Shakespeare's 'Lady Editors': A New History of the Shakespearean Text by Molly G. Yarn

Abstract

Reviewed by: Shakespeare's 'Lady Editors': A New History of the Shakespearean Text by Molly G. Yarn Paul Salzman Yarn, Molly G., Shakespeare's 'Lady Editors': A New History of the Shakespearean Text, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2021; hardback; pp. 352; R.R.P. £29.99; ISBN 9781316518359. Early modern literary studies are experiencing an especially fruitful period, despite attacks on the humanities, and dire working conditions (or no work) for young and aspiring academics. Molly Yarn's new book is an excellent example of the kind of new, historicist, theoretically inflected research that makes this field so exciting at the moment. In this witty and thoroughly researched revaluation, Yarn offers a telling riposte to an unfortunate remark by Gary Taylor, an editor of Shakespeare's works (admittedly in 1988): 'Women may read Shakespeare, but men edit him. So, it has been from the beginning, and so it remains' (p. 15). Well, no, neither 'from the beginning' nor now, and Yarn offers some sixty-nine examples from 1800 to 1950. Those examples fit into two basic categories: the majority are women most of us, even those of us interested in the history of editing, have never heard of; the second group, in some respects the most interesting, are those who are quite well known, but have been treated as unworthy or even risible. Perhaps the most interesting example of this is Henrietta Bowdler, whose expurgated edition (later expanded by her husband Thomas) is notorious, and the idea of bowdlerization has taken on the stigma of censorship and mockery of Victorian prudishness. But Yarn places Henrietta Bowdler's edition within the tradition of what she calls domestic editions, which played an important role in [End Page 178] the increasing democratization of access to Shakespeare. At the same time, Yarn is able to counter the extraordinary misogyny implicit, and often explicit, within the fraternity of male editors, and their policing of editorial legitimacy/respectability. Yarn has an unerring ability to anticipate issues with the scope of this book, offering an illuminating, albeit brief, admission that women edited many early modern authors other than Shakespeare. In the case of this particular study, though, the focus on Shakespeare, so often an absurd process of the separation of a single author from his rich literary and cultural context, is justified because the book is an intervention into a field dominated by the editing of Shakespeare. One of the most interesting and original aspects of Yarn's study is her examination of the selected area of student editions of Shakespeare. Of course, not only women edited student editions, but Yarn's meticulous scholarship has unearthed some especially interesting examples where women took a highly original approach to this field. For example, Katherine Lee Bates was a significant poet, and Professor and later Head of English at Wellesley College. Bates edited The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and As You Like It for a student Shakespeare series. Not only did Bates prepare a thorough, collated text, but she trialled a system of textual notes which not only set out differences between quarto and folio texts but offered questions for students to consider in relation to possible editorial choices, often after setting out two different readings, and asking 'Which is better?'. Yarn reproduces a page from Bates's notes to Merchant illustrating this innovative approach to pedagogy and Shakespeare editing. Through her careful examination of a large range of student editions, Yarn is able to break down the dichotomy between the prestigious scholarly edition, and the utilitarian student edition. This runs parallel to recasting the (past) dominant paradigm of the male authoritative edition, which was previously undermined by the 'un-editing' move in the 1990s exemplified by Leah Marcus's Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe and Milton (Routledge, 1996). But here, Yarn is using a finely-honed historicist perspective to reshape our sense of how editions are created, and what their influence has been. Yarn also offers a perceptive and again revisionist account of New Bibliography through a feminist lens. Once again, while there have been a considerable number of critical accounts of New Bibliography in recent years, Yarn brings to the table her focus...