103. Laura Valentine — The Secret Shakespeare Editor

AMY: Hi everyone, and welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I'm Amy Helmes.

KIM: And I'm Kim Askew. So in today's episode, we're going to be talking about a lady novelist who is also thought to have secretly edited a Victorian-era edition of Shakespeare. That edition eventually sold over 340,000 copies.

AMY: Okay, I'm excited to discuss this, but before we do, we need to celebrate the fact that this summer we were finally able to get back to seeing Shakespeare in the Park, which is a tradition of ours, right?

KIM: Yeah, we love doing that, and we haven't been able to do it for a couple of years, so that was very exciting.

AMY: So the group that we usually see is called Independent Shakespeare Company, that's our go-to, and they have their stage in an interesting place because it is a former zoo; like a zoo from the 1930s. So surrounding the area where you watch the play, there's all these old animal enclosures, like metal, rusty cages, like a very janky old kind of creepy... 

KIM: It's creepy. Not even “kind of,” it is creepy.

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. Um, but it's a neat place to do it. Shakespeare outside is always magical. It's so fun.

KIM: Yeah, for sure.

AMY: Although the one we saw so far this summer wasn't even Shakespeare.

KIM: No, it was Francis Beaumont, a Shakespeare contemporary, and I think they said even friends with Shakespeare, though I didn't know that. Um, I had read it before when I was in undergrad, so it was a long time ago. “Knight of the Burning Pestle” was what we saw.

AMY: Yeah, it was new to me, but it was very Shakespeare-esque, for sure. Um, and then they're doing “Macbeth” later this summer, and I think we're hopefully gonna get to that too.

KIM: I know, which is crazy, how excited... I'm so excited to see “Macbeth,” and it's like, I've seen it so many times, but it never gets old for me somehow.

AMY: You know what, I also feel like it's like one of the shorter of his plays too.

KIM: It's also just really good.

AMY: It's also really good. You know what's gonna happen. Sometimes they put an interesting twist. Oh my gosh, one time... you went with me... this was not the Independent Shakespeare Company, but remember when we went to see “Fleetwood Macbeth?”

KIM: Oh, yes.

AMY: It was like a mash-up of “Macbeth” and Fleetwood Mac songs.

KIM: Didn't we see a Simpsons one too?

AMY: Yeah, "MacHomer." Homer Simpson was the main character, Macbeth. That was really good too. There's a guy that does that, we'll link to it in our show notes. I don't know if he still puts on that production, but I think he tours with it. It's so good.

KIM: One of the pluses of living in Los Angeles, um, if you can call it a plus.

AMY: Yeah, but what I want to do though, and Kim, I'm springing this on you, but I want to run through a little list I came up with of "Five Things That You Can Always Expect At Any Shakespeare in the Park Performance." There are just certain things that you know when you go you're gonna encounter. 

KIM: Uh-huh. 

AMY: I'm sure you can think of a few things right off the top 

KIM: At least one is popping into my head.

AMY: Well, we'll see. And if I don't say it, then you can add it. 

KIM: Okay. 

AMY: So number one on my list, drum roll, please: Bees.

KIM: Oh, bees. If you're outside. Okay. Got it. All right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. 

AMY: When we went to see “Knight of the Burning Pestle,” it was like a cartoon; there were so many bees attacking our amazing spread. We had amazing spread of food, and... 

KIM: And your teen daughter was like, oh, it was Julia. It was majorly...

AMY: Yeah. She was being very dramatic, but I mean, there were like…

KIM: A lot of bees. 

AMY: At least 50 bees.

KIM: We were trying to act mature, but we were also like, it's kinda bad. Mm-hmm. 

AMY: Bees and flies attacking your picnic basket. Okay. Number Two would be Renn-Fair kids. You're always gonna see like a group of... 

KIM: Thespian wannabees.

AMY: Thespian wannabees. They're usually dressed up, which we did see that; people showed up in like princessy dresses.

KIM: I was kind of jealous, I will say.

AMY: Yeah. Sometimes, not so much anymore now, but in years (and probably decades) past, a hacky-sack circle would form around those people. So there's that group. Um, Number Three: pelvic thrusting.

KIM: If you didn't say grabbing the codpiece or pointing at that area or pelvic thrusting… there's no list that’s complete without that. Yeah. It's like, “In case you don't get that this is a sexual joke or an innuendo, we're going to make it absolutely clear with, you know, very strong, um, sign language.” (Loosely called sign language.)

