Valerie Wayne is Professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa.
A specialist in early modern English literature with an emphasis on gender
and culture, textual editing, and early modern women writers, she currently
serves as a Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America and is on the
editorial board of Shakespeare Quarterly. In 2000 she was president of the
Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. She has held fellowships at the
Folger Shakespeare Library and the Huntington Library and was awarded a
Board of Regents’ Medal for Excellence in Teaching from the University of
Hawai‘i. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has
taught at the University of Illinois, Chicago, the University of Liverpool,
the University of Kansas, and the University of Szeged in Hungary.

Wayne is currently at work on an edition of Cymbeline for the Arden
Shakespeare, third series. For The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, she
edited the city comedy A Trick to Catch the Old One and served as an
Associate General Editor. Her previous publications include a critical
edition of a Renaissance dialogue on marriage by Edmund Tilney called The
Flower of Friendship (Cornell, 1992) and a collection of essays on
Shakespeare, The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of
Shakespeare (Harvester Wheatsheaf, Cornell 1991). She selected and
introduced the writings of Anne Cooke Bacon for a volume in the series The
Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works (Ashgate,
2000) and co-edited a book in honor of her former colleague, Joseph Keene
Chadwick: Interventions and Continuities in Irish and Gay Studies
(University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002). The author of numerous essays on
representations of women in early modern texts, she is also co-editing
Staging Early Modern Romance: Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance, and
Shakespeare, forthcoming from Routledge.

“Assuming Gentility: Thomas Middleton, Mary Carleton and Aphra Behn.” Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450-1700. Ed. James Daybell. Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing, 2004. 243-56.

This essay compares three texts that represent a woman’s imitation of a gentle status she was not born to but has the ability to perform so convincingly that men are duped into marrying her: Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One, The Case of Mary Carleton, and Behn’s The City Heiress, It also relates the “transnaturing” power of clothing and textual identities to the lives of Middleton, Carleton, and Behn.

“The Sexual Politics of Textual Transmission.” Textual Formations and Reformations. Ed. Laurie E. Maguire and Thomas L. Berger. Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 1998. 179-210.

This essay calls attention to gendered processes of textual transmission by exploring compositorial errors among early editions of Edmund Tilney’s The Flower of Friendship, textual cruces and editorial choices in The Tempest and Othello, and problems of speech tags, commentary, and stage directions as they relate to prostitution, slander, rape, and the law in Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One. It explains the reasons for changing the speech tag from “Courtesan” to “Jane” in the play’s edition for the Oxford Collected Works.