Women Making Shakespeare: Text Reception and Performance ed. by Gordon McMullan, Lena Cowen Orlin, and Virginia Mason Vaughan (review)

Building on the 1997 anthology Women Reading Shakespeare, edited by Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts, Women Making Shakespeare seeks to highlight the profound influence women have had on formulating the current reputation of William Shakespeare. Dedicated to Ann Thompson, Shakespeare professor at King’s College and General Editor for the Arden Shakespeare Series, each article draws a connection between her work and that done by female scholars and artists from the last four centuries. Additionally, many of the book’s contributors acknowledge a personal connection to Thompson, demonstrating the enormous influence she has had on the current state of Shakespeare studies. Thompson lends the collection focus over the four hundred year history of women and Shakespeare; and the book as a whole serves as an homage from the Arden to one of their main contributors. Through its sometimes tedious specificity, Women Making Shakespeare showcases the untold stories of women who have aided not only in producing Shakespeare, but also in crafting the playwright into the recognizable brand we know today. The unspoken call is for the next woman to “make” Shakespeare take center stage.

The book is divided into three sections: “Text,” “Reception,” and “Performance.” Comprised of ten essays, the first section, “Text,” takes as its theme the play-texts themselves and the women found within through character, history, and editing, mostly focusing on the Elizabethan era. This part reads play texts with an eye toward gender; investigating the presence, influence, or relevance of female characters; and interrogating the portrayal of female characters on the Elizabethan stage. The result is that this section uncovers some of the lost female agency of the plays, though the disparate essay topics (Edward III to Two Noble Kinsmen with some comedies as well) leave much room for further exploration. The second portion of the section deals with the physical text, delving into the presence of women in the publishing industry. These articles convincingly reveal women’s history in publishing Shakespeare as well as identifying the struggles they overcame, highlighting the increased female presence in Shakespeare publication today. The section concludes with articles which interrogate the similarities and differences between male and female editors of Shakespeare, leaving the reader wondering who has been amending Shakespeare and for what audience and purpose.

The second section, “Reception,” is comprised of ten essays chronicling how women’s engagement with Shakespeare’s work often dictated how he was perceived, particularly in the strict social systems and artistic context of the nineteenth century. The leading essay is written by British literary critic and Shakespeare scholar Catherine Belsey. “Juliet and the Vicissitudes of Gender” articulates Belsey’s belief that Shakespeare wrote Juliet as a strong female character who was the intellectual and sexual equal to Romeo, but Belsey notes how ensuing iterations of Juliet grew progressively weaker through the nineteenth century. Contributors trace interpretations by female performers through the nineteenth century, particularly focusing on women whose influence led to the female characters being taken seriously. The section ends by demonstrating how women were responsible for keeping Shakespeare relevant and accessible outside of the realm of performance, for example, through birthday books, literature, and criticism. These essays are concerned with what may be termed the “apocrypha” of women in Shakespeare studies; they detail women who are on the periphery, those who would not necessarily be regarded in a general history of Shakespeare. However, telling the story of women’s literary clubs in Montana, or of lesser known Shakespearean actresses, however tedious the task and research may appear, gives voice to women in an era where they would otherwise be all but excluded (except for Sarah Siddons of the stage) from participating in the perpetuation of Shakespeare’s legacy. It is the start of a wider conversation, and encourages the reader to dig deeper.

“Performance,” the final section, provides thirteen essays, which detail women in Shakespearean...