Student-Friendly Editions—a Pedagogical and Scholarly Experiment with A Warning for Fair Women

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• Student-Friendly Editions—a Pedagogical and Scholarly Experiment with A Warning for Fair Women
• Ann Christensen (bio)

This essay documents a yearlong process to involve undergraduates in research, writing, and performance relating to the play I was editing at the time, A Warning for Fair Women, the unattributed 1599 true-crime domestic drama similar to the frequently anthologized Arden of Faversham.¹ My purpose is to illustrate strategies for instructors of Shakespeare and other early modern texts to explore hands-on options for getting students involved in, if not excited about, the materials that we work on but with which they are unfamiliar. I present assignments and sample student writing and presentations that show how their beginners’ mind experiences yielded often-keen critical insights that helped me edit the play for student audiences. Following the trend that Jeremy Lopez calls expanding the canon beyond “the Shakespeare aesthetic,” students eagerly participated in the not-Shakespeare experiment; they were discerning readers as well as creative collaborators in part because the text was fresh to them (109).² The tragedy, based on Arthur Golding’s pamphlet, A briefe discourse of the late murther of master George Sanders (1573), recounts the recent murder of London merchant George Sanders, and a servant, John Beane, by George Browne, Sanders’s wife’s lover, along with the adultery preceding it and the legal proceedings and executions that follow. The play can feel episodic with two unsuccessful murder attempts, but it also develops poignant relationships (such as Beane’s friends) and moments of both real pathos and high hilarity—from Browne’s smitten soliloquies to a pair of carpenters building the gallows on stage.

Although my deadline for A Warning for Fair Women: Adultery and Murder in Shakespeare’s Theatre was a useful prompt to get a draft into students’ hands, I believe that intellectual curiosity is a great teaching tool. Even if we are not sure where a new (to us) text will lead in terms of our own research projects and publication, we can let students explore it. With genuine questions about a find, we can model to students how sometimes serendipity leads the critical process. For example, one hears about an undiscovered writer at a conference—as was the case with Hester [End Page 81] Pulter that led to the Pulter Project³—and brings the news home to the classroom; one randomly finds a compelling bit in an archive or on Early English Books Online (EEBO) or tracks down a reference to a lesser-known figure, as happened to me with the indomitable Anthony Mundy, whose A View of Sundry Examples refers to the crime on which A Warning is based.⁴ My point is that we can use any of our naturally occurring discoveries and inquiries to engage undergraduate research; any type of source can be muscled onto our syllabi, either centrally or as a one-off exercise. Additionally, most of them can also be fruitfully read aloud if not performed.

Since my edition was intended primarily for classroom use, a test drive of the manuscript with real students was ideal. My project had curricular and extracurricular applications, independent and group components:

1. 1. It began with an independent student research project: “‘Here Enters Murder’: Transcribing A Warning,” a University of Houston (UH) Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship Project completed by Aubrey Cowley, B.A. (Summer 2017). This project emerged from Cowley’s interest in gender and economic structures in early modern drama; she and I agreed that this play and our similar research focus would be a good fit. She then enrolled in the Shakespeare course listed below.

2. 2. Secondly, the draft edition of A Warning was part of my Fall 2018 English 3306 (Shakespeare) syllabus; the unit culminated in group projects that were proposals or pitches for staging or filming the play.

3. 3. Finally, we conducted informal readings/performances: two table readings at my home institution, one in class, and one led by the UH Improv Group and the Shakespeare Club; and a reader’s theatre performance at the Attending to Women in Early Modern Europe Conference (June 2018).

First, I did primary textual work with Cowley, an outstanding undergraduate English major who...