Mary Wollstonecraft is one of the most distinctive letter writers of the eighteenth century. Her works from her juvenile productions as a young girl in the Yorkshire town of Beverley to her final notes to her husband and future biographer William Godwin are instantly recognizable. Indeed Wollstonecraft's value is as much in letter writing as in public authorship; often she seems almost to live through her correspondence, expressing within it her numerous roles: child, daughter, companion, friend, teacher, governess, sister, literary hack, woman of letters, lover, wife, rationalist, and romantic. She wrote incessantly throughout her life, priding herself on her frank expression and often berating her correspondents for not rising to her expansive standards. She might have said with Amelia Opie, a friend from her final years, “If writing were an effort to me I should not now be alive . . . and it might have been inserted in the bills of mortality – 'dead of letter writing A. Opie.'”

Wollstonecraft’s letters were self-aware certainly but they were also dashed off as the overflow sometimes of joy, more often of bitterness, ennui, and self pity. They are occasionally funny, often engaging, but most frequently moving in their self-centered vulnerability. In them Wollstonecraft grows from the awkward child of fourteen to the woman of thirty-eight facing her death in childbirth. One can see where she matured and where she remained entangled in childhood emotions, noting in the swift reading of a lifetime’s writing the unity in temperament from beginning to end, the eerie consistency of tone.

While the man in the street is unperturbed at the thought of Shakespeare being performed some 400 years after his death, he is astonished to hear that Shakespeare is performed in Asia (never mind 400 years after his death). Commonality of language, culture, history, country and 'race' conspire to naturalise Shakespeare's otherwise highly 'unnatural' cultural longevity. By the same token, the sheer discontinuity and remoteness represented by 'Asia' exposes not just the longevity of Shakespeare but the workings of cultural value itself. It seems not just strange for Shakespeare to be performed in Asia, but somehow unfit. 'Part of an Englishman's constitution' (as Jane Austen put it), is Shakespeare therefore part of an Asian constitution too?

For a somewhat different reason, the notion of an ‘Asian Shakespeare’ may well seem odd to a Japanese, Chinese or Indian. In terms of what culture in the geographic domain of Asia does ‘Asia’ make sense? No one particular culture, of course. As Edward Said has suggested, ‘Asia’ is a geographic fiction rather than a life world. The difficulty is not got round by substituting the grouping of ‘India’, ‘China’ and ‘Japan’. The very bracketing of these countries bespeaks an implicitly Orientalist standpoint.

After an eighteen-year hiatus theatres reopened in London in 1660, following the restoration of King Charles II. While the stages, audiences and taste of this age were markedly different from those for which Shakespeare wrote, his works were an important part of the theatrical corpus of the later seventeenth century, along with others by Ben Jonson and John Fletcher. In his diary, Samuel Pepys records numerous performances of Shakespeare's plays in the first years after the Restoration, including productions of 1 Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor within months of Charles II's return. From the 1660s through the end of the eighteenth century, Shakespeare's plays were a routine part of any theatre's offerings and made up a far larger proportion of the popular theatrical repertoire than they do today in London or New York. They appeared regularly every year, although not necessarily in a form that Shakespeare would have recognised. In particular, the Restoration staging of Shakespeare has become infamous for its creative reconfiguration of Shakespeare’s plays, in which some tragedies are given happy endings and others made more tragic, while characters are eliminated – or added – to conform to contemporary taste, and in which entire scenes and acts are omitted, replaced in some cases by new scenes and rewritten dialogue.

In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft threw down the gauntlet, not only to her male readers, but equally important, to the other women writers of her day, as she called for a “revolution in female manners.” And these women took up Wollstonecraft's challenge. Whether they endorsed her views or contested them, very few women writers of the time ignored them. In this essay, I shall explore the range of responses by women writers to Wollstonecraft's ideas, or, more generally, to the feminist programs she and others espoused, taking the works of Mary Hays, Mary Robinson, Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Jane Austen as representative.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman proposed a model of what we would now call “equality” or “liberal” feminism. Grounded on the affirmation of universal human rights endorsed by such Enlightenment thinkers as Voltaire, Rousseau, and John Locke, Wollstonecraft argued that females are in all the most important aspects the same as males, possessing the same souls, the same mental capacities, and thus the same human rights.

During the summer of 2000, The Tempest was staged at Shakespeare's Globe in London. There was an implicit challenge to traditional readings of the play in the casting of Vanessa Redgrave as Prospero, but her presence was as imposing and her voice as rich as any man's need have been. Perhaps this Prospero was more completely Miranda's parent, less securely the colonialist patriarch, than Michael Redgrave was at Stratford in 1951, but there was never any sense that allowances were being made. This was our Prospero, and we respected him. A cultural shift of great significance is even more evident here than in the reaction to Fiona Shaw's playing of Richard II, because the crossing of gender quickly ceased to be the audience's focus. For one thing, Redgrave's performance of the role brushed lesser considerations aside; for another, Prospero's fecundity is peculiarly genderless; and for a third, there was Caliban.

