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“Let reason serve to make the truth appear”: How The Shakespeare Club of Mobile studied Shakespeare from 1897 to 1918

The paper offers an overview of how one women's amateur discussion group, founded in 1897 in Mobile, Alabama, studied Shakespeare's plays. The group is particularly interesting as it included some of Mobile's most well-known figures, like the novelist Augusta Evans Wilson. The paper uses the surviving log books of The Shakespeare Club to explore how the club was organized and what its literary criticism was like. The picture that emerges in some ways supports our existing understanding of these discussion groups but in other ways complicates it. The paper then compares and contrasts The Shakespeare Club's amateur criticism with the professional (published) criticism of the nineteenth century; arguing that, surprisingly, these amateur scholars were more interested in learned, factual scholarship than in character studies or a romanticized version of Shakespeare's biography.