This excerpt from 'Shakespeare's Lady Editors' by Molly Yarn explores the restricted access that girls had to Shakespeare in the 19th century.
In 1807, two books appeared that would deeply influence the world of Shakespeare publishing, both originating largely with female creators – Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and Henrietta Bowdler’s Family Shakespeare. Although Mary wrote the majority of the Tales, the original imprints listed Charles Lamb as the sole author, thereby avoiding any negative publicity that might derive from Mary’s well-known psychotic episode, during which she killed their mother...
...Both books grew out of the impulse to make the works of Shakespeare available to those who could not previously access or understand them. The Lambs’ Tales focused on the combined market of women and children, particularly female children; by the second edition, the ‘Advertisement’ section described them as ‘not so precisely adapted for the amusement of mere children, as for an acceptable and improving present to young ladies advancing to the state of womanhood’...
...The images presented by the Lambs and Bowdlers of a male relative mediating contact for girls still existed, but a new social context also emerged: reading in a classroom with other children, overseen by a teacher. New approaches involved some trial and error, as demonstrated by a professor at Queen’s College, London, in the 1890s, whose student later recalled that
[we were] reading the sleep-walking scene in Macbeth when the Professor held up his hand: ‘Ladies, before proceeding further we will turn to the next page. We will count one, two, three lines from the top. We will count one, two words in this line. We will erase or cross out the second word and substitute the word “thou”. This line will then read “Out thou spot. Out I say.”’
In poet Emily Dickinson’s Shakespeare reading group, the men suggested that they go through all the copies of the plays and mark out anything ‘questionable’. The women rejected this idea, informing the men that they did not want those ‘questionable’ things emphasised, and that they would read everything. Dickinson herself haughtily told them that ‘there’s nothing wicked in Shakespeare, and if there is I don’t want to know it’.
