‘Shakespeare’s Sister ’:

‘Shakespeare’s Sister’: archival research and the politics of the canon. Dr Suzanne Trill, University of Edinburgh 26th March, 2014, HEA Equality Seminar

Context (including course outline). • Activity 1. Anthologies and the politics of the canon. • Seminar Skills. Stages of Editing. • Activity 2. A Textual Crux in Othello. • Alternative Assessment. • Challenging the Canon: beyond the academy?

Virginia Woolf. A Room of One’s Own. (1929) ‘it is a perennial puzzle why no women wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man it seemed was producing songs and sonnets’ http://wroth.latrobe.edu.au/row-082.html

it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, … any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at … That woman, then, who was born with a gift of poetry in the sixteenth century, was an unhappy woman, a woman at strife against herself.

Course Outline This course offers students the opportunity to participate in the ongoing debates concerning the process of recovering ‘lost’ early modern women’s writing, and will introduce them to the practical skills of editing early modern women’s texts. Students will be encouraged to examine the basis upon which we assign literary value to a given text, and will gain an insight into the way in which the editorial process can alter our perception of a given literary text.

[It] will take students through the process of locating ‘lost’ texts, the skills needed to read them in their original format (which will include a practical session at the NLS), and the decision-making process involved in editing a text. [It] will result in the student’s production of his/her own edition of an early modern text … [which] … will not only provide an insight into the process of editing … but will also introduce students to some [aspects of the publication process].

Seminar Schedule. • Introduction. • Reading Early Modern Texts: Print. • Reading Early Modern Texts: Manuscripts. • Locating & Handing Early Modern Texts: NLS. • Current Debates, I: the politics of the canon and literary value. • Innovative Learning Week. • Individual consultations • Current Debates, II: the politics of editorial choices. • Framing the Text, I: The ‘Authorial’ question. • Framing the Text, II: Annotation and references. • Individual Consultations. • Group discussion of draft editions.

Assessment Learning Journal (40%) • Up to 400 word entry (weekly) • Attachment of weekly exercises • Ongoing feedback Take-away Essay/Edition (60%) • General Introduction • Textual Introduction • Edited Text • Bibliography • Appendices

Activity 1: Anthologies.

The Right Honourable and most Vertuous Lady MARY SIDNEY, wife to the late deceased Henry Herbert Earle Of Pembroke & c. Simon Van de Passe (1618) Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke

http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/ ceres/ehoc/lessons/ lesson18/index.html

Thomas Bentley. The Monument of Matrones(1582)

Othello (British Library Shakespeare in Quarto). 1622 1630 http://special-1.bl.uk/treasures/SiqDiscovery/ui/record2.aspx?Source= text&LHCopy=49&LHPage=1&RHCopy=50&RHPage=1

‘Shakespeare’s Sister ’: