Chapter 5 focuses on the changes in the editorial profession that resulted from the rise to prominence of the New Bibliography and shows how the consolidation of editorial authority and the increasingly quasi-scientific method (or mystique) of the New Bibliography worked to exclude women from its editorial ranks. This resulted in a significant decrease of woman-edited editions around the middle of the twentieth century. Continuing previous discussion of male collaborators, it demonstrates that well into the twentieth century, women editors’ successes still relied in part on finding a way into the primarily masculine network of editors via their male colleagues and allies, focusing on the careers of Grace Trenery, Una Ellis-Fermor, Alice Walker, and Evelyn Simpson.

This chapter takes up the issue of the expansion of the market for Shakespeare editions across the nineteenth century. A culture of home reading encouraged the practice of producing expurgated editions, which proved highly popular. A gradual broadening of the educational franchise had the effect of significantly raising the level of literacy in the UK, and this coincided with the cost efficiencies afforded by the industrialisation of printing, making it possible to serve a growing market with ever cheaper editions. The highly popular, inexpensive Globe Shakespeare is considered, together with subsequent editions which reduced the cost of complete works editions to unprecedentedly low levels (just sixpence, in the case of the Ward Locke edition). By the later decades of the nineteenth century Shakespeare was increasingly finding a place in school curricula, and some of the major schools editions – such as the Pitt Press and Clarendon editions – are considered in detail.