Elizabeth H. Hageman, ehageman@cisunix.unh.edu
<mailto:ehageman@cisunix.unh.edu>
Univ. of New Hampshire
International Shakespeare Association Meeting, April 2001
[URL for WWO: <http://www.wwp.brown.edu <http://www.wwp.brown.edu> >.
For the next few weeks, participants in this seminar may access the site with the user name "SAA" and the password
"Women!"]
The Brown University Women Writers Project (WWP) is a collaborative project in which computer specialists and
literary critics are creating and making available a textbase comprising women's writing in English before the year
1830. Since the late 1980s, encoders and technical experts at Brown have been working with guidelines established
by the international Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) to create an SGML textbase now comprising some two hundred
texts, with about two hundred more currently being transcribed and soon to go online. Selected by subject-matter
specialists, the list of titles currently or soon to be in the textbase is only a small portion of the writings known to
have been authored by pre-Victorian women. Even so, the WWP archive is large and diverse enough to demonstrate
two basic premises of the project: (1) that women writing in English before ca. 1830 contributed a great deal more to
literary history than many twentieth-century scholars had, before the inception of the WWP, understood, and (2) that
an understanding of women's writing changes one's apprehension of their contemporaries-of Spenser, Donne,
Milton, even Shakespeare.
From the beginning, the WWP has created diplomatic transcriptions, old-spelling versions of early texts-sometimes
using manuscripts, sometimes printed books as basetexts. As the project's description of its online textbase now
says, the WWP position re: issues of authorship and authority is "agnostic." Recognizing that every written text is at
best a mediated expression of its writer's "voice," the WWP has included in the textbase not only writing known to
have been authored and produced by women, but also women's texts that were in their own time copied out, printed,
or edited by men. Among the former are Margaret Cavendish's writings, many printed at her behest in print shops
owned by women, some extant in printed copies corrected by her; among the more interesting examples of the latter
are the speeches by Elizabeth I printed after her death, with titles indicating the political purposes of their publishers:
The Last Speech and Thanks of Queen Elizabeth of ever Blessed Memory, to her Last Parliament, after her delivery
from the popish Plots, &c (London, 1679), for instance. In the textbase as well are some texts (a witchcraft trial
from the seventeenth-century for example) recording words allegedly by women-and also translations by women
(Mary Sidney's Psalms, for instance).
While it is true that encoders of diplomatic transcripts make editorial decisions as they, for example, insert codes
such "title" or "stage direction," the WWP aims to provide something akin to "raw materials" with which scholars of
various critical persuasions can work. Thus the WWP's SGML textbase includes neither modernized spellings nor
emendations. Once described as "analogs of books," WWP texts note such textual features as signature numbers and
marginalia (both printed and handwritten) as well as indications of torn or smudged pages (these features of the
project showing that the WWP transcribed individual copies of texts, not conflated or "ideal" versions of them.
Early on in the life of the WWP, hardcopies derived from the textbase were sold at cost to scholars, with permission
to make photocopies for classroom use. These texts of course did not show codes such as "title" or "stage
direction"; nor were features such as spelling or punctuation modernized.
Response to these texts was immediate and profound. Sophomore survey courses could now include Mary Wroth's
sonnets alongside sonnets by Wyatt, Surrey, Spenser, and Sidney; Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World beside
More's Utopia; and writings by Elizabeth I counterpoised with James I's TrueLaw of Free Monarchy. Sixteenthcentury courses treated Geoffrey Whitney's sister Isabella and Sir Philip Sidney's sister the Countess of Pembroke;
seventeenth-century scholars read Katherine Philips with John Donne and Aemilia Lanyer with Milton.
