[In the essay below, Thompson discusses recent reactions from feminist critics to The Taming of the Shrew.]

In the second half of 1992 I committed myself to two developments in my career that seemed to some of my friends incompatible. I went as visiting professor to the Center for Women's Studies at the University of Cincinnati for three months to teach a graduate course in Feminist Theory, and I signed a contract to become joint General Editor (with Richard Proudfoot) of the new Arden Shakespeare series, Arden 3. Women's Studies are still, even in the United States, a marginal, controversial area, existing precariously within academic institutions and vulnerable to financial cutbacks. Shakespeare Studies are at the center of English Studies, arguably one of the more conservative disciplines.

Insofar as the academic study of “English” has begun to change, with pressure from various quarters to enlarge the canon of texts, women's writing is seen as a direct threat to Shakespeare—for example, in the debate about “political correctness” in the teaching of English that followed the publication of a survey of English degree syllabi in British Polytechnics and Colleges of Higher Education early in 1992.¹ This survey was widely reported in a distorted form in the right-wing popular press, which seized on the fact that Shakespeare was compulsory in only 50 percent of the institutions covered. A. N. Wilson's article on “Shakespeare and the Tyranny of Feminism” (London Evening Standard, 4 February 92) can be taken as representative of the generally hysterical reaction with its claim that the novels of Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker are compulsory reading for more students in British higher education than the plays of William Shakespeare. This is of course a ludicrous exaggeration, and the survey itself made no assumptions about any necessary antagonism between Shakespeare and women writers, but, while the same abbreviation serves (confusingly, in my notes) for both, W.S. (women's studies) is the opposition, W. S. (William Shakespeare) the establishment.

So what can feminist theory have to do with the editing of Shakespeare? Even within women's studies the role of feminist theory is problematic. There is still considerable hostility to it for two basic reasons:

1. It is seen (in its institutionalized form) as the exploitation, appropriation, and even de-radicalization of the women's liberation movement. Through women's studies, feminism becomes co-opted into the white male establishment, and its energies are misdirected into narrow scholastic battles.

2. It is seen as elitist because it is inaccessible to most women. It is in conflict with the popular and historical feminist stress on the personal, the experiential.

The first of these objections was discussed by Mary Evans in her 1982 essay “In Praise of Theory.”² She argued that feminist theory has not been appropriated or co-opted because women's studies cannot merely be “added on” to the existing academic agenda without challenging and changing everything else. She quoted Maurice Godelier's paraphrase of Marx:

We might say that the dominant ideas in most societies are the ideas of the dominant sex, associated and mingled with those of the dominant class. In our own societies, a struggle is now under way to abolish relations of both class and sex domination, without waiting for one to disappear first. (“The Origins of Male Domination,” New Left Review 127 (1981): 3-17)

Feminist theory challenges patriarchal ideology and questions how “ideas” themselves are produced, assessed, and distributed in our society. Given the overwhelming dominance of the male sex in the editing of Shakespeare, Evans's argument implies a prima facie case for feminist intervention.

The second of the objections was the focus of Sarah Fildes's 1983 essay “The Inevitability of Theory.”³ She traced the emphasis on the personal element in popular feminism to the absence of other discussions of women's lives: feminists have been obliged to make use of sources such as diaries, autobiographies, even novels, as the only available forms of data on the experiences of women, which were otherwise ignored by the traditional academic disciplines. (One might also mention the importance of the personal in the influential consciousness-raising movement.) But the personal can be claustrophobic, a dead end in which feeling is privileged over analysis or action. Theory opens onto a larger, more objective picture. Moreover, it is not optional but inevitable: there is no escape from theory, as there is no escape from ideology. While you accept the status quo, theory can remain unconscious, implicit, but, once you begin to resist or challenge, theory has to become conscious and explicit. In the present context it is clear that a major aspect of women's responses to Shakespeare over time has been the personal one, in particular the desire to identify with female characters and to praise or blame the author accordingly.⁴ Without detracting from the validity of such responses, feminist theory can facilitate an analysis of how Shakespeare has been mediated and reproduced for women readers (and audiences) through the male editorial tradition.

For, as Gary Taylor says, “Women may read Shakespeare, but men edit him.”⁵ Apparently, no edition of the complete works has ever been prepared entirely by a woman. Mary Cowden Clarke wrote in the preface to her 1860 edition of Shakespeare's works, “I may be allowed to take pride in the thought that I am the first of his female subjects who has been selected to edit his works,” but she did most of the work in collaboration with Charles Cowden Clarke (who was incidentally her husband, not her brother, as Taylor calls him both here [196] and in Reinventing Shakespeare).⁶ In fact, the first edition published in New York by Appleton was ascribed simply to “M. C. C.,” but the 1864 London edition published by Bickers was ascribed to “Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke,” as were subsequent reprints. In any case the claim was a mistaken one: the distinction of first female editor must unfortunately go to Henrietta Bowdler, whose edition of the works (far from complete, by definition) was first published anonymously in 1807 and then under the name of her brother, Thomas Bowdler, in 1818. The most important female editor in the twentieth century was undoubtedly Alice Walker, who succeeded R. B. McKerrow on the old-spelling edition sponsored by Oxford University Press in the 1930s “under the condition that her work be vetted by a board of male scholars headed by W. W. Greg”;⁷ she never finished it.

