• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.745-765
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• 2009

The Eighteenth Century Shakespeare's Women Audiences: From Objects of Sexual Appetite to Ladies of Quality Abstract Younglim Han (Kyungpook National U) This paper aims to give an account of the eighteenth century Shakespeare's women audiences who marked a turning-point in the history of Shakespeare's popularity. The 1736 formation of the 'Shakespeare Ladies Club' as a leading group of the female audience encouraged the theater managers to perform more Shakespeare. Stage productions relied more than ever on the favorites of women audiences. The establishment of female patronage was associated with the popularity of Shakespeare's crossed-dressed comedies and actresses in 'breeches' part. The outstanding achievement of the Ladies was their contribution to the promotion of Shakespeare's status as an embodiment of British culture and the acknowledgement of the dignity of national literature. They were successful in securing the native sense of Shakespeare in place of Italian opera and Harlequin pantomime. The recognition of the national significance of Shakespeare led a campaign to erect his monument in Westminster Abbey. The female audience's claim to the respectable Shakespeare provided the stimulus for transforming his plays in the interests of family values such as marital duty and domestic morality. Marina (1738), George Lillo's adaptation of Pericles that was dedicated to the Ladies, was an exemplary case. The domestic versions of Shakespeare stressed the importance of women characters and the idealization of them. Thus the reception of Shakespeare in the eighteenth century was characteristic of formulating the women audiences-performers-characters association. The female yearning for a refined theater was a significant achievement, considering its influence on ways of establishing the canonical Shakespeare in the eighteenth century.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.59 no.4
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• pp.645-666
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• 2013

In the history of the study of Shakespeare's texts the eighteenth century marked the emergence of editors, and in the history of Shakespearean editing Edmond Malone's emphasis on documentary evidence inaugurated a new stage. Malone's antiquarian scholarship sought to establish Shakespeare in the theatrical context of his age and a historically informed view of the physical circumstances under which he wrote his plays. Malone's editorial use of historical sources in terms of Shakespeare's past formulated a new mode of ascertaining his authorship: the construction of Shakespeare as a man of the theatre as well as of literature. Malone was the first scholar to recognize Shakespeare's merits as an actor, and to introduce the concept of the theatrical Shakespeare, which has become the scholarly norm since. In this respect this paper is designed to demonstrate that Malone's editorial principle and practice are characteristic of the identification of the factual documents of Shakespeare's biography, the authentication of his material to attain his true text, and the construction of his personal experiences through intensive readings of his plays. In conclusion, Malone's new criteria laid the foundation for the progress towards authorizing Shakespeare, thereby canonizing him as a figure of the theatrical and literary authority.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.5
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• pp.947-971
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• 2010

Anna Letitia Barbauld's poem "Washing-Day" (1797) has sparked a variety of feminist critical endeavors over the past two decades. While many feminist literary critics try to salvage the poem as a successful tongue-in-cheek riposte directed at the male dominant literary world, more rigorous Marxist feminists accuse Barbauld of being limited by her own middle-class woman's view on women's domestic labor. Legitimate as they may be, these readings fail to elucidate Barbauld's place in a larger literary and intellectual discourse during the eighteenth century. In this paper I read "Washing-Day" as a woman's georgic, a genre or mode concerned with agricultural labor, the public value of which was highly recognized in eighteenth-century England. Alluding to canonical texts by writers like Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope, Barbauld's "loaded lines" in mock-heroic form create a space in which the women's domestic labor of washing interrupts men's daily routines and disrupts their poetic assumptions. While she makes women's work visible, Barbauld also addresses its quintessential nature. Women's work is affective labor; women have to labor physically and mentally to produce the desired domestic comfort. By allowing the image of the soap "bubble" to echo with many "bubbles" in other writers' texts, from the soap bubbles the narrator used to play with as a child to the hot-air balloon "bubble" of the Montgolfier brothers, Barbauld pleasantly equates work and day-dreaming, men's toil and children's play, and finally public, scientific, and recognized labor and private, domestic, and imaginative activities.