Ladies Reading ‘bawdy geare’: Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis and the Early Modern Woman Reader

Abstract

Even given the constraints of literacy, early modern readers were a remarkably heterogeneous group differentiated by gender, status, education, profession, age, region, religious and political affiliation. Hence Heminge and Condell’s insistence upon ‘the great Variety of Readers’ in their preface to the First Folio of Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623), ‘from the most able to him that can but spell’ (sig. A3). While their inclusive pitch functions as a marketing ploy, an awareness of reader diversity was none the less axiomatic in the period — ‘almost a condition of authorship in the expanding market for print’, argues John Kerrigan — and prefatory addresses to the reader can often be found anticipating a wide range of responses from a diverse readership: gentle, common, learned, inexperienced, professional, recreational, hostile, courteous, careful, indifferent, critical, indulgent, virtuous, perverse. 1 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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