This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ The Role of Women in the Canonisation of Shakespeare From Elizabethan Theatre to the Shakespeare Jubilee Kitamura, Sae Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 25. Sep. 2021 This electronic theses or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Title: The Role of Women in the Canonisation of Shakespeare From Elizabethan Theatre to the Shakespeare Jubilee Author: Sae Kitamura The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. 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The Role of Women in the Canonisation of Shakespeare: From Elizabethan Theatre to the Shakespeare Jubilee Kitamura Sae King’s College London PhD 2013 1 Abstract The aim of this thesis is to clarify the role that female interpreters in Britain played at an early stage in the canonisation of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare, one of the popular playwrights in English Renaissance theatre, became increasingly famous during the first half of the eighteenth century, and the Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769 marked the climax of the popularisation of his works. It is said that since then, he has maintained his position as the ‘national poet’ of England (or Britain). Although women had supported Shakespeare even before his works had established their canonical status, the extent to which female interpreters contributed to the canonisation of Shakespeare, how they participated in the process, and why they played the roles that they did have not yet been sufficiently visible. In this thesis, I illustrate women’s engagement in the process of the popularisation of Shakespeare by examining the early reception of his works, and to document how individual women’s pleasure of reading and playgoing relates to their intellectual activities. I adopt three approaches to provide answers to my research questions in this thesis: reading critical and fictional works by women; analysing the descriptions of female readers and playgoers by male writers; and conducting a large-scale survey of the ownership history of pre-mid-eighteenth-century printed books of Shakespeare’s plays. This thesis is divided into four chapters. In the first chapter, I analyse women’s engagement with theatre in Renaissance England, and consider Shakespeare’s popularity amongst them based on records about female audiences. The second chapter discusses female readers and writers in Renaissance England and their responses to Shakespeare’s works. Chapter 3 focuses on Restoration Shakespeare and female interpreters from 1642 to 1714. The fourth chapter discusses women’s playgoing, play-reading, writings, and their participation from the early eighteenth century to the Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769. 2 Table of Contents Abstract 2 Table of Contents 3 Acknowledgement 6 Introduction: The Canonisation 7 Chapter one: Shakespeare and Female Playgoers in Renaissance England 30 Section 1: Theatre and Women in Renaissance England 30 1.1 Previous Studies of Female Playgoing in Renissance England 31 1.2 Women’s Interest in Theatre 34 1.3 Theatre’s Response to Female Playgoers 44 Section 2: Women Watching Shakespeare 55 2.1 Female Playgoers in Shakespeare’s Plays 55 2.2 Shakespeare and Burbage’s Popularity 66 2.3 Royal and Aristocratic Women and Shakespeare’s Court Performances 68 Conclusion 79 Chapter two: Reading and Writing about Shakespeare 80 Section 1: Women, Books, and Shakespeare 80 1.1 Previous Studies of Literacy, Playbooks, and Readers 80 1.2 Using Shakespeare’s Books 82 1.3 Female Owners of Large Libraries 88 1.4 Women’s Intellectual Activities and Shakespeare’s Books 91 Section 2: Shakespeare and Women Writers in Renaissance England 97 2.1 Women’s Private Letters and Shakespeare 98 3 2.2 ‘Professional’ Women Writers before Cavendish and Behn 111 Conclusion 129 Chapter three: Women and Shakespeare after the Restoration 131 Section 1: Restoration Women Reading and Watching Shakespeare 131 1.1 Restoration Women and Drama 132 1.2 Female Book Users and Playgoers 136 Section 2: Interpreting Shakespeare: Women Writers in the Restoration Period 160 2.1 Margaret Cavendish and Her Family as an Interpretive Community 160 2.2 Female Playwrights 175 2.3 Judith Drake, Early English Feminism, and Theatrical Performance 194 Conclusion 206 Chapter four: Eighteenth-century Women, Shakespeare and the Shakespeare Jubilee 208 Section 1: Women, Reading, and Writing in the Eighteenth Century 208 1.1 Reading for Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century 209 1.2 Women’s Scholarly Engagement with Shakespeare’s Works 224 1.3 The Novel and Sarah Fielding 238 Section 2: Female Playgoers, Periodicals, and the Shakespeare Jubilee 250 2.1 Eighteenth-century Female Playgoers 251 2.2 Periodicals, Women, and Shakespeare 256 2.3 Women at the Shakespeare Jubilee 262 Conclusion 277 Conclusion: Preserving the Past, Defining Ourselves 278 4 Appendices 285 Appendix 1: List of pre-1769 copies of Shakespeare’s works in the British Library, including adaptations and anthologies 285 Appendix 2: List of pre-1769 copies of Shakespeare’s works in the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, including adaptations, excluding complete works 301 Appendix 3: List of Shakespeare’s Folios in Meisei Shakespeare Folio Collection 303 Appendix 4: List of pre-1769 copies of Shakespeare’s works in the Senate House Library, including adaptations and anthologies 306 Appendix 5: List of the pre-1769 copies of Shakespeare’s works associated with women before the nineteenth century in the Folger Shakespeare Library 308 Appendix 6: List of the plays dedicated to women from 1570 to 1642 310 Bibliography 311 5 Acknowledgements Foremost I would like to thank my PhD supervisors, Professor Ann Thompson and Dr Hannah Crawforth. I would also like to thank the staff of the Department of English at King’s College London, especially those who gave comments on my drafts: Dr Sonia Massai, Professor Gordon McMullan, and Dr Chloe Porter. I am also grateful for Professor Kawai Shoichiro and Professor Takada Yasunari, who oversaw my BA and MA dissertations at the University of Tokyo. I must thank the Yoshida Scholarship Foundation, which financially supported me over three years in King’s College London. I would also like to thank libraries which allowed me access to rare books and manuscripts: the British Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Meisei Shakespeare Folio Collection, the Senate House Library, the Huntington Library, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the New York Public Library, the Morgan Library, the Auckland City Library, the Bodleian Library, the National Archives of the UK, The Northamptonshire Record Office, and Ewelme Cottage. Especially, I would like to express my thanks to Dr Georgianna Ziegler at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Professor Sumimoto Noriko at Meisei University, and Mr John Webster, then curator at Ewelme Cottage. Lastly, I would like to thank my family and friends. My partner Nagai Daisuke was the best proofreader I have ever had and I cannot thank him more. My parents Hiroshi and Toshiko always supported me. I would also like to thank Dr Sakamoto Kuninobu, who always commented on my drafts. 6 Introduction: The Canonisation I Wonder how that Person you mention in your Letter, could either have the Conscience, or Confidence to Dispraise Shakespear’s Playes [.]1 We all well know that the immortal Shakespears Playes ... have better pleas’d the World than Jonsons works [.]2 Who has given us nobler or juster Pictures of Nature, than Mr. Shakespear?3 Seventeenth-century female writers wrote all three of these encomia to William Shakespeare. The author of the first passage, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, published an epistolary essay on Shakespeare in Sociable Letters (1664), and this is the earliest substantial review of Shakespeare’s plays in existence (Thompson and Roberts, Introduction, p.