Chapter 1 - ‘We Have Lost Our Labour’

Summary

Having established women’s absence from the current narratives of the Shakespearean editorial tradition, Chapter 1 lays out possible reasons for this neglect, and for the gender imbalance in the editorial profession. First, it questions how the field currently defines textual editing, challenging how twentieth-century bibliographical trends have distorted judgements of past editorial work. It explores how both labour and texts can be gendered, re-evaluating the ‘social’ labour of the introduction and examining the repercussions of textual collation. Turning to the gendering of texts, it introduces ‘domestic texts’, including the Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare and the Bowdlers’ Family Shakespeare, then addresses misogyny and gendered rhetoric in textual studies.