The Shakespeare Ladies Club by Christine & Jonathan Hainsworth: The women who made Shakespeare great

William Shakespeare had to wait 124 years before he was thought worthy of a statue in Poets’ Corner, the niche in Westminster Abbey dedicated to England’s greatest literary stars. At the time of his death in 1616, the playwright’s reputation was in free-fall.

While fellow scribe Ben Jonson flatteringly dubbed his older friend ‘the Swan of Avon’, the brutal truth was that to most theatre-goers Shakespeare was a dusty relic. No London paper had mentioned the playwright’s death at the age of 52.

All this changed in 1736, thanks to four enterprising upper-class women who formed the Shakespeare Ladies Club. The club was the brainchild of Susanna, Countess of Shaftesbury. She was sickened that London theatres now showed only mutilated versions of Shakespeare’s plays.

These mutilations were the result of a new cultural puritanism which insisted that Shakespeare’s plays were too bawdy and bloody for polite society. Susanna and three literary friends hated that Macbeth had been turned into an all-singing and dancing extravaganza, while Romeo And Juliet was no longer a tragedy, since the lovestruck teens took sleeping drafts rather than deadly poison.

Susanna – along with Mary, Duchess of Montagu, Elizabeth Boyd, a brilliant writer, and feisty feminist Mary, Baroness Walsingham – set about campaigning for Shakespeare to be returned to his former glory. Specifically, they wanted his liveliness and even vulgarity to be reinstated. In particular, the ladies were angry that Shakespeare’s strong, complex women had been turned into silly dolls.

The Shakespeare Ladies Club existed for only a handful of years and didn’t leave any records. Nonetheless, authors Christine and Jonathan Hainsworth have done an excellent job of tracking down evidence of its pioneering work.

They have found playbills that refer to the plays being performed ‘At the Particular Desire of Several Ladies of Quality’. The ladies petitioned theatres to mount plays that had disappeared from the repertoire, including Twelfth Night, The Winter’s Tale and All’s Well That Ends Well.

Thanks to these efforts, by the late 1730s, roughly a quarter of performances in London were of a Shakespeare play. A leading newspaper published a spoof letter from Shakespeare thanking the Ladies Club from beyond the grave for reviving ‘the memory of the forsaken Shakespear’.

The ladies’ greatest triumph was fundraising for a commemorative statue of Shakespeare to stand in Poets’ Corner alongside such literary luminaries as Geoffrey Chaucer and John Milton.

They arranged two benefit performances of Julius Caeser and Hamlet at the Drury Lane and Covent Garden theatres respectively. However, since it wasn’t legal for women to campaign openly, they had to rely on men to front the work on their behalf. Their choice of poster-boy was David Garrick, the country’s leading actor and theatre manager.

Garrick was a colossal egoist who took all the credit for getting Shakespeare installed in Poets’ Corner. By the Victorian period, this elevation of William Shakespeare to the status of Britain’s secular patron saint – what George Bernard Shaw wittily dubbed ‘Bardolatry’ – was routinely laid at Garrick’s door.

How gratifying to learn that the Hainsworths have lobbied Westminster Abbey on the ladies’ behalf. The official record now states that it was thanks to four feisty women that Shakespeare was rescued from the cultural dustbin and restored to his rightful position at the heart and soul of British culture.