Sowing the Dragon's Teeth: Amateurism, Domesticity, and the Anglophone Audience for Shakespeare, 1607-2007

This essay probes the established history of how Shakespeare developed a worldwide audience by placing it alongside the hitherto neglected his­tory of how his works have been performed by non-professional groups. It singles out three key dates in the received history of Shakespeare's reception—1623 (which saw the publication of the Folio), 1774 (which saw the publication of the first fully academic monograph about Shake­speare) and 1932 (which saw the opening of the Folger Shakespeare Li­brary in Washington DC and of the rebuilt Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford)—and considers how our sense of their importance might be altered by the consideration of less widely-studied firsts from the same years, namely the first recorded non-professional production of a Shakespeare play on British soil (at Surrenden in Kent), the first record­ed all-female production of a Shakespeare play (in the Cathedral Close in Salisbury), and the opening of the first Shakespearean theater to be de­signed, owned and built by a woman (at Minack in Cornwall)