Shakespeare’s laundry: Feminist futures in the archive

Abstract

I have not discovered Shakespeare’s laundry bills, but am intrigued by the attention they have received in Shakespeare scholarship for well over a century. A commonplace of nineteenth-century literary criticism, historiography, and biography, the “washing-bills of great men, " was first used in relation to Shakespe are by Sir Leslie Stephen, founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, when in 1877 he complained of scholars “gaping for every scrap of knowledge about the petty details” of great men’s lives, including even their “washing-bills, " and reserved particular scorn for those who would search out “similar information about Shakespeare.”2 In the view of Stephen and his contemporaries, the desire to “know all about his [Shakespeare’s] washing-bills” marked a critical turn “downward towards trifle, " rather than “upwards to the ideal, " a reduction of the sublimely poetic to the ridiculously prosaic.3 By the early twentieth century, the trope had become sufficiently familiar that one Shakespeare critic simply referred to “the washing-bill method of research.”4.