Shakespeareans compared Othello with Elizabeth Cary's Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry; Antony and Cleopatra
with Mary Sidney's translation of Garnier's Antonie; and Love's Labors Lost with Margaret Cavendish's Convent of
Pleasure. Eager to read texts by "Judith Shakespeare," students were pleased to feel themselves on the cutting edge
of scholarship as they helped outline a women's literary history extending back to the time of Shakespeare-and
before. Soon they were choosing to write on women writers in undergraduate courses, graduate seminars, M.A.
essays, and Ph.D. dissertations, some of which have subsequently been published.
The project's second phase was the publication of some 14 volumes in the series Women Writers in English issued
by Oxford University Press. Taken from the WWP textbase, the texts for this series were regularized (i, j, u,
v, w, printed in modern forms, and contractions and abbreviations expanded) and glossed with footnotes defining
obsolete words and allusions to biblical passages, classical legends, and contemporary events. Notes and
introductory materials were prepared by established scholars: Elaine Beilin working on Anne Askew, for instance;
Patrick Cullen on Anna Weayms. Series guidelines were flexible enough to allow variations within the pattern of
usually printing a conservatively-edited version of a single known basetext. For example, we printed John Bale's and
John Foxe's versions of Anne Askew's Examinations one after the other; Anne Weayms's Continuation of Sir Philip
Sidney's "Arcadia" was presented in a slightly-modernized version following the same guidelines as in the OUP
edition of Sidney's romance-and also in an old-spelling version, regularized only as described above and maintaining
rhetorical punctuation and variant spellings as in the 1653 printed edition.
Beautifully designed and distributed by a major press, these books gave women's writing a certain respectability not
established by Xeroxed copies. Also, of course, printed books have a far longer shelf life than paper copies, and the
work done by Beilin, Cullen, the other editors has entered our collective literary history. Third, the WWP is now
publishing its ever-growing textbase on the web. Currently some 200 texts are in Women Writers Online (WWO):
almost 100 in a subsection called Renaissance Women Online (RWO). At present, everything in WWO is from
early printed texts; in the not-too-distant future, manuscripts such as Anne, Lady Southwell's family miscellany and
Arbella Stuart's letters will be there as well. The 100 texts in RWO comprise a mix of sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury writings by women from a variety of social classes, religious persuasions, and political standpoints. Drama,
narrative and lyric poetry, and prose is represented-the latter including prayers, cookbooks, petitions to parliament,
religious tracts, historical and utopian writing. Among writing attributed to women is Jane Anger's Protection of
Women (1588) for instance, and Ester Sowernam's response to Joseph Swetnam, Esther has Hanged Haman (1617).
Among women's translations are Margaret Roper's of Erasmus's Treatise on the Pater Noster (ca. 1526) and
Katherine Philips's of Corneille's Pompey and Horace (first printed in 1663 and 1667, respectively-the former the
first play by a woman to be presented on the British public stage-in Dublin's Smock Alley Theatre in February
1663).
RWO also includes contextual material by faculty members and graduate students from around the world:
introductions to individual works and essays on topics such as Petrarchan Literature and Women in Printing. Links
to the Orlando Project provide brief biographies of some writers; others are by members of the RWO network. Texts
and contextual materials can be read on line or printed by individual users who thus own their own paper copies of
texts not otherwise easily available. Even students whose libraries own UMI microfilms of early modern books, we
have found, prefer WWO transcripts to microfilmed copies of the books themselves, in large part because of the
WWO use of modern typefaces and regularization of i, j, etc.). Today's students (perhaps unlike their teachers) find
scrolling through computer texts much easier than scrolling through microfilms. Moreover, of course, the fact is
that thanks to the WWP each of us-student and teacher-has available in our own private space and at our fingertips
an inexpensive archive of materials by women writers easily accessible at any time of the day or night.
