Shakespeare ‘creepes into the womens closets about bedtime’: women reading in a room of their own

Abstract

While Shakespeare’s women characters have long been the subject of literary criticism, his women readers have not. This is particularly so for the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the historical record provides few clues for women’s reading of Shakespeare. But although surviving accounts of women reading Shakespeare in early modern England are fragmentary, they can be used to question contemporary perceptions of women as consumers in the literary marketplace. My concern here is with notions of reading and private space articulated by male commentators on women readers of Shakespeare’s most frequently reprinted text before 1640, Venus and Adonis . The poem was arguably Shakespeare’s ‘best-selling’ text in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: nine editions had appeared before Shakespeare’s death in 1617, with a further six reprints by 1640; it was the only work by Shakespeare to be printed by a woman in the seventeenth century (Elizabeth Hodgkinson, 1675), and published in Scotland before the eighteenth century (Edinburgh, 1623). 1 Although the poem has now fallen to the margins of what has become the Shakespearean canon, Venus and Adonis attracted considerable contemporary commentary, providing rare descriptions both of women and men as readers of Shakespeare and of Shakespeare’s status as a writer. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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