The Forgotten Women Who Saved the Bawdy Bard

Following Shakespeare’s death in 1616, four women were crucial in ensuring his original work was not forgotten: the Shakespeare Ladies Club. Formed in 1736, the club was a quartet of “Women of Quality”—three from the aristocracy and one a writer who ran a stationery shop, all educated and so enraptured by Shakespeare’s plays that they met to read and discuss his transcendent genius. Not content with this, they used their power and influence to campaign successfully for a statue of their literary idol to be placed in Westminster Abbey—their efforts were finally recognized by the Abbey in June 2025. 

These women put their considerable wealth behind their lobbying for more Shakespeare plays; they convinced theater managers to put on the original versions by promising to underwrite any financial losses. They had to overcome a post-Puritan culture that believed theatre to be immoral and no place for respectable women. After nearly 300 years, writers Christine and Jonathan Hainsworth tell their remarkable story in The Shakespeare Ladies Club. 

In the authors’ words: “The obstacles they faced were daunting, yet Susanna Shaftesbury, Elizabeth Boyd and the two Marys, Montagu and Cowper, each like the goddess Diana the archer, fired an aesthetic arrow that would strike a bullseye in Britain and, eventually, the entire world, as reviving Shakespeare has positively affected human culture to this day.”

The excerpt below is from Chapter 7: The SLC Bespeaks ‘Reviv’d … The Forsaken Shakespear’

In early 1736 this handful of remarkable women formed The Shakespeare Ladies Club. It was a golden age of clubs for all sorts of interests, they met perhaps as often as once a week and read the favourite parts of the plays they enjoyed and almost certainly discussed the political and social issues of the day.

The London residences of all four women were in close proximity to one another and although only one member, Elizabeth Boyd, lived permanently in the capital, the others spent the ‘season’ in London—the time when Parliament was sitting and the aristocrats would journey to their city homes to enjoy cultural events, theatre, music, balls, sports, gambling, clubs—until the heat and intolerable stench of the London summer sent them all packing, back to their country estates.

New evidence points to exactly which version of the First Folio the Ladies dutifully studied. In the surviving diary of Bishop Richard Pococke is his account of visiting St Giles House in Wimborne St Giles, Dorset on 6 October 1754.

The Gardens are very beautifully laid out, in a serpentine river, pieces of water, Lawns … very gracefully adorn’d with wood … Shake Spears house, in which is a small statue of him, & his works in a Glass case; & in all the houses & seats are books in hanging Glass cases.

This is the earliest known reference anywhere to a private shrine to the Bard and, fittingly, it is on the estate of Susanna, the Countess of Shaftesbury. (Again, posterity has wrongly identified the actor manager David Garrick as being the first to mount such a personal tribute to Shakespeare—Garrick’s Temple to Shakespeare was built in 1756 in the grounds of his home on the banks of the River Thames at Hampton.) Canadian academic Genevieve Kirk found in an overlooked inventory list for the 4th Earl of Shaftesbury: ‘Shakespear (Theobalds) 7 vols’.

By 1736 there were three editions of Shakespeare’s collected works available that vied with each other as definitive: Alexander Pope’s, Nicholas Rowe’s and Lewis Theobald’s. With great arrogance and prudery, Pope published in 1725 his highly censorious volume of Shakespeare’s plays. For example, here is Kirk quoting another academic, Gary Taylor:

Taylor acknowledges that Pope … was hostile towards the surviving folios and quartos [single copies of plays] determining that ‘all the early texts of Shakespeare reeked of corruption’ and ‘could be saved only by wholesale adaptation’. Not wholly unlike the playwrights of the day, Pope attempted to update Shakespeare to suit eighteenth-century aesthetic standards … censoring Shakespeare’s ‘bander, quibble and vulgarity’.

The following year, Theobald sought to correct this literary desecration and here is the mouthful of a title he came up with to rebuke his literary rival: SHAKESPARE RESTORED; Or, a Specimen of the Many Errors, as Well Committed, as Unamended, by Mr. Pope in His Later Edition of This Poet, Designed Not Only to Correct the Said Edition, but to Restore the True Reading of Shakespeare in All the Editions Yet Publish’d.

Despite Pope being in the SLC’s literary circle—Elizabeth Boyd addresses this leading critic in the prologue of Don Sancho, as does Mary Cowper with a quite stinging rebuke in her pro-SLC poem—the Ladies rejected his version in favour of Lewis Theobald’s authentic embrace of the Bard’s ‘banter, quibble and vulgarity’. The editor boasts in the preface of ‘restoring to the Publick their greatest Poet in his Original Purity: after having so long lain in a Condition that was a Disgrace to Common Sense’.