Actors of comedy and comic actors

The ability to sustain a role in a comedy was no less a routine requirement forprofessional actors in Elizabethan England than it is now. A genuine comicactor, though, is comparatively a rarity. We do not know who created therole of Caliban, but Shakespeare had someone in mind when he wrote it asan extreme stylistic contrast to Prospero.

On 2 June 1752 the Charming Sally arrived in the harbour near Yorktown, Virginia, carrying among its passengers twelve adult actors and three of their children. Organised in London by William Hallam, the erstwhile proprietor of a minor London theatre, the New Wells, and led by his brother Lewis, the company was drawn in the main from the ranks of metropolitan and provincial players of modest accomplishment. After an interval of three months, during the course of which the company awaited official permission to perform and worked to refurbish the primitive playhouse in nearby Williamsburg, they commenced their season with The Merchant of Venice on 15 September – an event generally considered to be the first significant professional staging of Shakespeare in America.

For a number of years after the arrival of the Hallams, theatre in America, and the smaller world of the Shakespeare theatre within, was a distant colonial extension of English culture. The actors who came were largely those whose opportunities for advancement were limited in their homeland; for the first half-century of American Shakespeare performance and beyond, sophisticated observers in London would likely have viewed the theatrical emigrés who journeyed to America’s shores as being no less marooned than Prospero on his distant isle.

The business of playing

Shakespeare's plays were born on stage. They might have been conceived 'In the quick forge and working-house of thought', but for Shakespeare that house where you should 'Work, work, your thoughts' was itself a playhouse (Henry V 5.0.23, 3.0.25). Shakespeare did his thinking in theatres. 'My muse labours', Shakespeare wrote, 'and thus she is delivered', Iago says, enacting thought, the actor delivering his line as the character delivers his rhyme (Othello 2.1.126-7). What the muse conceives is not properly born until it cries out, giving voice to what had before been only 'bare imagination' (Richard II 1.3.296). So it should not surprise us that Shakespeare imagined being 'born' as an entrance onto 'this great stage' (Tragedy of King Lear 4.5.175). That metaphor depended, in part, upon the Latin motto of the Globe Theatre, 'Totus mundus agit histrionem' (translated in As You Like It as 'All the world's a stage'). But it also reflected Shakespeare’s own frequent association of the womb that delivers newborn babes with the theatre that delivers newborn plays. He compares the walls of a circular amphitheatre to a ‘girdle’, encompassing a ‘pit’ that is also an ‘O’ (Henry V Pro. 19, 11, 13); he imagines a ‘concave womb’ echoing with words (Lover’s Complaint I), and asserts that a ‘hollow womb resounds’ (Venus 268), as though a uterus were a resonating auditorium. Such associations subordinate female anatomy to the emotional and professional experience of a male actor and playwright.

Did Shakespeare have a political agenda? Up until forty years ago most scholars and readers would have affirmed that his reputation rested on exactly the opposite, namely on not being partisan, but for all time. For centuries his plays were seen as timeless models of human nature; as such they were performed on the stage, as such they were studied, debated, translated into many languages, assimilated into foreign literatures and adapted to widely different media. None of his plays are drames à thèse, and yet they have been appropriated by the political stage like no other.

The reason for this is simple. Although the plays are not partisan (unless the general support of the Tudor myth in the histories is counted as such) they deal with material eminently suited to transformation into political theatre. The history plays and the Roman plays for example can be read as so many case histories of the ways of gaining, wielding and losing power, and the protagonists are thoroughly familiar with Machiavelli’s lessons in Realpolitik. However, the conflicts shown are never played out merely on the surface level of intrigue and counter-intrigue.

Performing Shakespeare in the Romantic age became an intensely political business. The leading theatre critics – William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, and Leigh Hunt – pepper their dramatic interpretations with deft, savvy and mischievous political shots. Reviews make frequent and pointed references to controversial topical events (the disorder which broke out after the mass meeting organised by radical leaders at Spa Fields in 1816, for instance, or the government's decision in February 1817 to suspend habeas corpus, thereby removing the accepted civil liberties of the English people); political concepts and institutions – anarchy, monarchy and aristocracy – pervade the discussion of Shakespearean performance. What is at stake in these accusations and counter-accusations, sly asides and ironic tirades? Why should the discussion of Isabella's chastity, or Coriolanus's condescension towards a Roman mob provoke charges of sedition and libel? At the heart of this period is a battle for the political and moral possession of Shakespeare.