During the first year or so of publication of WWO, the stories we heard of people using the textbase were accounts
of students writing reports on topics such as women prophets, housewifery, or prefatory materials in which
women writers (often translators) defend their entrance into the world of print. The WWO, in short, continued to be
a source of writing not otherwise known to twentieth-century readers. But as time has gone on, students and teachers
have become more proficient and creative at using the search capabilities of the textbase for research. Like other
textbases, LION for example, RWO allows users to search for single words within one text, within a selection of
texts (perhaps in all texts printed between 1650 and 1660 or in all texts written by recusant women), or within the
entire textbase. It also allows for searching proximate words: "virtue" within 10 words of "beauty," for example, or
"weak*" (i.e., weak, weaker, weakest, and the like) within 20 words of "vessel."
At a session sponsored by the WWP at the 2000 MLA meeting, Lori Newcomb described an assignment in which
her students "selected pairs of proximate words from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, words they saw taking part in the
construction of gender, and then searched for proximate appearances of those same word pairs in RWO texts"
(examples included "women" and "retention," "woman" and "rose," "love" and "bond"). In the same session,
Kimberly Hill recounted her experience finding conditional verbs in the past tense (could have, would have) to
reveal how in Mary Carleton's writing they "[signal] places in her narrative where the layers of her carefully
laminated authorial voice split apart" (for these two papers, see
http:www.wwp.brown.edu/texts/usrprojects/mla2000/index.html). This semester I am teaching a course entitled
Shakespeare and Early Modern Woman's Culture, a course loosely modeled on a seminar described by Jane
Donawerth in Teaching Judith Shakespeare in the December 1996 issue of Shakespeare Quarterly.
As I write this paper, we have completed two of four sections of the course: The Early Modern Household and the
Social Order includes Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, the marriage ceremony from the Book of Common
Prayer, and family poems by Anne Bradstreet and Katherine Philips; Women, Religion, and Witchcraft includes
Richard III, Jane Anger's Protection for Women, the story of the fall from the Book of Genesis, and Lanyer's Salve
Deux Rex Judaeorum, The third section-Women and Gardens-will feature As You Like It, Lanyer's "Description of
Cookeham," Philips's country-life poems, and Cavendish's Convent of Pleasure, and the fourth section-Women,
Race, and History-will treat The Jew of Malta, Cary's Mariam, and Antony and Cleopatra. The 18 students in the
class have taken our introductory Shakespeare course, a few have participated in women's studies courses, and
some have encountered early women writers in the sophomore survey of British literature; only one, though, has
studied early modern women in real detail-this student having taken a junior seminar on writing by and about
"Shakespeare's Sisters." So although we can enlarge class discussions by easy references to others of Shakespeare's
plays-The Taming of the Shrew and Comedy of Errors, for example-we need to rely on something other than the
students' collective memories if we are to contextualize our readings with women's works beyond those listed on the
syllabus.
Following the advice of a former student now teaching at Pepperdine, this year I expanded the OED exercise I've
been using for years to ask students to write a 2-page paper on a key word from a Shakespeare text-a word such as
"friend," "honest," "blood," "Turk," or "race" whose implications matter within the text. The paper (which could be
done with the library's paper volumes or online through the university's subscription to the OED) was to include a
paragraph on the word's etymology, one on variant spellings in the 16th and 17th centuries, and one or more on
meanings available to Shakespeare and his early modern audience. Finally, the student was to use a concordance or
a searchable Shakespeare text on the web to find the word in at least two others of his works and to indicate how it is
used there. In the course of outlining the assignment, I noted that although our Shakespeare text prints modernized
texts, photocopies or diplomatic transcripts of early quartos or the folio show variant spellings as in the OED (and,
in fact, as in RWO). As we discussed the students' results, we noted that even within the work of a single author a
word can convey a variety of rather different meanings-sometimes serially, sometimes simultaneously. Students
were of course struck by the apprehension that the words such as "honor," "honest" and "virtue" mean different
things when referring to male or female characters within Shakespeare texts, and they were especially taken with the
assertion in Merry Wives that "Wives can be merry and yet honest too."
