The Shakespeare Ladies Club

A century after Shakespeare’s death, his words were in danger of being forgotten. While plays like King Lear and Othello still played to packed houses across England, audiences saw only the bowdlerized versions—censored, rewritten, and stripped of anything that could be considered distasteful.

How, then, did Shakespeare’s original works re-emerge? Thank the Shakespeare Ladies Club, a group of influential women who rescued his plays (and his double entendres) from obscurity.

In their book, The Shakespeare Ladies Club: The Forgotten Women Who Saved the Bawdy Bard, Christine and Jonathan Hainsworth uncover the club’s unsung contributions to Shakespeare’s legacy. Thanks to the Hainsworths, Westminster Abbey has now officially recognized the Shakespeare Ladies Club for their campaign to memorialize Shakespeare in Poets’ Corner. But, they reveal, the club’s influence goes even deeper than that.

In this episode, Christine and Jonathan Hainsworth shine a light on this remarkable group of women and how they made Shakespeare the cultural icon he is today.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published May 5, 2026. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Technical support was provided by Philip Bodger in Lewes, England and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Web production was handled by Megan Fraedrich. Transcripts are edited by Leonor Fernandez. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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.

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FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

[Music fades]

KARIM-COOPER: A century after Shakespeare’s death, his reputation was beginning to evolve.

18th Century critics saw his plays as needing a makeover. They censored and reworked the plays to fit the tastes of the time, while using the works to build the myth of the Bard.

Starting in the 1730s, a group of influential women began lobbying to bring back Shakespeare’s originals.

Led by Susanna Ashley-Cooper, the Countess of Shaftesbury, the Shakespeare Ladies Club met to read and discuss the plays as printed in the First Folio.

To give Shakespeare even more prominence, the club provided financial backing for so-called “faithful” productions.

And to promote Shakespeare as a national poet, they worked hard to get his statue installed in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. But they worked behind the scenes, and their efforts were mostly forgotten.

The authors Christine and Jonathan Hainsworth have excavated this hidden history in their new book, The Shakespeare Ladies Club: The Forgotten Women Who Rescued the Bawdy Bard.

With scholars Genevieve Kirk and Michael Dobson, the Hainsworths successfully petitioned Westminster Abbey last year to recognize the club’s role in the statue. But the ladies’ contributions didn’t end there.

Here are Christine and Jonathan Hainsworth, in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

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BARBARA BOGAEV: Christine and Jonathan, really lovely to have you on the podcast.

CHRISTINE HAINSWORTH: Thank you for having us.

JONATHAN HAINSWORTH: Thank you.

BOGAEV: So, why don’t we just start here with some context. Why did Shakespeare need rescuing in the early to mid-1700s?

JONATHAN HAINSWORTH: Well, fashions change, culture changes, and by the time the Shakespeare Ladies Club was formed in 1736, the plays were either very shortened, or much worse, the plays had been, in effect, rewritten. So, if they went to see Macbeth, the Macduffs became the main characters, not the Macbeths, and there was singing and dancing.

There was just this feeling that, well, Shakespeare wrote at a time when the audience was much more working class, very poor people mixing with often very wealthy people. But when you go ahead into the 18th century, into the 1730s, the audience is essentially middle class, upper middle class, and therefore these plays are too crude. And by “crude,” it can be things like King Lear being shown as insane. “Oh, that’s a bit much. Let’s just make him grumpy. And let’s add a happy ending. And let’s have a romance between Cordelia and Edgar.”

Again, everything is sanitized or censored, and so much of Shakespeare’s language that was lots of sexual double entendres—“Well, they’re offensive now. Let’s cut them out.” So, the ladies are going to see Shakespeare, and they feel that all these plays have been, in effect, destroyed.

BOGAEV: Christine, I love how you describe these four women of the club as the 18th-century equivalent of today’s internet influencers.