The situation is not much different today. A survey of current editions of single plays reveals the following statistics: in the New Arden series (henceforth to be known as Arden 2), which has published all the plays except The Two Noble Kinsmen, only one play has been edited by a woman: Agnes Latham's As You Like It (1975). In the Penguin series, which has published all the plays except Cymbeline and Titus Andronicus, only three plays have been edited by women: Anne Righter (Barton)'s The Tempest (1968), M. M. Mahood's Twelfth Night (1968), and Barbara Everett's All's Well That Ends Well (1970). In the Oxford series only one of the nineteen plays published so far has been edited by a woman: Susan Snyder's All's Well That Ends Well (1993). In the New Cambridge series only three of the twenty-five plays published so far have been edited by women: my own Taming of the Shrew (1984), Elizabeth Story Donno's Twelfth Night (1985), and M. M. Mahood's Merchant of Venice (1987). It is still the case, as Taylor says, that, “when they do edit, token women are almost always confined to the comedies, usually to plays which present few textual problems.”⁸ In addition, it is notable that none of these female editors, from Henrietta Bowdler in 1807 to M. M. Mahood one hundred and eighty years later, would have been publicly recognized as a feminist. (I include myself here, since I had not published anything relevant at the time my edition was commissioned.) Would it have made any difference? Would more female editors have produced editions significantly different from those produced by male editors? On the existing evidence one would probably have to answer this question in the negative, but I would want to draw a distinction between female editors and feminist editors—between what has happened in the past and what might happen in the future. Presumably no one today would dispute that more female editors are desirable (like more female judges or more female members of Parliament or Congress), but what specific contribution might feminist editors make?

It is clear that it is much more easy for a female Shakespearean scholar to identify herself as a feminist today than it was twenty or even ten years ago. Feminist criticism is widely recognized and respected. It has been a lively and quite extraordinarily prolific approach: in his 1991 annotated bibliography of Shakespeare and Feminist Criticism⁹ Philip C. Kolin covered four hundred and thirty-nine items from the publication of Juliet Dusinberre's Shakespeare and the Nature of Women in 1975¹⁰ to his cut-off point in 1988. I have even heard complaints that recent publications and conferences have been unduly dominated by the notion of “gender,” which as usual (but curiously) seems to be something possessed by heterosexual women, lesbian women, and homosexual men but not by heterosexual men, who consequently feel excluded. Yet it can hardly be claimed that feminism has had a comparable impact on editing.

During this same period, however, the practice of editing has been beginning, cautiously, to open up to contributions to literary theory more generally that might (potentially at least) include feminist theory. A series of recent articles in Studies in Bibliography illustrates this development as well as some of the difficulties that have been encountered. In his 1989 essay “Textual and Literary Theory: Redrawing the Matrix”¹¹ D. C. Greetham argued that, despite the absence of an explicit debate between textual critics and literary critics, there has been some unacknowledged common ground between them. In particular, they have shared “a specific intellectual climate [that] made some critical and textual assumptions more likely or plausible at some times than at others.” Beginning with the observation that it is “no accident that the current ‘revisionist’ textual view of certain Shakespeare plays occurred during a period of poststructuralist unease with the fixed, determinate text of literary criticism” (1), Greetham went on to demonstrate that there has been greater “filiation” between the two camps than has yet been realized in their approaches to writer-based, text-based, and reader-based theories. In the following year G. Thomas Tanselle focused more on potential divisions in “Textual Criticism and Deconstruction,”¹² which is essentially a belated review article on Deconstruction and Criticism, a 1979 collection of essays by Harold Bloom and others,¹³ in which he deplored the lack of interest in “texts” (as understood by editors) on the part of the deconstructionists and their casual equation of “textual criticism” with “literary criticism.” Greetham's reply to this essay, “[Textual] Criticism and Deconstruction,”¹⁴ cleverly read Tanselle's argument as itself a deconstruction of the text he addressed. This allowed Greetham to reread Deconstruction and Criticism in order to deconstruct Tanselle's deconstruction, looking as before for “congruence rather than difference, common cause rather than dissension, between the deconstructors and the textual critics” (14). He put special stress on the mistrust or suspicion of “authoritative” texts, long practiced by textual critics and now taken up by deconstructors, claiming “textual criticism has anticipated and domesticated the agenda of the deconstructors” (20).

Further contributions to the 1991 volume of Studies in Bibliography by Peter L. Shillingsburg (“Text as Matter, Concept and Action”) and G. Thomas Tanselle again (“Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology”)¹⁵ pursued and extended these arguments, making it apparent that at least some textual scholars are prepared to engage with theoretical debates and to attempt to articulate the thinking behind their own practice within the frameworks made available by the theorists. It is indeed impressive to me how thoroughly these scholars have acquainted themselves with the ideas, terminology, and characteristic procedures of the deconstructionists in particular, down to the level of Derridean playfulness with the signifier and jokes that cannot help being somewhat ponderous in this context: for anyone who finds both textual scholarship and literary theory hard going, Studies in Bibliography taking on Derrida has the air of a scholarly equivalent of “Godzilla Meets King Kong!”

These writers are not Shakespeare scholars; Greetham, for example, works on medieval texts, Tanselle on Herman Melville. Nor are they feminists, though Greetham does briefly raise the question of whether a feminist approach might challenge the traditional hierarchical structures of the presentation of texts in his essay “The Manifestation and Accommodation of Theory in Textual Editing.”¹⁶ They sometimes complain that their overtures are not being reciprocated: it has become obligatory for everyone in the profession to be aware of literary theory, while it is not yet obligatory to be aware of the finer (or even the cruder) points of textual editing. Nevertheless, I see this debate as an enabling one for feminist editors of Shakespeare. As feminists, we too have had to engage with theory (though our encounter has taken place in a different part of the forest from that inhabited by the deconstructionists), and we can surely take courage from the notion that textual critics as well as feminist critics are likely to be receptive to our work.

