taming of the Shrew, re-created by Elizabeth Schafer from Marlowe’s prompt books that show her as a director and dramaturg too; she researched the play, edited the text, and annotated vocal emphases and stage business. Trudi Darby explores how Patsy Rodenburg, an internationally famous voice coach, directs a 2011 student performance of Richard III that gives the play’s multiple powerful women their due — instead of cutting their parts down or out as did Olivier’s and McKellan’s films. Virginia Mason Vaughan analyzes the stunning transformations of The Tempest that occur when women play Prospero in recent films and stage productions. This richly interwoven collection is more variegated than a brief review can capture. It provides a history of women making Shakespeare that is more than the sum of its excellent parts and will appeal to playgoers, students, and scholars.