CHRISTINE HAINSWORTH: Well, we have a lot of reports about the ladies. Men loved them. It seems that women were more attracted to go to the theater because they were there. A lot of the plays would be advertised as “At the request of a lady of quality.”

On the surface, you think, “Oh, the Shakespeare Ladies Club. I’d like to join that, too. It sounds very genteel.” But these women, led by Susanna, they had actually quite a bit on their agenda. She felt that British culture was dying and one of the problems was that plays were being canceled by the Licensing Act of 1737.

That was brought in by Prime Minister Robert Walpole, who was being lampooned by a lot of the current playwrights. One of the best hitmen of the time was probably Henry Fielding, and he was friends with Susanna and her husband, Anthony. He had written a play called Pasquin, and he satirized Walpole. They all thought Walpole was corrupt and should go. So, they weren’t just having tea and coffee and polite chat. They actually had a few other things in mind.

BOGAEV: Oh, they had a really serious agenda, and they were powerhouses. It’s so interesting. You go into the background of each of them and each of them are fascinating, especially Susanna Ashley-Cooper. You say her life, or at least her early life, was an ironic twist on Romeo and Juliet. Didn’t she marry when she was very young her cousin, who was also, what, 14?

CHRISTINE HAINSWORTH: Yeah. He was a quite distant cousin, and the mothers of the two were close friends, and so, the children grew up together, and letters that we have, the mothers say that the children always loved each other. They were great friends, and they loved each other. The two of them were married at 14. Then Anthony was taken away and educated away from his mother by a guardian who had been appointed, and when he returned, they started their married life when they were 18 or 19.

BOGAEV: They’re such an interesting couple. They seem to really be in love and they seem to be very modern, as if it were a marriage of equals. Would you say so, Jonathan?

JONATHAN HAINSWORTH:  Yes, other people comment on how much they are a team in a thoroughly male-dominated society. They keep talking about how Anthony is, you know, a man of his time, an enlightenment thinker, a progressive figure. But so is Susanna, as very much his partner in, for example, patronizing Handel and getting his stuff performed when other people are saying, “Well, he’s not really very good.” The same with Shakespeare.

We find them a really admirable couple. Whereas if you look at the other lady, Mary Churchill, who becomes Mary Montagu, her life’s completely different. She hates her mother, who’s the infamous favorite. Her husband’s a practical joker.

BOGAEV: Oh yeah. He sounds like a real cad. I mean, kind of contradictory, though, a prankster but also kind of an iconoclast.

JONATHAN HAINSWORTH: An iconoclast, and also, he’s modern in that he set up his property so it was like a nursing home for his pets and animals.

BOGAEV: Really? Like a menagerie.

JONATHAN HAINSWORTH: Yes, and he said in his will that anyone who gets the estate has to look after them or they lose the estate.

CHRISTINE HAINSWORTH: I think he’s the kind of fellow that, if he’s your friend, oh, you’d love him. He’s so much fun. But to be married to him would’ve been very challenging.

BOGAEV: Oh, isn’t that always the way? [Laughter.]

CHRISTINE HAINSWORTH: Yeah. Part of his practical jokes, they really did have a purpose because each of them served to say something.

JONATHAN HAINSWORTH: Well, his famous one is about a magician who is going to miniaturize himself into a bottle and sing from the bottle—and this was advertised. Obviously, something that couldn’t possibly happen. But he was waging a bet with a friend that a crowd would turn up because it proves that people are so credulous and they’ll believe anything.

Well, of course, an enormous crowd showed up, including members of the royal family, to see an act that wasn’t going to take place, and when they realized they’d been had, there was the usual rioting. The theater was burnt down. He had to publicly apologize for his prank. But he is trying to make a point that people will believe anything and it’s wrong.

BOGAEV: Okay. But it makes me laugh because here these women are doing something so good for the world. They’re trying to do something so serious and they know their Shakespeare, the original, the Folios, they know what’s been lost. And they’re working hard as women do because they have no real power in the world, right? Meanwhile, the husbands are just—

CHRISTINE HAINSWORTH: Well, that husband in particular. [Laughter.]

