Shakespeare Ladies Club

The Shakespeare Ladies Club (or Shakespeare Ladies' Club) refers to a group of upper class and aristocratic women who petitioned the London theatres to produce William Shakespeare's plays during the 1730s. In the 1700s they were referred to as “the Ladies of the Shakespear’s Club,” or even more simply as “Ladies of Quality,” or “the Ladies.” Known members of the Shakespeare Ladies Club include Susanna Ashley-Cooper, Elizabeth Boyd, and Mary Cowper. The Shakespeare Ladies Club was responsible for getting the highest percentage of Shakespeare plays produced in London during a single season in the eighteenth century; as a result they were celebrated by their contemporaries as being responsible for making Shakespeare popular again.

The Shakespeare Ladies Club was organized in late 1736 with the expressed goal of persuading “London’s theatrical managers to give Shakespeare a greater share in their repertoires.” The Ladies wanted to see more Shakespeare on stage because they preferred his plays to the inappropriate libertine content in Restoration comedies and the Italian operas that were dominating the London stage at the time. Within four years the Ladies’ Club had succeeded: one in every four performances in London during the 1740–41 season was a Shakespeare play. Shakespearean scholar Michael Dobson points out that this is “a record which even during Garrick’s professedly Bardolatrous management of Drury Lane was never challenged.”

In addition to being responsible for the highest percentage of Shakespeare’s plays performed in a single season during the eighteenth century, the Ladies’ Club was also responsible for Shakespeare’s memorial statue in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. Fundraising for the memorial statue began in 1738 and the statue was placed in Westminster Abbey in 1741. There were at least two benefit performances of Shakespeare plays done as part of the Ladies' Club's fundraising efforts. One was a performance of Julius Caesar on 28 April 1738 at Drury Lane. The other was a performance of Hamlet on 10 April 1739 at Theatre Royal, Covent Garden (also known as the Royal Opera House).

In January 1737 every performance of a Shakespeare play at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane (except for one command performance of Hamlet for the Prince and Princess of Wales) was done “At the Desire of several Ladies of Quality.” While such a heading was not unusual in the early eighteenth century, it is significant that it occurred for every performance that month. As the Ladies’ gained influence over Drury Lane their popularity and success began to be recognized in prologues to performances of new plays and new adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. For the premiere of The Universal Passion, an adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing by James Miller, the prologue included an “ecstatic eulogy of the Shakespeare Ladies Club”:

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