The American Women Who Transformed Shakespeare Editing

Folger Shakespeare Library: Porter and Clarke were outliers in the rarified world of Shakespeare editing and scholarship. Why? Because they were female, queer, non-academic co-editors, in a world dominated by solitary male editors with university affiliations. They were the first editors to base their edition and analysis on the text of Shakespeare’s First Folio of 1623, a back-to-basics approach which got rid of three centuries of editorial attempts to “correct” or “improve” the original text.