But what, in detail, is our work going to be like? I shall now attempt a brief survey of how a feminist approach to editing might make specific differences in the three main areas of an editor's responsibility: the text, the introduction, and the commentary.

THE TEXT

Editors of Shakespearean texts have always had to choose between possible readings, and it is arguable that a feminist editor might make a different set of choices. In the case of plays that survive in two or more early printed versions, editors have to choose which version they see as more “authoritative.” This choice will depend on a number of factors including of course an argument about the provenance of each text, but an awareness of gender issues can contribute to such a choice in the present and help to explain the reasons behind editorial decisions made in the past. At the most obvious level editorial choices can strengthen or weaken the roles of female characters. As long ago as 1965, Nevill Coghill argued in “Revision after Performance”¹⁷ that, if the folio text of Othello is an authorial revision, one of the author's aims was to make the role of Emilia more important, particularly toward the end of the play. This did not have much impact at the time, but it was taken up again in 1982 by E. A. J. Honigmann, who added the observation that several of the folio-only passages are more “sexually specific” than the equivalent passages in the quarto, “that is, they add images or turns of thought that throw new light on sexual behaviour or fantasy, notably reinforcing the play's central concern with normal and abnormal sexuality.”¹⁸ D. C. Greetham would say that the intellectual climate in 1982 was more receptive to revisionism than that in 1964 partly because of the work of the literary theorists. I would add that the higher level of gender awareness was partly due to the work of feminists.

Another example of discussion of the potential for editorial choice in this area is Steven Urkowitz's essay “Five Women Eleven Ways: Changing Images of Shakespearean Characters in the Earliest Texts,”¹⁹ in which he demonstrates that the parts of Queen Margaret in 2 and 3 Henry VI, Anne Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Juliet and Lady Capulet in Romeo and Juliet, and Gertrude in Hamlet differ significantly between the early quartos and the folio. Also relevant is Beth Goldring's essay, “Cor.'s Rescue of Kent,”²⁰ in which she argues that Cor. as a speech prefix at a crucial point in the opening scene of King Lear could stand for Cordelia and not, as editors have assumed, for Cornwall.

Othello, King Lear, and the Henry VI plays are all textually complex, but editors of apparently straightforward, folio-only plays also have to make choices. They are sometimes confronted with passages of speech that seem at first sight meaningless and need to be reassigned, relineated, repunctuated, or more substantially emended before they can be made to yield any sense. In addition to their reliance on relatively objective criteria (such as theories about the provenance of the folio copy and the degree of likely scribal and compositorial error), editors must of course attempt to understand the context of each letter, word, sentence, or speech and to relate what is happening at the microlevel of the language to larger patterns of coherence at the macrolevels of plot, character, theme, or message. We have all learned from the literary theorists that such an understanding is bound to be limited and subjective: we cannot stand outside the ideological baggage we carry, though we can at least attempt to be aware of the preconceptions and prejudices that may affect our interpretations.

In “Textual and Sexual Criticism”²¹ Gary Taylor discusses a crux in The Comedy of Errors that he claims has defeated past editors, partly because they were men who accepted the double standard of sexual behavior that the speaker (Adriana in 2.1) is complaining about. Thus, a gender-conscious male editor, sympathetic to the aims of feminism, can expose the sexist assumptions of previous male editors. It seems to me highly likely that feminist editors will discover many more examples of this phenomenon, and I am personally indebted to Taylor's work, but I am less happy about the last section of his essay in which he represents the process of editing itself through sexual metaphors, claiming that male editors favor “lightning strikes of ingenuity” rather than slow, painstaking efforts. He concludes:

Editors always engage in a particular kind of intercourse with an author's discourse: they engorge the text, and simultaneously intrude themselves into it. The male editorial tradition has preferred cruxes which offer opportunities for a quick, explosive release; if an emendation does not provide such a quick fix, it leaves editors feeling dissatisfied. But a crux like this one presents us with “falshood and corruption” which can only be overcome by “often touching”: prolonged exploratory attentiveness. Neither of these methods should have a monopoly on the text. A good editor, like a good lover, should be capable of both. (221)

While this is clever in its use of phrases quoted from the passage under discussion (“falshood and corruption,” “often touching”) and, I believe, the author is at heart well-intentioned toward feminist scholarship, it leaves us, like Taylor's more famous metaphor of editors as “the pimps of discourse,” with the impression that texts are female and editors (still) male.²²

THE INTRODUCTION

Male editors who have misunderstood the nature of the problem in the passage from The Comedy of Errors discussed by Taylor have also of course failed to pay any attention in their introductions to the larger issue of the double standard of sexual behavior in the play, which is endorsed most strongly by the female characters (Luciana in 3.2, the Abbess in 5.1) and which has been highlighted by feminist critics. Male editors have solemnly assured their readers that Prince Hal in the Henry IV plays undergoes a “comprehensive” education through his visits to the Boar's Head tavern, which enable him to achieve a “universal” or “representative” knowledge of his subjects, not noticing that this has involved an extremely limited experience of women. (Hal himself remarks on this deficit when he is required to become a wooer at the end of Henry V—one instance among many of Shakespeare being less blind to women's issues than his editors.) Male editors assume that sex is Ophelia's only problem: one remarked in 1982 that “her tragedy of course is that Hamlet has left her treasure with her” and that she has nothing left to do but “bewail her virginity.”²³ A successor quoted these remarks approvingly in 1987, adding complacently that as a virgin Ophelia dies “unfulfilled.”²⁴

A feminist editor of Shakespeare will in fact usually find that in their introductions her male predecessors have neglected, distorted, and trivialized topics that are of interest to women. She must interrogate the assumptions made about gender in the text itself and in the previous transmission and elucidation of the text, drawing on feminist studies of the ways in which Shakespeare has been reproduced and appropriated by patriarchal cultures. An interesting example of this is Elaine Showalter's essay “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism.”²⁵ She sets out to “tell Ophelia's story” not so much from the text of Hamlet but from the “afterlife” of the character as represented in painting, literature, and psychiatry as well as in stage history. Ophelia has become the type, or icon, of female insanity, and her story changes independently of theories about the play insofar as it is determined by attitudes toward women and madness more generally. Hence, Showalter's focus is on “the Ophelia myth” that has accrued around the play and that affects our interpretation of it.