BOGAEV: So, that’s two members. Not all the members, though, were upper class. Another member was a writer, Elizabeth Boyd, and she actually had to write to support herself. So, what’s known about her background and her family? And how did she manage to get published in this time?

CHRISTINE HAINSWORTH: We don’t know a lot about her background. There’s a few things we can suppose about it. One thing we do know from what she tells us in her writing is that the family lost its money. We’re not sure how. There’s various ways that could have happened.

JONATHAN HAINSWORTH: But Elizabeth is educated. So, she becomes a writer, and she’s patronized by clients that include the Countess of Shaftsbury and the Duchess of Montagu. She also runs a printing shop.

But nevertheless, she does write bestselling pieces that comment with great modernity on the issues of the day. So, she’s also a really tremendous figure, and of course she writes this play Don Sancho, which was about how the universities have not been at the forefront of rescuing Shakespeare. It is the ladies who’ve done it. So, it was a play about themselves.

BOGAEV: Wow. It sounds like she was a kind of proto-feminist lost to history, almost.

JONATHAN HAINSWORTH: Yes.

BOGAEV: And there was another writer in the club, Mary Cowper, very young. She was just a teenager when she joined. Tell us about her.

CHRISTINE HAINSWORTH: Yes. She was only 17, and she came from a family of women writers.

She had a grandmother, I think a great-grandmother, who was a diarist. Her aunt was a noted poet who Alexander Pope took under his wing. Her cousin was William Cowper or Cooper. In the last half of the 1700s, he was the most famous poet in Britain. So, there’s a lot of talent in that family.

Mary wrote a lot of poems. She wrote one about the Shakespeare Ladies Club that talks about the Shakespeare Ladies Club and what they did and what their goals were.

BOGAEV: Yes. Okay. Let’s talk about the goals. What did these women aim to do with this club?

JONATHAN HAINSWORTH: They wanted to make British culture grow up, to be of the standard as it had been under Gloriana, the nickname for Queen Elizabeth.

And this was also part of the political opposition they were showing to Sir Robert Walpole’s corrupt administration, because he was perceived as selling out British interests to the Spanish Empire, whereas of course, Elizabeth had defeated the Spanish Armada.

So, they wanted to get the original plays back on stage as much as they could, and they wanted everyone to go, not just people from their class, in order to make British culture, well, the leader of Europe.

And by 1800 when the last of the Shakespeare Ladies, Mary Cowper, dies, Shakespeare is considered the greatest writer in English history. And he’s well on his way to being considered the greatest writer in world history.

BOGAEV: True, but I mean, they had the big push of Garrick’s Jubilee. But they came before Garrick. So, how did they actually work to achieve the goals? What did they do? Did they pay for productions?

JONATHAN HAINSWORTH: Yes, they did pay for productions or they subsidized them. They underwrote them.

The statue is one of the things that they want to see put in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey of Shakespeare. It had been attempted several times before and there just wasn’t enough interest. So, they said, “It must happen.” And so, they had productions of Julius Caesar and Hamlet to raise money for that statue, and that was successful. And finally, the statue was put up.

Now, of course, the problem for them being women in a male-dominated society is that they themselves are not allowed to be officially in charge of putting that statue there and they had to have a male front. Only recently has Westminster Abbey changed that because we asked them to, and they were absolutely on board.

BOGAEV: How did you even get onto their story?

JONATHAN HAINSWORTH: We discovered that David Garrick, the superstar of the 18th century as an actor-manager, who is often credited with rescuing Shakespeare’s original plays and popularizing Shakespeare again—that’s part of the truth, but it’s not the whole truth—because who Garrick was as a young man was a person with almost no acting experience at all. He just had an interest in acting.