Do Shakespeare’s plays celebrate monarchy and aristocratic government? Or might these dramas offer a much more ambivalent interpretation of political power and moral values? Is Shakespeare a natural aristocrat, or a closet radical? In the early nineteenth century, performers, managers and theatre critics relished the chance to offer polemical answers to these controversial questions, for in Shakespeare’s representations of political power seemed to lie the key to Britain’s political future.

From the title of the last book published before her death, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796), we can guess that for Mary Wollstonecraft the word “residence” reflects little stability or rest. A short residence in three countries? Over the course of one summer? Upheaval writes itself into the title, and becomes the motor of this peculiar but lovely book. HereWollstonecraft takes the restlessness and dislocation that marked her own life, as well as the society she observed in northern Europe, and tries to shape them into a style, an argument, and a political stance. “The art of travelling,” she remarks elsewhere, “is only a branch of the art of thinking.”In the Short Residence the thinking subject herself cannot be distinguished from constant movement. Her travelogue thus tells us more about the mind of the traveler-subject, charting her path through a “heterogeneous modernity,” than about the three countries she visits. During her Short Residence, the narrator adopts several modes of travel but never settles: her account of boat trips, carriage rides, ferry passages, walks, and, most significantly, flights of fancy, purposefully has no end. As the Short Residence unfolds, however, the mobility of the subject, which had initially presented itself as both liberating and creative, modulates into something compromised, inescapable. In her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), Wollstonecraft first signaled this thought: “I perceive, but too forcibly, that happiness, literally speaking, dwells not here. And that we wander to and fro in a vale of darkness as well as tears” (VRM 5:76).

For a reader coming to the life and work of Mary Wollstonecraft for the first time, one of the most compelling aspects of her career is its power to unsettle the homosexual/heterosexual split that the twentieth century made so rigid. This unsettling occurs partly because Wollstonecraft, like all eighteenth-century writers, had no words like “homosexual” or “heterosexual” in her vocabulary. Sexuality had no language of its own in the eighteenth century. Instead, writers understood sexual roles through the vocabulary of gender: certain modes of sexual behavior were the supposed prerogatives of masculinity; others, of femininity.

What is so interesting about the eighteenth century is that neither “masculinity” nor “femininity” was a fixed category. When eighteenth-century writers argued about virtually anything (education, aesthetics, law, natural philosophy, religion, politics), they usually did so in loudly gendered terms. However, gender definitions were not necessarily the same in each discourse; they were as likely to differ as to complement one another. Consequently, eighteenth-century writers like Wollstonecraft could set different definitions against each other, using those from one discourse to criticize those in another.

In 1789, Wollstonecraft included extracts from John Gregory's A Father's Legacy to his Daughters, one of the most popular of eighteenth-century conduct books, in her anthology The Female Reader; in 1792, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she claimed to “entirely disapprove of his celebrated Legacy,” and Gregory was among those singled out as “writers who have rendered women objects of pity.” On the face of it, this looks like a radical change of opinion: a clear symptom of a newly politicized Wollstonecraft explicitly rejecting the kind of advice literature which she had been prepared to reproduce, and even to emulate, as a struggling freelance writer in the late 1780s but which, in the revolutionary atmosphere of the early 1790s, she recognized as one of those repressive cultural mechanisms responsible for turning women into mere “creatures of sensation” (VRW:130). But to read this as a straightforward volt face on Wollstonecraft's part would be far too simple an account of her view of Gregory, or of the wider tradition of female conduct literature which his text represents. Furthermore, it would be a serious misunderstanding of Wollstonecraft's relationship with the multifarious genre of advice writing more generally. As an autodidact, and then as an independent woman trying to make a living from her writing, Wollstonecraft relied throughout her life on those instructional genres through which moral principles and enlightenment knowledges were offered up to a popular audience. Her first publication, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), was a kind of conduct book, and Rights of Woman itself still bears a more than passing resemblance to the genre. In each case, advice on “improvement”is a primary characteristic, and the moral agenda which underpins this urge to (self-)improvement means that distinctions between attaining proper standards of personal “conduct,” defining oneself as a virtuous domestic woman, aspiring to an appropriate education, and simply expanding one's knowledge, can become blurred: for modern readers, often uncomfortably so.