One could adopt a similar strategy in an edition of Cymbeline by investigating “the Imogen myth,” whereby the play's heroine became, during the Victorian period, “the most lovely and perfectly delineated of all Shakespeare's characters”²⁶ and “the immortal godhead of womanhood.”²⁷ What precisely was it about Imogen that brought forth these superlatives at a time when the play as a whole was not held in very high esteem? It turns out, briefly, that she is specifically praised for her total femininity, which cannot be concealed under male disguise, for the domesticity of her figurative language (she refers twice to her needle) and her actions such as cooking for her brothers and Belarius: as the actress Helen Faucit put it, “For the first time, the cave is felt to be a home.”²⁸ She is also commended for her purity (unlike the problematic Isabella in Measure for Measure, she calls out for help as soon as she recognizes the language of seduction), her complete obedience to her husband even when he orders her death, and for the magnanimity with which she gives up her right of succession to the kingdom once her long-lost brothers are found. “Conjugal tenderness” is said to be her dominant quality, and she is often described as “matronly”: perhaps it is not surprising that three of the most celebrated performers of the role—Helen Faucit, Ellen Terry, and Peggy Ashcroft—all played Imogen when they themselves were fifty or more.

This approach could also inform and enliven a stage history, often a rather dull section of an introduction consisting of a dutiful list of names, dates, and places with little to interest nonantiquarian readers. With Cymbeline, for example, one can trace how the idealization of the heroine could only have been achieved by radical cutting and expurgation of the text, beginning with David Garrick's version in 1761. Explicit sexual references and references to all but the most “innocent” parts of the human body were routinely omitted. In the wager scene (1.4), for example, it became standard for Iachimo to assert that he would “win the love” of Imogen rather than that he would enjoy her “dearest bodily part,” and in the scene in which he returns to Rome (2.4) it became standard to omit Posthumus's blunt challenge to him to prove “that you have tasted her in bed.” Posthumus's misogynistic soliloquy at the end of this scene was often cut, as were Iachimo's references to prostitutes in his scene with Imogen (1.6). The purpose of Cloten's pursuit of the heroine was altered insofar as references to his intent to rape her were omitted. After his fight with Cloten (4.2), Guiderius usually entered carrying Cloten's sword, not his head, and Imogen's speech on awakening from her drugged sleep later in this scene was shorn of its references to the body's leg, foot, thigh, and so on. She certainly did not daub her cheeks with the dead man's blood. Despite all this, Imogen's part remained central to the play, though the dynamics of it shifted according to whether the actor-manager of the time was playing Posthumus (like Garrick and John Philip Kemble) or Iachimo (like Macready and Irving). In thus attempting a gender-conscious approach to the study of stage history, a feminist editor can also build on the work of Irene Dash, whose book Wooing, Wedding, and Power: Women in Shakespeare's Plays²⁹ considered the ways in which female roles in a number of texts have been altered and abridged in a male-dominated theatrical tradition.

THE COMMENTARY

Mary Cowden Clarke took a swipe at the male editorial tradition when she dismissed most footnotes as “mere vehicles for abuse, spite and arrogance.” Any editor who has plowed through the eighteenth-century commentaries will have some sympathy with the charge. As in the introduction, so in the commentary, a modern feminist editor can generate a refreshing amount of interesting new material simply by performing a critique of her male predecessors' work. The typical rhetorical stance of the male editor is aloof, patronising and overtly or covertly misogynistic. The feminist editor will again find that the editors are frequently more sexist than the text, both in what they discuss and in what they fail to discuss. I shall limit myself to two examples of each category.

To begin with sins of commission, toward the end of The Comedy of Errors the Abbess questions Adriana about the possible cause of her husband's apparent madness and establishes that it is due to “the venom clamors of a jealous woman” (5.1.69),³⁰ Adriana having dared to complain to her husband about his relationship with a prostitute. This conclusion is reached after some very leading questioning, in which Adriana is made to convict herself of excessive and violent scolding. Her sister Luciana objects to the Abbess's verdict and defends Adriana, asserting, “She never reprehended him but mildly” (87), and she asks her, “Why bear you these reproofs and answer not?” (89), to which Adriana replies, “She did betray me to my own reproof” (90). This last line is paraphrased by a 1972 editor³¹ as meaning “She tricked me into recognizing my own faults”—a paraphrase that is quoted without comment (and presumably approvingly) by a 1987 editor.³² Surely this is simply incorrect? The line means, “She tricked me into criticizing myself,” and the context (not to mention the rest of the play) establishes that the criticism is not justified. Adriana is not “recognizing her own faults” but accusing herself of faults she does not possess. This misreading can, like Taylor's textual example, be attributed to the unthinking sexist assumption on the part of male editors that Adriana is indeed the one who is at fault in this context. The way they present their reading as an apparently straightforward paraphrase means it will all too easily be accepted by readers who are themselves conditioned by patriarchal attitudes and who assume the editor speaks with authority in such a matter.

