On July 3, 1925, together with Lord Balfour and Rudyard Kipling, James Barrie was granted the freedom of the Stationersâ Company. The text of Barrieâs acceptance speech was printed the following morning in the London Times (and subsequently by Clement Shorter in a private edition of twenty-five copies). The speech, which posited the existence of an edition of Shakespeare newly sensitive to the needs of women, is here quoted at length:
Barrie is mimicking many of the various resources that women (or at least, those women who have wished to retain the poet as an object of affection and veneration) have repeatedly brought to the problem of Shakespeare. These include resources of editing, reading (both individually and in societies), and the development of character criticism; the adaptation of Shakespeareâs stories for specialized (usually juvenile or school) audiences; the performance activities of producing, acting, and directing; and womenâs promotion of Shakespeare, within the heritage industry, as a man who loved women (it was, for example, with the crucial support of the Shakespeare Ladies Club that in 1741 a monument was erected to Shakespeare in Westminster Abbey, copies of which were subsequently placed in Stratford, and in Leicester Square).
Women have also been interested, as âThe Ladiesâ Shakespeareâ suggests, to âreread,â ârewrite,â ârefigure,â âre-vision,â or âdecenterâ Shakespeare â that is, to criticize the poet from a womanâs point of view while continuing to appropriate the cultural capital that accrues to his name. In this essay, I use the term âThe Ladiesâ Shakespeareâ to describe both the imaginary text that is the object of Barrieâs joke, and the set of gestures whereby some critics have asserted a particularist, woman-centered interest in Shakespeare â and whereby other critics, taking such assertions at face value, have understood them to represent errors of judgment within Shakespeare criticism. Both as an essay and as a concept, âThe Ladiesâ Shakespeareâ is intended to demonstrate that the âwoman-questionâ within Shakespeare criticism is a reflex whereby such criticism recognizes and castigates itself: neither as essay nor concept does it therefore attempt to account for the differences of class, nationality, and ethnicity as these have recently become visible within feminist criticism, and as they continue to make their difference to the ways in which Shakespeare may be read, viewed, and valued.
As Barrieâs admixture of suffragist gender politics to Shakespeare criticism and performance suggests, women have regularly taken pleasure in, and understood the contemporary material benefits of, the enterprise of arguing the case for womenâs special relation to Englandâs national poet. While womenâs labor has contributed to the development of Shakespeare studies, the study and performance of Shakespeare may have helped to articulate the interests of (and hence offer benefits to) women as a group. In âShakspere Talks with Uncritical Peopleâ (1879â91), Constance OâBrien imagined women gathering in small, informal groups to talk over characters âwhose life seems as vivid as our own.â1 Through such meetings, as well as through more organized Shakespeare study clubs and the distribution of what Elizabeth Latimer (herself a speaker on the study-club circuit) called their âfugitive Shakspearian Criticism,â women articulated social and intellectual communities that intersected, but were not entirely coincident with, those of their male counterparts. So the study of Shakespeare cemented the friendship of critic Anna Jameson and actor Fanny Kemble; Mary Cowden Clarke learned her love for Shakespeare from her tutor Mary Lamb, and conceived the idea for her Shakespeare Concordance (1845) at the Lambsâ breakfast table; Mary Lamb was encouraged to write Tales from Shakespear (1807) with her brother Charles by the publisher Mary Jane Godwin; the actress Helen Faucit wrote her volume On Some of Shakespeareâs Female Characters: By One Who Has Personated Them (1885) in the form of personal letters to her female friends; and Elizabeth Griffith was âstirredâ to write The Morality of Shakespeareâs Drama Illustrated (1775) by her desire to emulate Elizabeth Montaguâs Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear (1769).
Less clear, within Barrieâs parody, is the fact that self-directed humor has also been characteristic of womenâs approaches to Shakespeare. In 1896 Emily Bissell (Priscilla Leonard) published an antisuffragist article in the conservative Century Magazine which has obvious affinities with Barrieâs speech. Claiming to be an account of a lecture given in a Twentieth-Century Womenâs Club, âThe Mistaken Vocation of Shakespeareâs Heroinesâ charges Shakespeare with having put his female characters in the wrong plays (âin a word, ladies, with these heroines in their appropriate places, there would have been no tragedies at all among Shakespeareâs works!â). To prolonged applause, and cries of âDown with Shakespeare!â the speaker reassigns the female roles of an author she considers âwell-meaning, but inadequate â blind to the true powers of Woman and the illimitable wideness of her sphere.â Mrs. Lauch Macluarin also anticipated the tone of Barrieâs address in a paper delivered to the Dallas Shakespeare Club in 1897. Beginning from the premise that âShakespeare has told us everything, about everything, that is, and was, and is to come,â Macluarin pretends to search for the figure of the business woman in his plays, before finally forgiving Shakespeare for his omission of the character. For âhow could he anticipate her, great man that he was, any more than he could the typewriter and the phonograph and other pleasant and surprising things we have?â Bissell and Macluarin republished their essays in the American Shakespeare Magazine, the journal of the largely female-staffed Fortnightly Shakespeare Club of New York. Mocking themselves as lady Shakespeareans, Bissell, Macluarin, and the women who laughed with them explored what was not in Shakespeare primarily in order to demonstrate and enjoy their familiarity with what was there. Even as this strategy stakes its claim to some part of the cultural territory that is Shakespeare studies in the late nineteenth century, however, it hints at the pleasures of a criticism that, departing from strict textual considerations, is free to ask not what women can do for Shakespeare, but what Shakespeare can do for women.
The essays of Bissell, Macluarin, and Barrie are written from a culturally conservative position which uses the specter of a ludicrous and anachronistic feminist criticism to deflect attention, both from a serious consideration of womenâs rights, and from a critical analysis of the premises of Shakespearean criticism itself. It is the argument of this essay that if the extravagancies that Barrie attributes to âThe Ladiesâ Shakespeareâ have been legible within woman-centered criticism of Shakespeare, they have been equally legible within a more general appreciation of Shakespeare as that has been developed both within and beyond the academy. I am suggesting that in âThe Ladiesâ Shakespeare,â and in subsequent attacks on feminist approaches to the plays, scholars and others attempt to distance themselves from the undesired consequences of some of their own readings of Shakespeare by projecting them onto women. Conducted by men or by women, such readings begin from the unexceptionable premise that literary criticism necessarily responds, in however mediated a form, to current political concerns. The criticism that follows is itself what Marx called âideologicalâ to the extent that it attributes to acts of intellection (such as Shakespeareâs, or its own) the power to change the circumstances of menâs and womenâs lives. The fantasy that is âThe Ladiesâ Shakespeareâ is not the fantasy of women alone â it is the productive and necessary fantasy of all those who have allowed themselves to read Shakespeare as if it mattered to do so. I am proposing, then, that the specificities of woman-centered criticism as mocked by its detractors are almost always standing in for the specificities of Shakespeare criticism in general as these are recognized and disavowed by its own practitioners â laugh at âThe Ladiesâ Shakespeare,â and âThe Ladiesâ Shakespeareâ laughs at you. But my argument is twofold, for if there is nothing particularly unusual, subjective, or particularist about the grounds on which woman-centered criticism of Shakespeare proceeds, then such criticism cannot be distinguished, for good or ill, from that which surrounds it. That is to say, there is no feminist criticism of Shakespeare, but thinking makes it so.
