Manchester Shakespeare Club: The Bard takes center stage
submitted by Joan Gaughan, Shakespeare Club
When Florence Russell, Annetta English, and Emma Goodyear founded the Manchester Shakespeare Club in January 1897, it joined over two dozen other such clubs that had been established about the same time in Michigan. And, as Chris Kanta pointed out in her presentation to the club on October 14, they were part of a national network that included over 500 Shakespeare clubs that existed … and still exist … in the United Sates. They were, and still are, largely for women of any and every social level, but some of the clubs have also included men.
There were numerous publications available on how to start a Shakespeare club. These gave directions on how to create a set of bylaws, establish an agenda, and keep minutes for each meeting, Since many of them met in members’ homes, membership initially was limited and, as in Manchester’s case, applicants had to be voted in by the existing members and, in some cases, there was actual competition to acquire membership.
The members would read the plays carefully, place them in their historical context, analyze the characters and plots, and make themselves familiar with Shakespeare’s words and phrases. Each club, including Manchester’s, had a Critic who was charged with leading the analysis of the play, including the correct pronunciation of unfamiliar Shakespearean words and phrases.
The clubs emerged at a time when there was a lively interest in Shakespeare — an interest the clubs benefitted from but to which they also contributed. In addition to the increasing availability of access to and intense popularity of his plays even in very remote areas, Shakespeare himself was so popular that Shakespeare reading cards had wide circulation and his image could be found on packages of cigarettes and boxes of Whitman’s chocolates.
The Bard provided not only a means for intellectual fulfillment and self-improvement, but also an incentive for active participation in the civic life of members’ communities. Among scores of civic projects, the clubs organized traveling libraries, established community gardens, and contributed to the war effort during the World Wars. In the case of African American clubs, the members were understandably active in social justice projects.
Besides their obvious social value, the Shakespeare clubs allowed women, especially those living in rural areas, to explore the world far beyond their homes. While popular rhetoric in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries emphasized the domestic sphere as a woman’s proper place, the Historical Minutes of Manchester’s club, for instance, reveal an astonishing awareness of events happening literally all over the world. At a time when women’s suffrage was becoming a prominent issue in America, Shakespeare, especially his heroines, were an implicit argument that women were just as capable as men for voting and holding public office.
Unhappily, members of the Shakespeare clubs were often criticized as selfish for neglecting their domestic duties in favor of their own intellectual and social activities. Ironically, that criticism had a long history. As Joan Gaughan noted in her October 28 presentation, it had also been leveled at a group of women in eighteenth century London called “blue stockings.”
Unlike the Shakespeare clubs in America, the “blue stockings” were not a formal association. Rather, they were an informal gathering of mainly aristocratic women whose wit and intelligence were the only criteria for membership. The modern term “feminist” might be too strong a description for them, but by discussing ideas and by what they wrote, the blue stockings were a quiet but really revolutionary argument that women should be given the same kind of education, and the same rights, privileges, and freedoms, that were allowed to men. And because they wrote in genres that were presumed to be fit only for men — history, poetry, essays, and even novels — they very gently shook the foundations of the male patriarchy that had endured for millennia. The founder of the group, Lady Elizabeth Montague, even had the temerity to challenge two of the most influential luminaries of the day — the philosopher Voltaire, and the writer of the first dictionary of the English language, Samuel Johnson — upon the subject of Shakespeare. Both men had written essays critical of the Bard whom they found to be vulgar, boorish, and “low class,” but Lady Elizabeth wrote an essay on the writings and genius of Shakespeare about the beauties of the verse in Shakespeare and saw in him a championing of all things inherently English.
As gentle as their criticisms were, they were thought to be so dangerous that, in the wake of the French and American revolutions with their emphasis on human rights and equality, the term “blue stocking” became a pejorative.
At the Club’s last meeting of 2025, on November 11, the ladies read the first act of The Tempest, attacking Shakespeare’s language with a vigor and heartiness that would have made the Bard proud. Part of the joy of the reading was delighting in Shakespeare’s insults. Something like “A pox on your throat, you bawling, blasphemous, incharitable dog” makes one of our own insults seem rather pale in comparison. And we expect more similar delights when we finish the play in the coming year.
Mrs. Kanta’s presentation was based on Katherine Shiel’s book She Hath Been Reading, which she has donated to the Manchester District Library.
Lady Elizabeth Montague.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login