My other example is from Othello. (Can one imagine anyone advising him not to criticize his wife for her infidelity but, rather, to put up with it quietly and even accept that it is all his own fault? Can one imagine male editors finding it natural to endorse such a position?) The problem here is with Desdemona's sensuality, and it was, sadly, a female editor in 1957 who, as Gary Taylor demonstrates,³³ rejected the quarto reading of 1.3.251, in which Desdemona says her heart is subdued to the “utmost pleasure” of Othello, preferring the less physical folio reading “very quality.” The same editor argued in her commentary that, when Desdemona complains that if Othello goes to Cyprus without her, “The rites for why I love him are bereft me” (1.3.257), rites has nothing to do with conjugal rites. A male editor in the following year, whose textual theory committed him to following the quarto, printed “utmost pleasure” in 1.3 but explicitly expressed his approval of a later quarto reading at 2.1.80, in which Cassio prays that Othello's “tall ship” may soon arrive in Cyprus so that he can “swiftly come to Desdemona's arms.”³⁴ This editor commented unfavorably on the more physical folio reading that Othello may “Make love's quick pants in Desdemona's arms” on the grounds that it is “out of character for Cassio and his usual attitude to Othello and Desdemona.” Both these editors seem to use their authority in their commentaries to take as much sex out of the play as they can.

As for sins of omission, I’ll begin with As You Like It, in which it has always struck me that the famous “seven ages of man” speech (2.7.137-66) conspicuously excludes women. After the Duke's introductory reference to “this wide and universal theatre” and Jacques's opening “All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players,” the speaker limits his focus to just one half of mankind—“each man in his time plays many parts”—and proceeds to delineate the schoolboy, the specifically male lover, the soldier, the justice, and so on. No editor remarks on this. Indeed, all eight pages of commentary on the speech in the recent New Variorum edition³⁵ celebrate Shakespeare's ability to portray “representatives of the entire human race.” A feminist editor might note the invisibility of women here and perhaps relate it to the absence of actual women on the English Renaissance stage, a convention about which this play is notably self-conscious, especially in its epilogue.

My other example is from King Lear. At the beginning of 4.3 in editions that conflate the quarto and folio texts, a Gentleman explains that the army that has arrived from France to support Lear is being led by Cordelia, not by the king of France, whose absence is rather vaguely explained by “something he left imperfect in the state,” (3) which needs his attention. Editors do have something to say about this passage (which is in the quarto text but not in the folio), the standard explanation for the king's absence being that Shakespeare is cautious about making what is after all French military intervention look too much like a foreign invasion. This issue has been debated by recent textual critics who have disputed Shakespeare's need to “censor” his work in this way: see, for example, Gary Taylor's essay “Monopolies, Show Trials, Disaster and Invasion: King Lear and Censorship.”³⁶ But a feminist editor might add that it is also crucial for the emotional effect of Lear's reunion with Cordelia in 4.7 and 5.3 that her husband not be present. One might even express concern at the way in which the play's ending encourages us to endorse Lear's appropriation of Cordelia regardless of her wishes or her other ties, ignoring our sense that she was right to refuse just such an appropriation in the opening scene.

Finally, it is hard to know whether to laugh or cry when one comes to examine the traditional editorial procedures for dealing with obscenity in Shakespearean texts, an area that gives rise to sins of both kinds. Some editors simply try to evade the issue altogether, from Pope, who cut many of the lines Shakespeare gave to the sexually outspoken Princess in Love's Labour's Lost,³⁷ to modern editors of As You Like It, who fail to comment on the sexual innuendo in Rosalind's speeches.³⁸ In both cases the fact that a woman is speaking is significant: Shakespeare's heroines (including Desdemona in my earlier examples) are more frank and enthusiastic about sex than his male editors think “ladies” should be.

Frequently, editors use coy phrases such as “bawdy quibble,” “double entendre,” or the even more quaint “sexual equivoque” without spelling out what precisely is going on. They go to extraordinary lengths to avoid using “rude” words themselves, as can be illustrated from the English lesson scene in Henry V (3.4). One 1965 editor informed his readers that le foot and le count are “similar in sound to the French equivalent of English ‘four-letter’ words.”³⁹ A 1968 editor volunteered the information that foutre means “coition” and that con means “female organ.”⁴⁰ The year 1976 saw a regression from this brave outspokenness with an editor who remarked that the scene in general exhibits “some gentle humour in a number of mispronunciations” and that foot and count are “close approximations to obscene words.”⁴¹ A modern feminist editor would surely make less of a fuss about printing fuck and cunt and commenting on the kind of humor that is being generated in this scene between two women.

The sexual politics of The Taming of the Shrew have always been controversial. It is the only one of Shakespeare's plays to have provoked a theatrical reply or sequel in his lifetime in the form of John Fletcher's The Woman's Prize, or The Tamer Tamed (c. 1611), in which Petruchio, now a widower, marries again and has the tables turned on him by his second wife. (The implicit homage of such a sequel may have been one of the factors in Shakespeare's decision to collaborate with Fletcher in his last three plays from around 1612-14: Cardenio, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen.) While The Shrew has been a popular play in the theater for four hundred years, its stage history offers numerous examples of ambivalence on the part of adaptors and producers toward its subject matter. As early as The Taming of a Shrew, the problematic quarto text published in 1594 and generally known as A Shrew, Katherina is given an aside in the wooing scene (the equivalent to 2.1 in the traditional treatment of the folio version):

She turnes aside and speakes
But yet I will consent and marrie him,
For I methinkes have livde too long a maid,
And match him too, or else his manhood's good.

