Better Late Than Never – After 285 years Westminster Abbey to credit The Shakespeare Ladies Club for spearheading monument to Shakespeare

As Petruchio says in The Taming of the Shrew: Better once than never, for never too late. 1

An historical wrong will be redressed by Westminster Abbey by finally recognising The Shakespeare Ladies Club for their campaign to install the 18th Century Shakespeare monument in Poet’s Corner.

The club was founded in 1736 by Dorset luminary Susanna Ashley-Cooper, 4th Countess of Shaftesbury aged just 26, and included the writer Elizabeth Boyd, poet Mary Cowper (later Baroness Walsingham) and Mary Churchill 2nd Duchess of Montagu a daughter of the notorious “favourite” of Queen Anne, Sarah Churchill. One of the earliest recorded book clubs; they met for private play-readings and public theatre going, hoping to experience The Bard’s genius on the stage. As they navigated their own colourful private lives, each of these free-thinking women found a personal connection with Shakespeare’s “earthy” dialogue and strong, realistic depiction of men and especially women.

But club members were hard-pressed to see on the stage what they read on the page. For decades, Shakespeare’s plays had been considered too old-fashioned and sexually explicit to stage without censorship and additions – such as singing, dancing and even happy endings for tragedies. In 1736 a theatre goer bemoaned “The other Night we had Macbeth (I had like to have said Shakespear’s Macbeth, but I beg his Pardon, for he would scarce know it as it is now acted).” 2

Frustrated, the women commenced an ambitious campaign to ‘rescue’ Shakespeare and reverse what they saw as the decline of British culture. They lobbied theatre managers to stage more of Shakespeare’s original plays and raised money and public awareness with benefit performances “Towards raising a Fund for Erecting a Monument to the Memory of Shakespear.” 3

Like today’s celebrities and Internet “Influencers”, the women were hailed for both their crusade and personal charms; they had odes written about them, were hailed at performances and made theatre going safer and more respectable for women. Their campaign was a spectacular success. Over a handful of years, Shakespeare’s plays swelled to a quarter of all staged productions and, by 1740,44 124 years after his death, a monument to The Bard was finally placed in Westminster Abbey where it remains to this day the most popular and recognised statue in Poet’s Corner.

Australian authors Christine and Jonathan Hainsworth have written the first ever book devoted to this quartet of women who, outside pockets of academia, have been unjustly erased from popular culture. Their 1736-1741 campaign launched what would later be termed “Bardolatry”. They are the missing link between 1700 – when Shakespeare’s plays were dismissed as too crude to perform unplugged – and 1800; when his plays were hailed as the ‘holy writ’ of a singular literary genius.

While the original British “fab four” rescued Shakespeare, in time, their achievement was almost totally forgotten. Credit for the statue remained with a committee of men, and the ‘saving’ of Shakespeare attributed to the 18th Century superstar actor, David Garrick, whose undoubtedly distinguished career was set in motion by the club’s efforts the previous decade.

The authors invited Professor Michael Dobson Director of The Shakespeare Institute Stratford-on-Avon and North American scholar Genevieve Kirk, each who had also written on the club, to join them in a petition to Westminster Abbey to have The Shakespeare Ladies Club finally recognised for founding the Shakespeare statue. In a victory for the women, Abbey curator Dr. Susan Jenkins has fairly considered the historical evidence and responded in the affirmative; the record will be reviewed and the women’s names will finally be credited.

Christine and Jonathan Hainsworth will be guest speakers at the Sturminster Newton Literary Festival Dorset on June 10 and at The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust on June 14, 2025 to launch their book:

The Shakespeare Ladies Club: The Forgotten Women Who Rescued the Bawdy Bard
(Amberley U.K. June 2025)

https://www.amberley-books.com/the-shakespeare-ladies-club.html

Footnotes

  1. “The Taming of the Shrew”, Act 5, Scene 1, W. Shakespeare ↩︎
  2. The Daily Journal, The Occasional Prompter, Number X., 29 Dec 1736 ↩︎
  3. “London Stage Event”: 28 April 1738 at Drury Lane Theatre. London Stage Database, London Daily Post and General Advertiser, 5 June 1738
    https://londonstagedatabase.uoregon.edu/event.php?id=19152 ↩︎
  4. 1740 Old Style Dating or 1741 current dating ↩︎
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