A week later came the RWO assignment, a somewhat longer paper on findings about a word or complex of words
used by three or four early modern women. I provided a list of sample words-Deborah, Cleopatra, and Esther; father,
son, mother, daughter; white, Jew, Ethiopian, blackamoor, for example-but students were free to choose anything
they thought might appear in RWO-possibly though not necessarily word(s) from one of Shakespeare's plays
or sonnets. One student, for example, following up her work on "honest" in Merry Wives and Othello, found early
modern women also using "honest" in gender-specific ways-to mean honorable, upright, decent when referring to
men and sexually chaste when referring to women. Another noted that although Elizabeth Tudor discusses marriage
as an institution that would provide children to succeed her as monarch, some-if not all-other women of the period
write of marriage as a source of what the Book of Common Prayer calls "mutual society and comfort." A third
student was surprised to find women using references to Adonis to introduce rather explicit sexuality into their
poems. A student with small children of her own searched RWO for words such as "son" and "daughter," finding
that early modern women expressed more loving concern for their children than she had anticipated. She noted, for
instance, that elegies for deceased children and mother's advice books expressed both concern for the welfare of
their children's souls and also the mother's own joy in their births and anguish at their deaths. She noted "these
women, without exception, in my search, urged compassion and tenderness even in their discipline of children."
And she quoted a passage I had never noticed in which Katherine Philips praises a young mother:
And she well knew, although so young and fair, Justly to mix Obedience and Care;Whilst to her Children she did
still appear So wisely kind, so tenderly severe.
"In memory of . . . Mrs. Mary Lloyd"
Remembering the exchange in which Adriana and Luciana debate the husband's and wife's roles within marriage,
another student searched for "will" within ten words of "bridle" and found several uses of the metaphor within
women's religious writing. She found as well in The Mother's Counsel by an unidentified R.M. "a marvelous run of
the word will" in which the poet treats the "lawless will" of women who have "shaken off the shame-fac't band /
With which wise nature did them strongly binde, / T'obey the hests of mans well-ruling hand." Later in the poem, R.
M. questions, What iron band, or what sharp-mouthed bit, What chaine of Diamond; if such might be, Can bridle
womens wrath, or conquer it, And keepe them in their bounds, and true degree?
This seems, the student wrote, "to be a kind of advice for women of that time. She is saying [that] craft and wit will
keep a woman from becoming completely conquerable by the iron band of marriage." Yet another student
found that over and over again Cavendish's characters discuss obedience within marriage-often "to subtly show
[Cavendish's] disapproval," and that "although women of the time were [at least in theory] predominantly
subservient to their husbands, almost every person of the time was [supposed to be] dutifully subservient to God."
Perhaps most interesting was a paper on the figure of Sarah, who in the Book of Common Prayer is offered as an
example of proper wifely obedience. By contrast, in Rachel Speght's Muzzle for Malastomus, Esther Sowernam's
Esther Hath Hang'd Haman, and Margaret Fell Fox's Women's Speaking Justified Sarah is presented as a woman
whose words saved Abraham, Fox for example saying that "'Abraham obeyed the voice of Sarah,' and that Sarah's
decision was reinforced by the Lord. . . . The best way for [wives] to assist their husbands, these women argue, is to
continue to give them good counsel as did the matrons in the bible."
As I trust these examples make clear, the value in my students' papers derives from their use of what they found in
RWO. Searchable textbases provide interesting data; only human users can pinpoint its significance. It is our task,
not the computer's, to do literary analysis. But RWO can help as it provides (1) an easily-accessible archive within
which one can begin to study early modern women and (2) multiple entry points to discursive networks within and
among women's texts. As my students have found, women's discourse is sometimes analogous to that of
Shakespeare's characters, but it is often different from one what might expect if one's knowledge of the period were
based on Shakespeare's poems and plays, even together with contextual materials authored by men (e.g.,
Machiavelli's Prince, conduct books, biblical passages, laws of the period, emblem books) so often studied with
them. If women's views are partial, so too are men's: a full study of early modern literature encompass both.