(sc. 5, 40-42)⁴²

Thus, it is made explicit, as it never is in The Shrew, that Katherina can see some positive advantage in marrying and that she is going to enjoy competing with her partner. But later the brutality of the taming is played up when, in the equivalent of 4.3, we get the stage direction “Enter Ferando [Petruchio] with a peece of meate uppon his daggers point.”

Similarly, Catherine has an aside in the midst of the exchange of insults in this scene in Garrick's version (which held the stage from 1754 to 1844 in England and to 1887 in the United States):

A Plague upon his Impudence! I’m vexed—
I’ll marry my Revenge, but I will tame him.

(14)⁴³

And at the end of the scene she confirms this hint of a reversal of roles and adds further motivation in a closing soliloquy:

                                                            Sister Bianca now shall see
The poor abandon’d Cath’rine, as she calls me,
Can hold her Head as high, and be as proud,
And make her Husband stoop unto her Lure
As she, or e’er a Wife in Padua.
As double as my Portion be my Scorn;
Look to your Seat, Petruchio, or I throw you.
Cath’rine shall tame this Haggard;—or if she fails,
Shall tye her Tongue up, and pare down her Nails.

(16-17)

Garrick has here transferred some of Petruchio's taming metaphors to Catherine in an attempt to redress the balance between hero and heroine, but it also seems that it was he who first made a whip an obligatory stage property for Petruchio. Thus, from the beginning the theatrical tradition has simultaneously apologized for and exaggerated the play's misogyny.⁴⁴

Male editors have also felt uneasy about The Shrew. In 1904 one found Petruchio's order to Katherina in the last scene to take off her cap and tread on it particularly offensive: “Though not intended to humiliate her, but rather to convince his sceptical friends, it always strikes me as a needless affront to her feelings … offered at the very moment when she is exhibiting a voluntary obedience.”⁴⁵ Another in 1928 wrote, “There have been shrews since Xantippe's time … and it is not discreet for an editor to discuss, save historically, the effective ways of dealing with them … but … one cannot help thinking a little wistfully that the Petruchian discipline had something to say for itself.” He immediately withdrew this by remarking that Petruchio's method “was undoubtedly drastic and has gone out of fashion. … Let it suffice to say that The Taming of the Shrew belongs to a period, and it is not ungallant, even so.”⁴⁶ A more recent editor writing in 1981 revealed his embarrassment about the play by having a great deal to say in his introduction about shrews as little furry animals and almost nothing to say about sexual politics. Both this editor and another one in 1982 contrived to take no notice whatever of feminist critics, who had by then already produced some stimulating new readings of the play.⁴⁷

It is not an exaggeration to say that being commissioned to edit The Taming of the Shrew around 1979 and the experience of working on the play over the subsequent three or four years contributed to my becoming a feminist in a public, professional sense as well as in a private capacity. (I was simultaneously beginning to develop the first courses on women writers and feminist criticism at the University of Liverpool.) I don’t want to dwell on the final product, which was published in 1984, but I did try, especially in my introduction and commentary, to consider issues neglected by other editors and in particular to treat The Shrew as a “problem play” whose darker side has been acknowledged, consciously or unconsciously, throughout its stage and critical history. Perhaps I did not, by today's standards, go far enough. I was present at a paper given by Annabel Patterson at the World Shakespeare Congress in Tokyo in August 1991 during which, after some positive remarks about my edition, she said as much. I reflected then that some of the defects could be attributed to my lack of self-assurance, both as an editor and as a feminist, while others were due to the need to compromise with the wishes of the general editors of the series and behind them the publishers. Rather than conduct a backward-looking autocritique, what I shall do in the final section of this essay is consider briefly what I would do differently if I were editing The Shrew today, ten years after it was published.

I doubt if I would want to make any changes in the text itself, though I would of course need to engage with the choices and arguments of subsequent editors, notably those of Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor in the Oxford Complete Works and Textual Companion.⁴⁸ The 1594 quarto text of A Shrew is so different at the level of linguistic detail from The Shrew that no editor of the latter play would be likely to emend the text with readings taken from the former, but I would want to reexamine my position on A Shrew itself and on the relationship between the two versions in the light of work published recently by Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey in the introduction to their reprint of A Shrew⁴⁹ and by Leah Marcus in her essay “The Shakespearean Editor as Shrew-Tamer.”⁵⁰ These discussions challenge the orthodox position, established by all three of the 1980s editions, that A Shrew is a later text than The Shrew and is to some extent derived from it. They also argue that A Shrew is a more “progressive” text than The Shrew in its sexual politics. Marcus contrasts the continuing use of the additional Christopher Sly episodes in the stage history of The Shrew with their suppression by editors and traces a depressing history of a virtual conspiracy to associate the greater realism and the greater commitment to patriarchy of The Shrew with the “authentic Shakespeare,” while A Shrew with its “significant ideological differences” is banished from the canon.