We believe that the ladies thought that “We’re never going to get Shakespeare cemented into the center of British culture whilst the way men act onstage since the Restoration of 1660 is to do it as a static poetry reading.” This contrasted with actresses who, from 1660 onwards, they played their parts brilliantly and realistically. They were actresses in the true sense. They became somebody else onstage. But male culture was so backward that it was felt that a man who went up on stage and pretended to be someone else in a way that was persuasive, it’s unmanly and it’s ungentlemanly. Therefore, they would just stand there and declaim the lines.

By 1740, the ladies felt that this was very jarring, and so, they found Garrick and thought, ”We’re going to use him as a test case to see whether a realistic style of acting like the actresses can work with an audience.” And so, Garrick came out onstage in 1741 as Richard III and he began becoming that character. Initially, it was greeted with much consternation in the audience, and then as he kept going, they thought, “You know what? This is pretty good. We are enjoying this.”

From that night, from that moment, a superstar was born. But it’s a superstar who was chosen because he was expendable. If it had failed, no one would care about David Garrick. He would remain a nobody.

BOGAEV: So, in a sense you’re saying that without this Shakespeare Ladies Club, there would’ve been no famous David Garrick, who, in his later years—when he was kind of afraid of becoming a has-been or maybe already was—he staged this big Jubilee, that really brought Shakespeare kind of to a new level of consciousness in Britain.

JONATHAN HAINSWORTH: Yes.

BOGAEV: And you’re saying you trace it back to them.

JONATHAN HAINSWORTH: So does he. He had a big ego, Garrick, and he didn’t like to share the credit with anyone, but that day of his rained-out Jubilee, he does thank the ladies without whom Shakespeare would not have been rescued.

They’re rescuing not just Shakespeare’s reputation as a writer with that statue. They’re rescuing his original plays. We can’t think of another precedent where a group wants to go backwards. It would be like, you know, if somebody announced, “Right, we’re going to do a first run in every cineplex in America of The Maltese Falcon. It’s a great film. Humphrey Bogart is the greatest actor ever.” And people would say, “What, you mean you’re remaking it?” “Nope. The original 1941 film.” “Colorized?” “Nope, in black and white.” “And do you mean at arthouse cinemas?” “No, jostling right next to Project Hail Mary will be The Maltese Falcon. And people better damn well go and see it.”

That’s what they’re trying. It’s so difficult what they’re trying to do because culture and everyone thinks, “Well, we like things that are new and novel.”

BOGAEV: Right. It moves forward.

JONATHAN HAINSWORTH: Not the past, moves forward, and they’re going, “No, we’re going to move backwards because the plays will come to life with excellent actresses and, eventually, with male actors catching up.” And they were correct.

BOGAEV: Christine, we’ve jumped over the actual meetings of this club. It seems like maybe that’s been lost to history too. Do you even know what they did in their meetings? I mean, they had a lot of things to plan, but I picture it like a really serious book club.

CHRISTINE HAINSWORTH: Well, we do believe that they read the plays.

BARBARA BOGAEV: Out loud?

CHRISTINE HAINSWORTH: We think so, yes—and these women would’ve had access to the original plays. They probably had a First Folio in their library. So, they knew they were fortunate that they could read the originals, and of course, when they went to the theater that wasn’t what they were seeing.

But yes, as their meetings went, we don’t know what they said. We can only really work out what they were up to from the results of their campaign and what other people said about them.

We know that they went to the theater. So, that was probably their main activity.

JONATHAN HAINSWORTH: We think that when they read these plays, bits of plays, dipped into them and read them out to each other, we think that being very modern people, they embraced the saucy bits.

Just consider that Shakespeare’s titles had to be changed. The Tempest, yes, that refers to a storm. But it also is a double meaning for the sexual act so that had to be changed to The Enchanted Island. A play like As You Like It, the “it” in that refers to the sexual act, and when they bring them back, they have it as As You Like It.

Whereas you’ve still got Puritans who are saying, “Well, there shouldn’t be women onstage, and the original Shakespeare plays are appalling and should not be revived. They’re all sinful.”

