In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

141  Notes Preface 1. The History of Portia Club of Avon, Illinois, 1894–1994, Illinois State Historical Library, i; Historical Encyclopedia of Illinois and History of Mercer County, ed. Newton Bateman and Paul Selby (Chicago: Munsell Publishing, 1903). Bateman and Selby list the 1890 population of Avon as 692. 2. The evidence in this book runs counter to many of Lawrence W. Levine’s oftquoted claims about Shakespeare in America. Levine contends that around the end of the nineteenth century “the increasing separation of Shakespeare from ‘every-day’ people becomes more evident”; “Shakespearean oratory” was “a part of life” in the nineteenth century, he maintains, but by the end of the century the decline of oratory and the growth of literacy undermined Shakespeare’s place in American culture,making him “archaic and inaccessible.” See Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge,Mass.:Harvard University Press,1988),33,36,80. The more than five hundred clubs that form the basis for this book offer substantial evidence that Shakespeare was far from archaic or inaccessible to a wide variety of Americans across the country, and especially for women. 3. The report of the Stratford Club of Concord in 1959 notes that there were once ten Shakespeare clubs in Concord. “Notes and Comments: Shakespeare in New Hampshire,”Shakespeare Quarterly 10.3 (1959):456. The popularity of Shakespeare clubs in Concord spread to other locales;when Mrs. Jacob G. Cilley moved from Concord to Cambridge, Massachusetts, she brought with her the idea for a Shakespeare club—thus the Old Cambridge Shakespeare Association. See “Old Cambridge Shakespeare Association , 1882–2006: A Finding Aid,” Brinkler Library, Cambridge Historical Society. 4. Autograph Letters of Joseph Crosby,Y.c. 1372,Folger Shakespeare Library,Letter of 27 January 1876. When I inquired about the records of the Lexington,Massachusetts, Shakespeare Club, the reference librarian at the Cary Memorial Library responded, “We are especially happy to share materials that are rarely (ever?) used.” Personal communication , 2007. 5. Shakespeare clubs existed in many parts of the world, including Germany, England , Scotland, Australia, and Canada. See, for example, Heather Murray, Come, Bright Improvement: The Literary Societies of Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); Ken Stewart, “Much Ado About Everything: The Melbourne Shakespeare Society, 1884–1904,” Australian Literary Studies 19.3 (2000): 269–78. For Shakespeare’s relationship to Victorian women in Britain, see Gail Marshall, Shakespeare and Victorian Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Women’s clubs in Britain did not multiply as quickly as those in the States. Christine Bolt points out that the American club movement was “not matched”in Britain: “the 1870s and 1880s produced no proliferation of high-profile female clubs, combining cultural, social and civic purposes with a distinctive conception of the role of women.” This was due in 142 NOTES TO PAGES X–XI part to the strength of men’s clubs and also to the tradition of “co-operating with men rather than organising entirely separately from them in reform endeavours.” Christine Bolt, The Women’s Movements in the United States and Britain from the 1790s to the 1920s (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 168–69. I heed Sara M. Evans’s call to examine how women “affected and transformed the dynamic interplay of public and private life in our past and how the experience of women in America actively shaped the broader history that we, women and men, all claim as our own.” Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: Free Press, 1989), 6. 6. Anne Ruggles Gere counters the negative perception of women’s clubs as limited to white, middle-class women; she points out, “Difference as well as similarity marked the groups clustered under the term women’s club, creating a diverse and multifaceted social movement.” Intimate Practices: Literacy and Cultural Work in U.S. Women’s Clubs, 1880–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 6. 7. The groundbreaking work of Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts in Women Reading Shakespeare, 1660–1900: An Anthology of Criticism (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1997) offers the most extensive discussion of women readers of Shakespeare in Britain and the United States and was one of the central inspirations for this book. Recent works such as Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare for the People: WorkingClass Readers, 1800–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), which focuses on readers in Britain, suggest that the late nineteenth century is fertile ground for analysis of reading practices related to...

Share