I think the ideological differences are less clear-cut than these authors claim, and their textual arguments for the chronological precedence of A Shrew are not immediately convincing. A substantial counter argument is advanced in Stephen Roy Miller's unpublished Ph.D. thesis, A Critical, Old-Spelling Edition of “The Taming of A Shrew, 1594,”⁵¹ which seems to me, after a very thorough analysis of the evidence, forcefully to reestablish the view that A Shrew is a deliberate (though not always totally competent) adaptation of The Shrew. Marcus misrepresents the editorial tradition when she says that editors have suppressed the additional Sly episodes when all recent editions print them, albeit in appendices. Nevertheless, her work and that of Holderness and Loughrey is interesting, perhaps especially to literary theorists, in representing a poststructuralist and postrevisionist attitude to the fundamental indeterminacy of all texts. The solution proposed by Marcus for editors—that they should print complete versions of both texts—is not likely to appeal to publishers of regular Shakespeare series (Routledge, the Arden publishers, are not prepared to contemplate two versions even of Hamlet or King Lear), but the text provided by Holderness and Loughrey will allow those interested to read the plays intertextually. In an ideal world we would also have a published version of Miller's edition, and perhaps the current interest in “not-after-all-so-bad-quartos” (textually challenged quartos?) will make that possible.

In line with what I have said here, I might wish to be even more explicit in my commentary about obscenity in the play, especially in the wooing scene (2.1) and in the final scene (5.2), though I was gratified to read in a recent essay by Thomas L. Berger that my commentary was the most explicit on these matters of the six editions of The Shrew he examined.⁵²

But the major changes would come in the introduction. Many things would need updating, but I would want to do that along specifically feminist lines. In discussing more recent stagings, for example, I’d pay particular attention to those that have made some distinct point about the play's sexual politics. Two such productions were those at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool in 1987 and at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1992. (The latter production transferred to the Barbican Theatre in London in 1993.) The Liverpool production, directed by a woman, Glen Walford (who incidentally used my text), gave the play a North African setting, which was apparently intended to emphasize the restrictions on the women who appeared partially veiled. While this was effective to some extent, it also allowed the overwhelmingly white British audience to feel a sense of racial and religious superiority, complacent in their assurance that the Western Christian tradition is more progressive in these matters than the Eastern Islamic tradition. The Stratford production, directed by Bill Alexander, was (I would say significantly) more interesting for its treatment of the Induction and the subplot than for its treatment of the main plot. (Leah Marcus should have seen it.) It used an extended and thoroughly modernized version of the Christopher Sly episodes featuring a group of thoughtless yuppies who remained onstage right through the play and participated by being required to play minor roles from time to time, usually as servants. In the subplot Tranio became a potentially serious rival to Lucentio in the wooing of Bianca. The main plot was disappointingly conventional (apart from the casting of a blonde Katherina and a small Petruchio), with hero and heroine falling in love fairly obviously at first sight, though the playing of the scene on the road back to Padua (4.5) as a straight love scene was novel. In general, however, this production seemed more interested in class issues than in gender issues—the first postfeminist Shrew?

Turning to the critical tradition, I would be delighted to find much more material now than ten years ago. In the early 1980s I was able to treat feminist criticism as relatively univocal, partly because the field was then dominated by the North American approach, which had developed out of psychoanalytic criticism and which was exemplified by Coppélia Kahn's essay “The Taming of the Shrew: Shakespeare's Mirror of Marriage”⁵³ and Marianne Novy's essay “Patriarchy and Play in The Taming of the Shrew.”⁵⁴ Now I would want to explore the pluralism of feminist approaches and, in particular, the extent to which they have been influenced by American New Historicism and British cultural materialism. This would involve a more historical treatment of the play itself: I’d put it in the context of actual sexual politics in the 1580s and 1590s, drawing on recent work by critics such as Karen Newman in her chapter “Renaissance Family Politics and Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew,” in Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama,⁵⁵ and Lynda E. Boose in her essays “Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman's Unruly Member”⁵⁶ and “The Taming of the Shrew: Good Husbandry and Enclosure.”⁵⁷ At the same time I’d want to pay more attention to the history of women's responses to the play over the last four hundred years, drawing on my own recent work in this field and on books such as Women's Re-Visions of Shakespeare, edited by Marianne Novy.⁵⁸

While feminist critics have been becoming more historical, they have accused New Historicist critics in particular of treating issues of sexuality almost entirely in terms of power to the exclusion of gender: see Lynda E. Boose, “The Family in Shakespeare Studies; or—Studies in the Family of Shakespeareans; or—The Politics of Politics”;⁵⁹ Carol Thomas Neely, “Constructing the Subject: Feminist Practice and the New Renaissance Discourses”;⁶⁰ and my own essay “Are There Any Women in King Lear?”⁶¹ A contemporary edition of The Shrew would need to take on these debates as they impinge upon critical discussions of the play. It would also need to engage with the ongoing debate within feminist criticism itself between what one might call “apologist” critics, who want to “save” Shakespeare or even co-opt him as a protofeminist, and the more negative, or pessimistic, critics, who see him as quite irredeemably patriarchal. (In the former camp one might put Irene Dash⁶² and Linda Bamber, author of Comic Women, Tragic Men;⁶³ in the latter camp one might put Peter Erickson, author of Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare's Drama,⁶⁴ and Marilyn Williamson, author of The Patriarchy of Shakespeare's Comedies.)⁶⁵

There are of course anxieties that focus around this latter position: If we conclude that Shakespeare's views on gender would class him with the reactionaries were he alive today, does that mean we shall stop reading or teaching him? This brings me back to “Shakespeare and the Tyranny of Feminism”: feminism as censorship. The very fact that criticism of The Taming of the Shrew has enjoyed a positive renaissance in recent years mainly because of the contributions of feminist critics, while other early comedies such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Comedy of Errors remain relatively neglected, does not bear out the charge. (One might also cite the feminist-inspired debates that are revivifying study of more problematic misogynists such as John Milton and D. H. Lawrence.) Personally, however, I am prepared to admit I have no intention of reediting The Taming of the Shrew: having toyed with Cymbeline for a while, I’m now working on the Arden 3 edition of Hamlet.

