ABSTRACT
In contrast to the first two chapters, which explored the relatively unmapped terrain of working-class and children’s engagements with Shakespeare in the periodicals, some aspects of women’s engagements are already part of the critical discourse. A major contributor to the recuperation of female Shakespeareans has been Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts’s anthology Women Reading Shakespeare 1660-1900, which has made women’s writing about Shakespeare more easily accessible. The anthology samples writing from a wide variety of genres, and notes the significance of periodicals as a venue for women’s writing:
Thompson and Roberts have made a significant contribution to our knowledge of women’s responses to Shakespeare by recuperating the writing disseminated in these under-rated genres, and by anthologising them to reveal that they often share similar concerns and approaches. However, as my introduction has argued, the anthology form also has its inherent limitations. For periodical readers, the context of articles about Shakespeare would have been the other articles published alongside them in any given issue, not women’s Shakespeare criticism published in other genres and other periods. Also, and importantly, while the anthology collects women’s writing from these various contexts and historical periods, readers of even the most overtly feminist magazines would have encountered articles written by men as well as women. An accurate history of women’s engagements with Shakespeare, as opposed to a history of women’s writing about him, includes pieces by men as well as women that appeared in a range of periodicals. The present chapter surveys a limited number of Victorian periodicals and makes no attempt to provide the kind of generic or chronological range so admirably achieved in the Thompson and Roberts anthology, foregrounding instead the contextual elements that had a significant impact on the way in which Victorian women understood Shakespeare.