Although box office receipts alone are always a dubious measure of quality, it is a financial fact that Pope’s tasteful version was a flop whilst Theobald’s, adhering to the original’s earthiness, was a best-seller for the rest of the century. Theobald also observes in the same preface that ‘there is scarce a Poet that our English Tongue boasts of, who is more the Subject of the Ladies Reading.’

How true, and these particular ladies wanted to see the reconciliation of the original texts with what audiences saw on the stage—though all would be deceased by the time this happened at the dawn of the next century. In late 1736, those who were interested in theatre and patronising the latest plays—or revivals thanks to the tyranny of the Licencing Act—would have seen this line above the posters: ‘At the Particular Desire of Several Ladies of Quality’.

By the 1730s the convention of the sovereign being a financial spigot for the arts, as during Shakespeare’s time, was long gone. With theatres having become independent commercial ventures, the prestige vacuum was instead filled by members of the aristocracy who would request of playhouses—the word used then was ‘bespeak’—particular works they wanted to see.

Hence plays by Shakespeare that had not been staged since before the English Civil War were performed ‘At the Desire of Several Ladies of Quality’. By the end of the decade, thanks to their bespeaking persistence, a quarter of all plays were either directly by the Bard or adaptations of his works, a record never equalled (not even by David Garrick).

Their first successful bespeaking—or pressurising—of the playhouses to put on more Shakespeare was a performance of Othello at Drury Lane on 16  December 1736. It was such a success that an anonymous admirer praised the Ladies’ efforts in the 20 December 1736 issue of The Daily Journal, along with a shout-out for the positive social role of thespians:

A NOBLE Attempt to revive the Stage, by a club of Women of the first Quality and Fashion is now going forward: Would the Men of Fashion form a Club to extirpate Entertainments, the Shakespear Club (for so the Ladies have dignified) would find a noble Association there; and a Union of both, in all Probability, might restore the Stage, and make the Professions of an actor as valuable in publick Opinion as it is really in itself.

The first academic to make an effort to rediscover The Shakespeare Ladies Club and their significance was Englishman Emmett L. Avery in 1956. Sadly, Avery admitted he was unable to discover the identities of the club’s members. Nevertheless, he was to able show how successful the SLC was at increasing the number of Shakespeare’s plays staged between 1737 and 1740.

The earliest was the ‘Shakespeare Ladies Club’… Genuinely successful in their efforts, these women, whose identity has eluded our times, began a movement which restored many of Shakespeare’s neglected plays to the boards, increased the frequency with which many of the familiar ones were presented, brought his works a great deal of publicity in an exceedingly short time, and became a model to later groups which similarly wished to improve the stage.

Any advertisement about a play being ‘desired by’ the ‘Ladies of Quality’ and the appearance of one or more of the SLC members at a performance, sometimes even sitting on the stage itself, proved to be nothing less than boffo box office:

In 1735–36 the London theatres had given 650 performances [of British plays]; of these, 91 were Shakespearean plays. In 1736–1737 the theatres had 539 performances, of which 92 were Shakespearean. Most impressive was Drury Lane’s record: 198 performances, of which 58 were Shakespearean … the zeal of the SLC had even more important results in the next season. In 1737–1738, when the number of theatres was reduced by the Licensing Act … the playhouses gave 306 performances of which 68 were Shakespearean … [At] Covent Garden … of 148 performances, 41 were Shakespearean.

The SLC members were determined not only to revive Shakespeare and revive him in his original form as much as practicable at both Drury Lane and Covent Garden, they also sought to revive plays of the Bard which had remained dormant since the first Stuart king occupied the throne. This repertoire of masterpieces the Ladies petitioned for includes Richard  II, Henry  IV Part II, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, The Winter’s Tale, All’s Well That Ends Well and The Merchant of Venice.

About the authors

Christine and Jonathan Hainsworth have a passion for historical investigation and challenging the ‘conventional wisdom’ regarding famous historical subjects. The husband-and-wife team bring a wealth of life experience to the task. Christine gained insight into family dynamics, poverty and societal challenges while working for the Australian government on a program to re-connect lone parents with education and employment. Jonathan, educated in Britain and Australia has over three decades of experience as a high school teacher of Modern and Ancient History and English. He is a graduate of the University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia.

Having chanced upon a book mentioning the obscure Shakespeare Ladies Club, the authors were driven to research their forgotten story. Texts, historical records and family letters, undisturbed for centuries, brought into focus a quartet of women whose intelligence, taste and tenacity rescued Shakespeare’s original plays for all time.