BOGAEV: A lot of what you’re saying is making me think of what’s going on now, and calls to cancel Shakespeare for very different reasons, obviously, than Puritanism.

But you do have a chapter towards the end of your book about modern culture and cancel culture, and you write that Shakespeare is treated as a canary in the coal mine now. In what sense do you mean that?

JONATHAN HAINSWORTH: Our view is that it misunderstands Shakespeare. They don’t have to sit there thinking, “Well, I’m not Danish. I’m not a prince. I can’t relate to Hamlet.”

But the point of why Hamlet is such an extraordinary figure is that he knows what he has to do, but he delays doing it and he wonders if he’s mad and he wonders if he should end his life. And people can sit there in the audience and think, “Well, I too have wondered that.”

Macbeth isn’t about, “This is something that happened in medieval Scotland.” Macbeth is about a man who is a very successful and loyal soldier, and within a very short time, when he’s given the temptation, he’s murdered his boss. And so, you are meant to sit there and think, “His vaulting ambition took control of him. I wonder if that’s happened to me.”

When his plays were put on throughout the British Empire, we know this from the memoirs and letters of various anti-colonial, non-white leaders, they would sit there and think, “Right, okay, so, in King Lear, a king can be insane and in Othello, the non-white titular character is being set up and destroyed by Iago, his white male lieutenant, whom he trusts and shouldn’t trust.”

In other words, lots of Shakespeare, because it’s realistic, because he was writing about real people doing real things, has applications all across the world to any kind of moment of persecution, victimization, injustice, where people can see themselves. This is why Shakespeare, if you start canceling it, it means usually that some ruling elite doesn’t want the real world intruding upon their power.

BOGAEV: Well, it does raise the question even though there’s robust traffic in Shakespeare in theater and Shakespeare adaptations, in books and films as well as on the stage. But do you still think Shakespeare needs a kind of a Shakespeare Ladies Club? A cheering section? A really powerful group of forward-thinking people to promote the plays? Does he still need saving?

JONATHAN HAINSWORTH: Yeah, not people. Women.

BOGAEV: Women. I didn’t want to say it. Christine?

CHRISTINE HAINSWORTH: We believe, yes. We believe it’s essential, especially now that we understand what prompted the Shakespeare Ladies Club to do what they did. They could see that Shakespeare could have been lost. I mean, Ben Jonson was a great playwright. If you read his works, you think, “Oh, that’s fantastic.” But why don’t we have him as the greatest writer? Why don’t we go to Ben Jonson plays?

The women saved Shakespeare for a reason, and they were appalled at the attempt at cancellation of him. And I think we’ve come full circle. The threat is there again and, you know, perhaps too many trigger warnings, too much shying away from the realities of his plays. It may not be a good thing. Maybe we need to see those things and think about them rather than just cancel them and hope they go away.

JONATHAN HAINSWORTH: I mean, I’ve been a schoolteacher, so I have taught Shakespeare, and I have struggled with the teaching of Shakespeare, and I have taught to students of all socioeconomic backgrounds. If you pitch it right, they love it. They find it a revelation once they get over the “ye olde” English language.

We see this all through history. American servicemen in Europe, in Western Europe, after D-Day in France, Shakespeare’s put on for them. A lot of them are very unfamiliar with it but once they get into the rhythm of it, they can’t wait to see how Henry V ends, because they don’t know.

BOGAEV: Lucky them! Thank you so much, both of you. The book’s really interesting and it was fun talking with you.

CHRISTINE HAINSWORTH: Thank you.

JONATHAN HAINSWORTH: Thank you.

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KARIM-COOPER: That was Jonathan and Christine Hainsworth, interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

The Shakespeare Ladies Club: The Forgotten Women Who Rescued the Bawdy Bard is out now from Amberley Publishing. You can read an excerpt on the Folger’s Shakespeare & Beyond blog.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Andrew Wyrill in Adelaide, Australia, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Megan Fraedrich. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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