Bernard Hoffman for Life ©1943 at the Electric Boat Co. in New London, CT
Dr. Massai is Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Studies at King's College London and Full Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Sapienza, University of Rome. Her publications include Shakespeare's Accents (2020), Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (2007); edited collections Shakespeare at War (2023), Hamlet: The State of Play (2021), Ivo van Hove (2018), Shakespeare and Textual Studies (2015), and World-Wide Shakespeares (2005); critical editions The Paratexts in English Printed Drama to 1642 (2014), `Tis Pity She's a Whore (2011). She is General Editor of the New Cambridge Shakespeare and editor of the Arden 4 edition of Richard III.
General editor of Second Arden 1946-58
Textual Problems of the First Folio (1953)
Troilus and Cressida for the New Cambridge Shakespeare (1957)
"The 1622 Quarto and the First Folio Texts of Othello," Shakespeare Survey 5 (1952)
She wrote the introduction to the comedies in The Riverside Shakespeare
She edited the New Penguin Shakespeare The Tempest (1968) and wrote the introduction for Hamlet in the same series (1980)
"Was Shakespeare a Chauvinist?" New York Review of Books, 1981
Her obituary in the Telegraph
(Pictured at left)
Katherine Eisaman Maus, Jean Howard
Howard is the general editor of the Bedford Shakespeare
Editor, H5, Performance Series, Cambridge
Shakespeare's First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book (2015)
The Making of Shakespeare's First Folio (2015)
The Cambridge Shakespeare Guide (2012)
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's First Folio (2016)
Her website
Women editing: Janis Lull, R3; Ann Thompson, Shr., M. M. Mahood, MV; Kathleen Irace, Ham. Q1; Christina Luckyj, co-editor, Oth.; Elizabeth Story Donno, TN; Judith Weil, co-editor, 1H4; Patricia Tatspaugh, co-editor, TNK; Dorene DelVecchio, co-editor, Per.; Susan Snyder and Deborah Curren-Aquino, WT.
Shakespeare in Production series: Cynthia Marshall, AYL; Elizabeth Schafer, TN, Shr.; Frances A. Shirley, Tro.; Emma Smith, H5; Julie Hankey, Oth.; Christine Dymnowski, Tmp.
Women editing: Katherine Duncan-Jones, Son., co-editor of Poems; Virginia Mason Vaughan, co-editor, Tmp.; Suzanne Gossett, Per.; Claire McEachern, Ado; Juliet Dusinberre, AYL; Ann Thompson, co-editor of Ham.; Gretchen Minton, co-editor of Tim.; Barbara Hogdon, Shr.; Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason, Mac.; Valerie Wayne, Cym.; Helen Wilcox, AWW; Lois Potter, TNK; Suzanne Gossett and Helen Wilcox, AWW, Valerie Wayne, Cym.
Thompson is co-General Editor of the series. See her essay "Feminist Theory and the Editing of Shakespeare," in Shakespeare, Feminism and Gender, ed. Kate Chedzoy (2001)
Women editing: Mary Beth Rose, TGV; Frances E. Dolan, Err., AYL, WT, R3; Claire McEachern, AWW, Jn.,H5, 1H4, 2H4; Janis Lull, introductions to 1H6, 2H6, 3H6.
Women Editing:
Terri Bourus: introductory essay, Arden of Faversham, Tit., MND, MM, Ant., WT
Anna Pruitt: Tit., Shr., R2, 1H4, Ado, STM; commentary on STM, Shr.
Sarah Neville: TGV, Err., 1H6, JC, MWW
Kate McPherson: running commentary on Err., Per.
She brought out The Family Shakespeare (1807) anonymously and then under the name of her husband, Thomas, a few years later. Though the edition has been long derided and their name neologized into the quintessence of prudery, many of the great Enlightenment editors felt free to censor "indecent" material or leave it unexplained.
She and her husband Charles published their edition of Shakespeare in 1868. In 1879, they brought out The Shakespeare Key (1879), an extensive study of characterization and poetical effects in Shakespeare. She compiled the first concordance to the works. The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines (1850) creates back stories for the women in the plays. This is significant for what it says about women's reception of Shakespeare. Clearly the author wanted to advocate female agency and self-empowerment.
Shakespeare's Heroines (1832) is probably the first real exploration of how Shakespeare constructed the feminine. Jameson anticipated Mary Cowden Clarke's feminist The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines. As with theological controversies involving Grandmother Eve, Shakespeare scholarship allowed women a safe space to create discourses about empowerment, oppression, and self-determination.