Notes

1. The survey was carried out by Tim Cook of Kingston University for PACE, the newsletter of SCEPCHE, the Standing Conference on English in Polytechnics and Colleges of Higher Education. SCEPCHE subsequently merged with CUE, the Council for University English, to become CCUE, the Council for College and University English, and the publication is now known as the CCUE newsletter.

2. Feminist Review 10:61-74.

3. Feminist Review 14:62-70.

4. See my essay “Pre-Feminism or Proto-Feminism?: Early Women Readers of Shakespeare,” in The Elizabethan Theatre 14 (1996), 195-211.

5. “Textual and Sexual Criticism: A Crux in The Comedy of Errors,” Renaissance Drama 19 (1988): 195.

6. Reinventing Shakespeare (New York: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1989), 206.

7. “Sexual and Textual Criticism,” 197.

8. Ibid.

9. Shakespeare and Feminist Criticism (New York: Garland, 1991).

10. Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (London: Macmillan, 1995).

11. Studies in Bibliography 42:1-24.

12. Studies in Bibliography 43:1-33.

13. Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Seabury Press, 1979).

14. Studies in Bibliography 44:1-30.

15. Studies in Bibliography 44:31-82, 83-143.

16. In Philip Cohen, ed., Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 78-102.

17. In his book Shakespeare's Professional Skills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965).

18. “Shakespeare's Revised Plays: King Lear and Othello,” Library 4 (1982): 162.

19. In Images of Shakespeare, ed. Werner Habicht, D. J. Palmer, and Roger Pringle (London: Associated University Presses, 1988), 292-304.

20. In The Division of the Kingdoms, ed. Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 143-51.

21. As cited in note 5.

22. Taylor uses the phrase “pimps of discourse” in the general introduction to the Oxford Textual Companion (Clarendon Press, 1987), 7. It becomes more explicitly gendered on p. 60, where he gives an analogy from Harold Pinter's The Homecoming in which Lenny the pimp talks of a woman “falling apart with the pox”: when a listener asks “How did you know she was?” Lenny replies, “I decided she was.” Taylor continues, “An editor, in emending, decides a text is diseased.”

23. The Arden Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982), 152, 151.

24. The Oxford Hamlet, ed. G. R. Hibbard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 51.

25. In Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (London: Methuen, 1985), 77-94.

26. Louis Lewes, The Women of Shakespeare, trans. Helen Zimmern (London: Hodder Brothers, 1895), 340.

27. A. C. Swinburne, A Study of Shakespeare (London: Chatto and Windus, 1880), 227.

28. On Some of Shakespeare's Women, by One Who Has Impersonated Them (London: Blackwood, 1885), 251.

29. Wooing, Wedding, and Power: Women in Shakespeare's Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).

30. Quotations and references are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

31. The New Penguin Comedy of Errors, ed. Stanley Wells (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 176.

32. The New Cambridge Comedy of Errors, ed. T. S. Dorsch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 99.

33. “Textual and Sexual Criticism,” 199. The edition in question is the New Shakespeare Othello, ed. Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957).

34. The Arden Othello, ed. M. R. Ridley (London: Methuen, 1958).

35. The New Variorum As You Like It, ed. Richard Knowles (New York: Modern Language Association, 1977).

36. In Division of the Kingdoms, 75-119.

37. See Dash, Wooing, Wedding, and Power, 14-20.

38. See Juliet Dusinberre, “As Who Liked It?” Shakespeare Survey 46 (1993): 9-21.

39. The Signet Henry V, ed. John Russell Brown (New York: New American Library, 1965).

40. The New Penguin Henry V, ed. A. R. Humphreys (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).

41. The Macmillan Henry V, ed. Brian Phythian (London: Macmillan, 1976).

42. Quotation and reference from the text given in Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 1:77.

43. Catharine and Petruchio (London: Cornmarket Press Facsimile, 1969), 14.

44. For further discussion of these and other examples, see “The Taming of the Shrew on Stage,” in the introduction to my edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 17-24.

45. The Arden Taming of the Shrew, ed. R. Warwick Bond (London: Routledge, 1904), lviii.

46. The New Shakespeare Taming of the Shrew, ed. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), xxxvi-xxxvii.

47. The 1981 editor was Brian Morris, the Arden Taming of the Shrew (London: Routledge); the 1982 editor was H. J. Oliver, the Oxford Taming of the Shrew (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

48. Complete Works and Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986 and 1987).

49. A Shrew (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1992).

50. English Literary Renaissance 22 (1992): 177-200.

51. Miller's thesis was approved for the doctorate of the University of London (King's College) in 1993.

52. Berger's essay “Looking for Sex in All the Wrong Places,” a contribution to the seminar on editing at the International Shakespeare Conference at Stratford-upon-Avon in August 1992, is as yet unpublished.

53. Modern Language Studies 5 (1975): 88-102.

54. English Literary Renaissance 9 (1979): 264-80.

55. Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991): 33-50.

56. Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 179-213.

57. In Shakespeare Reread, ed. Russ McDonald (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994): 193-225.

58. For my own work, see note 4. See also Women Reading Shakespeare, 1660-1900 by Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts, forthcoming from Manchester University Press (1996). Novy's book was published by the University of Illinois Press (1990).

59. Renaissance Quarterly 40 (1987): 707-42.

60. English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988): 5-10.

61. In The Matter of Difference, ed. Valerie Wayne (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1991), 117-28.

62. Dash, Wooing, Wedding, and Power.

63. Comic Women, Tragic Men (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982).

64. Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare's Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

65. The Patriarchy of Shakespeare's Comedies (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986).