Shakespeare’s ‘Lady Editors’: A New History of the Shakespearean Text. By Molly G. Yarn

Abstract

Molly G. Yarn’s Shakespeare’s “Lady Editors”: A New History of the Shakespearean Text is one of the best books published on Shakespeare in the last decade. Drawing on a wealth of material from twenty-eight different archives and over 160 editions from the eighteenth century to the present, and surveying the work of nearly seventy (largely forgotten) women editors, Yarn uncovers a remarkable history of women’s involvement in the long tradition of editing Shakespeare. The result is a ground-breaking, moving, and fascinating book that will influence the study of textual editing for years to come. Yarn’s opening chapter argues that “the established language, conventions, and assumptions surrounding the editorial task conspire to exclude women from Shakespearean editorial history” (9). Using the term “domestic text” to describe editions designed for women, children, and working-class readers, Yarn demonstrates that subjective judgements about what constitutes an “important” edition have created a hierarchy of editions that has relegated texts edited by women to obscurity. For example, Yarn notes that there are twenty-two unique editions of As You Like It edited by women before 1950, yet the recent Arden 3, New Cambridge, and Oxford editions of the play collate only one, by Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke. The neglect of editions often designed for home reading has led to “a self-perpetuating system of exclusion, shaped by generations of subjective judgements” (20).