AMY: Um, okay, and this spirals into the next item on my list, which is the obnoxious laugher. So always in the audience, sometimes as a result of the pelvic thrust on stage, you have somebody, I'd say it's usually an older man…

KIM: It's always a man. Let's just say it's always a man.

AMY: And they do this, like, knowing, over-the-top laugh at something just to let the rest of the audience know that they understood that cerebral joke.

KIM: So then every time I laugh, I'm self conscious because I don't want to be the person…

AMY: You don't wanna be that lady. 

KIM: Yeah. I shouldn't worry, because it's always a man.

AMY: We shouldn't make fun of it because they're really just having a good time, but it is slightly annoying that it's like, "Okay, dude, we get it too. And we get that you get it now, but thank you." Um, and then the last thing on my list would be the bucket-dodgers.

KIM: Oh yeah. I was gonna say the obligatory bucket-passing, but then there are the dodgers. 

AMY: The dodgers are the ones that are the funniest to see because you... it's usually free Shakespeare in the Park. Uh, the Independent Shakespeare Company is, which is amazing because they want Shakespeare to be for everyone. However, If you're going and you can afford to drop a little bit in their bucket and the buckets are, um, prolific. They're everywhere, they, the whole cast comes around with the bucket after the show, and you can kind of see the people that are looking for the exit. Just put some money in the bucket. I think it was sad because when we went to see the play this summer, they had said something like some nights they only average like $2 and 30 cents or something per audience member, which is ridiculous. So just do the right thing.

KIM: Yeah. And shout-out to Independent Shakespeare Company. They are awesome. 

AMY: Oh, my gosh, we've gone for so long that I think they said it's been around for 19 years. That main guy, that British guy. 

KIM: Yeah, yeah. He and his wife, I think co-founded it.

AMY: I wish I knew his name, but if you don't live in LA it's beside the point anyway, I guess. Okay, so also as a quick aside, all of our listeners might not know this, but Shakespeare is especially near and dear to Kim and my hearts, not just because we're former English majors, but because together we wrote...I guess it was like a decade ago, oh my gosh... we wrote a series of young adult novels based on Shakespeare's plays. It's called the Twisted Lit series if you want to look it up,

KIM: Right. And I guess you could say we feminized or "feminist"-ized -- that's not a word -- them, because the heroines are all teenage girls. So we do our own spin on Shakespeare, for sure.

AMY: Yeah, it's kind of like, you know, these productions that we see, they always kind of try to put them in a, you know, new and interesting era or location, you know? Yeah, exactly. That makes it fun. Okay. So when we heard about Molly G. Yarn's recent book, Shakespeare's Lady Editors, needless to say our ears perked up.

KIM: Yeah immediately. So this book began as Yarn's PhD dissertation at Cambridge. She graduated from there in 2019, and in the prologue to the book, she investigates the unsigned Chandos Shakespeare.

AMY: I'm sure a lot of our listeners don't know what the Chandos Shakespeare even is. Can you explain?

KIM: Yes. Good idea. I'll actually back up a little bit more even. So over the centuries, since Shakespeare's death, there have been literally hundreds of editions of his plays, as you can all imagine out there. Um, everything from textbooks to be used by school children, to these really fancy leatherbound editions that you'd have in the library of your castle or what have you. And editors were responsible for each of these editions, of course, and they made key decisions that impacted the reading and understanding of the plays going forward. So like, which of Shakespeare's folios to use, that sort of thing.

AMY: Okay. That's interesting to know, because I didn't ever really think of that. I always thought like Shakespeare was Shakespeare and what he wrote was what he wrote and there wasn't a lot of margin of error there, but apparently not. Apparently you could pick and choose from. So, okay, who were these editors? Who were all these different people? 

KIM: Well, we do know who they are, um, up until a certain point. So we have the names of the people that edited these books throughout history until around the beginning of the 19th century when women actually started editing some of the editions. And that's when things started to get ominously anonymous, let's say.

AMY: Oh, women's work, getting swept under the rug? You don't say! 

KIM: Uh-huh. Yep. And that's what Yarn is trying to accomplish with this work. She's tracing the women who are involved in editing Shakespeare and bringing these formerly unacknowledged names and their stories into the world, which is really cool.

