A century after Shakespeare’s death, his words were in danger of being forgotten. While plays like King Lear and Othello still played to packed houses across England, audiences saw only the bowdlerized versions—censored, rewritten, and stripped of anything that could be considered distasteful.

How, then, did Shakespeare’s original works re-emerge? Thank the Shakespeare Ladies Club, a group of influential women who rescued his reputation(and his double entendres) from obscurity.

In their book, The Shakespeare Ladies Club: The Forgotten Women Who Saved the Bawdy Bard, Christine and Jonathan Hainsworth uncover the club’s unsung contributions to Shakespeare’s legacy. Thanks to the Hainsworths, Westminster Abbey has now officially recognized the Shakespeare Ladies Club for their campaign to memorialize Shakespeare in Poets’ Corner. But, they reveal, the club’s influence goes even deeper than that.

In this episode, Christine and Jonathan Hainsworth shine a light on this remarkable group of women and how they made Shakespeare the cultural icon he is today.