Latham (1905-96) was the sole female editor in the Second Arden edition, just as there had been only one woman chosen for the First Arden. Una Ellis-Fermor was co-general editor of the series for its first twelve years (1946-58).
Latham's text was As You Like It (1957). Her introduction to the play is highly recommended.
Her obituary in the Independent
Trenery was the only woman asked to edit a text for the First Arden Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing (1924). In his parallel passage version of Ado (1929), Professor Alphonso Gerald Newcomer, Stanford University, took issue with one of her readings, with all the condescension he could muster before he died (see above photo)
Dr. Stern is Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. She is an editor of the forthcoming Arden Shakespeare, Fourth Series, a General Editor of the New Mermaids series, and has written extensively on editing and performance as well as serving as editor on several editions of plays in English.
"Inventing Stage Directions" (2017)
(1689-1762)
An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear (1769)
Her championing of smallpox inoculation.
(pictured at left)
Some of the information here was first presented in Women Making Shakespeare: Text, Reception and Performance, edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan, Gordon McMullen, and Lena Cowen Orlin (2013):
Valerie Wayne, “Remaking the Texts: Women Editors of Shakespeare, Past and Present”; Neil Taylor, “ ‘To be acknowledged, madam, is o’erpaid’: Women’s Role in the Production of Scholarly Editions of Shakespeare”; H. R. Wouldhuysen, “Some Women Editors of Shakespeare: A Preliminary Sketch.”
Dr. Woodall is a General Editor of the Arden Performance Editions series and a Senior Lecturer in Shakespeare and Theatre at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham.
Evelyn Mary Spearing (standing, age 22) was an excellent textual scholar whose father, James (1844-1932, seated at left) supported her inclinations to pursue an academic career. She was not a Shakespearen per se, but produced scholarship devoted to the Seneca His Tenne Tragedies (1581) playwrights, co-edited the monumental Ben Jonson (1925-50), and produced her excellent The Sermons of John Donne, 10 vols. (1962), with George Potter.
She attended Newnham College, Cambridge, became a fellow there, and taught at St. Hugh's College, Oxford, and then at Bedford College. Her role model seems to have been Professor Minna Steele Smith, one of the many women on that faculty who encouraged her. She then married Percy Simpson (1865-1962), twenty years her senior, in 1921. There were two children, Edward and Mary. She resigned her position at Oxford and began work on her edition of Donne. Percy was the co-editor of Ben Jonson with C. H. Herford (1866-1931). Upon Herford's death, Evelyn put aside her own work and helped her husband with his, a massive and important project in some disarray, given the circumstances and Percy's diverse materials. She was then co-editor and lent her considerable editorial acumen to the project, which would never have been finished without her. After 1950, she turned her full attention to Donne. When Percy entered his final illness, she tended to him, and then asked George Potter to assume full responsibility for the project for a time. Upon her death, her colleague finished the Sermons, and in a classy move, put her name first in the editorial line, as he should have.
By 1912, Evelyn had made a thorough study of the Oxford and Cambridge schoolboy translations of Seneca's plays into fourteeners from the mid-sixteenth century. She had planned several separate editions of these interrelated tragedies. She sought the advice of W. W. Greg, who was happy to help, and created an impressive bibliographical treatise on the texts of all ten plays, The Elizabethan Translations of Seneca's Tragedies (1912 ). She finished one volume, [John] Studley's Translations of "Agamemnon" and "Medea" (1913) under the auspices of the editor Willy Bang at the University of Louvain for his series, Materialien zur Kunde des älteren englischen Dramas. The Germans had always been interested in Shakespeare, and were equally enthused with other early modern English playwrights.
Bang was impressed with Evelyn. She had prepared a second volume of Studley's translations of Hippolytus and Hercules Oetaeus. However, the German atrocities in Belgium--rape, murder, mass slaughter, mustard gas--included the destruction of much of the University at Louvain and its Press. This included the proofs for her new volume, which the bombs and fires found. Though Bang, her husband, and her father urged her to take up the project again, other circumstances interposed themselves.
Evelyn joined the V. A. D. (Voluntary Aid Detachments) of nurses in France in 1915-16, a dangerous undertaking indeed. She wrote an account of her experiences in From Cambridge to Camiers under the Red Cross (1917), favorably reviewed by none other than Virginia Woolf in TLS.
She published a bibliographical study of Alexender Nevile's translation of Oedipus (1560) in MLR (1920)
She was very, very impressive.
Much of the information above was summarized from the best account of Evelyn Mary Spearing Simpson, written by Chanita Goodblatt, a great Donne scholar. Here is a link to the essay, in preview rather than in full view.