AMY: Okay. So I don't know that we've still got to the bottom of the Chandos Shakespeare yet.

KIM: Yeah. So it was published in 1868, and it was an important edition for the Victorian era. Arthur Konan Doyle owned it for example, and James Joyce did, too. And of course Joyce's specific reading of Shakespeare actually comes up in Ulysses. But strangely, no editor was listed for these Chandos editions. So in her book, Yarn goes back and shows how she was able to uncover that the unsigned Chandos Shakespeare was very probably edited by one woman. Her name was Laura Jewry Valentine, and Yarn then uses this as an entry point to dig into the history of these often uncredited women who edited Shakespeare's works.

AMY: Ooh. So it's kind of a detective story, which we love. All right. So let's talk more about Laura Valentine, such a great name for an author or anyone. I think. In 1814, she was born Laura Belinda Charlotte Jewry. She was primarily known for historical romance and children's literature, including The Young Folks' Shakespeare Series. Hmm. What else do we know about her?

KIM: Well, she actually has a pretty interesting story. Her father was a lieutenant who served in the Royal Navy, and rumor had it that she was actually born on a ship called The Victory, but Yarn thinks that may have been an exaggeration. Either way, though, she did spend some time actually living some of her early life aboard The Victory, which is pretty cool. Um, I know that you probably, you know, love that, particularly, Amy, because of your love of Horatio Hornblower. Anyway. 

AMY: I mean, I never think of kids necessarily, or a family, you know, situation on a ship like that, but...

KIM: Yeah, I know. That's really interesting. I I'd actually love to learn more about that. And we can, because she did write a book about that, which I'll mention in a second. But eventually she became the governess for a family in Bath. And when they moved to India in 1842, she went with them. Upon their return to England in 1846, her first novel, The Ransom was published. She then married the Reverend Richard Valentine in 1851, thus her wonderful name, Valentine. And that was the year her historical romance, The Cup And the Lip was published. And in this novel, the heroine goes to live aboard The Victory with her uncle, and it's all about life aboard ship. So I feel like I've heard of this book, maybe because of this podcast. At some point it came up, I think it might have been on our list. Is it ringing a bell for you at all?

AMY: No, not at all. But yeah, the maritime aspect really ignites my interest, for sure. 

KIM: We need to read this or look into it.

AMY: So a year after her marriage, Valentine became a widow, sadly. That didn't last long. Um, she was actually pregnant when her husband died, and she delivered a stillborn child six weeks later. So she then applied for help from the Royal Literary Fund. I guess she was in some financial straits, and Yarn actually was able to access this organization's case file to learn more about her life at this point.

KIM: Yeah, it's really cool. This book feels like a dissertation and a mystery at the same time, which is very intriguing. Um, I loved reading it and seeing how she went about all this research. It's really cool. 

AMY: Yeah. So in a letter that Valentine wrote to this fund, in which she asked for assistance, she said "It may be very long, if I ever have strength again, before I can return to my pen for support." But she did, in fact, return to her pen eventually. And she wrote several more novels. She began working for a publishing firm in 1865 and was making a living as an editor in the Victorian era.

KIM: Yeah, Yarn is able to dig up all this information that eventually pretty much proves, though not definitively, that in addition to all the novels and children's books she was writing, she was also editing this important edition of Shakespeare's works at this publishing house.

AMY: And yet she wasn't credited. So we don't know why, for sure. Yarn surmises actually that it may have been her gender or just maybe the fact that she was a children's book author. People felt like that wasn't serious enough, you know, to give her the credit on this. But though uncredited, she was only the second woman that we know of to edit the complete works of Shakespeare.

KIM: Which is amazing. And Yarn then goes on to tell the stories of all these other uncredited women who came after her who edited Shakespeare, and quite literally, Amy, they were "love's labours lost."

AMY: Ba-dum-bump-ching! Anyway, listeners, we recommend you go pick up a copy of Shakespeare's Lady Editors if you want to learn more about her and these other women. And speaking of editors, our guest next week is Lori Harrison Kahan. We're going to be discussing a book she edited and wrote the introduction to called The Superwoman and Other Writings by Miriam Michelson 

KIM: That's going to be fantastic, but until then, don't forget to leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts if you're enjoying these episodes. We can't tell you how much it means to us, and it actually helps new listeners find us.

AMY: Yeah. Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.