Even though Mary Wollstonecraft had little to no presence in history or literature curricula as recently as a generation ago, she has never exactly been a minor figure. Some, certainly, have wished her so. A dauntless advocate of political reform, Wollstonecraft was one of the first to vindicate the “rights of man,” but in her own – brief – lifetime and ever since, she achieved notoriety principally for her championship of women's rights. And while some of this notoriety took the particular form of scandal of the sort that often attends women directly involved in public affairs, some of it she directly sought in her writing and in her conduct. Controversy always inspired Wollstonecraft, always sharpened her sense of purpose. Whether writing about education, history, fiction, or politics itself, she was always arguing – even her travelogue, written as a series of letters to her faithless lover, is an ongoing argument. And in turn,Wollstonecraft always inspired controversy. A revolutionary figure in a revolutionary time, she took up and lived out not only the liberal call for women's educational and moral equality, but also virtually all of the other related, violently contested questions of the 1790s – questions pertaining to the principles of political authority, tyranny, liberty, class, sex, marriage, childrearing, property, prejudice, reason, sentimentality, promises, suicide, to mention only a few. Clearly, she struck many a raw nerve. Although her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), for example, at first received fairly respectful reviews as a tract on female education, after England and France declared war, it was increasingly (and correctly) read against the backdrop of its broader progressive agendas on behalf of liberty. Thereafter, efforts to vilify Wollstonecraft, though sometimes marked by an air of puerile jocularity, were hysterically intense.

Even from its inauguration early in Her Majesty's long reign, the Victorian pictorial mode of staging Shakespeare's plays generated its own reaction. At Covent Garden late in 1823 Charles Kemble (1775-1854) presented King John in early thirteenth-century decor, with (claimed the playbill) 'the whole of the Dresses and Decorations being executed from indisputable Authorities, such as Monumental Effigies, Seals, Illumined MSS,&c.'. At the Haymarket in March 1844 Benjamin Webster (1798-1882) presented a production of The Taming of the Shrew in which the players who arrive in the Induction were made up to resemble Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Richard Tarlton: however implausible the assembly of these individuals, their respective appearances were copied from old paintings and prints. The two productions were thus the result of the same kind of study of pictorial and plastic images that had survived for centuries; and in fact they had been designed by the same person, J. R. Planché (1795-1880).

The crucial difference between the two productions lay in the point of application of antiquarian research. The 1823 production represented the dramatic time and place in which a Shakespeare play was set, while the 1844 production represented the theatrical time and place in and for which a Shakespeare play was written.

Appropriation anxieties

In 1981 at the Théâtre du Soleil in Paris, Ariane Mnouchkine directed a production of Richard II using her own French translation. Inspired partly by Antonin Artaud's dictum that 'the theatre is oriental', she told an interviewer: 'When we decided to perform Shakespeare, a recourse to Asia became a necessity.' She spoke of trying to find an antidote to the 'psychological venom' which infects western acting; wanting to break from the realistic tradition, she relied on a combination of Shakespeare's text and Asian form. Accordingly, she ignored the play's specifically English, national, resonance, instead importing movement, costumes and a hieratic style borrowed from Japanese Kabuki and Noh, interlaced with Balinese and Kathakali influences plus various styles of Asian music. The result was a blend designed to reveal the play's 'sacred and ritualistic aspects' and the chief means were the disciplined bodies of the actors and the words. Colette Godard describes the effect: the actors face the audience, 'knees flexed . . . hands ceremoniously spread. With their heads held erect, almost never looking at each other . . . they project their lines directly at the audience’. The words ‘come across with incredible clarity . . . It’s as if these weren’t characters, but bodies traversed by a single voice’. But the temperature is not uniformly cool: at the end, Bolingbroke ‘dares [to] kiss the lips of the murdered king, before laying himself out . . . tiny and fragile at the centre of an enormous bare carpet’.

Beyond the sphere of Wollstonecraft studies, Mary, A Fiction (1788) and The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (1798) typically receive scant attention. As if her novels had little intrinsic interest, most histories of the novel do not mention Wollstonecraft's contributions to the genre, and until relatively recently Wollstonecraft scholars in a way have seemed to concur, largely ignoring the first and reading the last either as an extension of her biography or as a fictionalization of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. At first glance, some skepticism about Wollstonecraft's contributions to the English novel seems only too reasonable. Although she became a woman of letters – “moralist” would probably have been the eighteenth-century term for her – Wollstonecraft's career did not develop around a single genre. All of her works are of a piece in their very diversity, blending overlapping discourses of education, political commentary, travel literature, autobiography, moral philosophy, and fiction by turns, and while this makes for challenging and often bracing reading, it is also probably a little dizzying to audiences whose generic expectations are more straightforward, who expect novels to execute a well-managed plot or to unfold incrementally developing character. Moreover, like most women writers of the time, Wollstonecraft had little in the way of formal education and is not a remarkably deft writer, lacking the ease and fluency of novelists like Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, the dramatic flair of Elizabeth Inchbald, let alone the comprehensive mastery of narration, dialogue, and pacing of someone like Jane Austen. She mostly wrote topically and in haste, rarely polishing what she had done, and she did not even finish such major works as Rights of Woman, Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, and, of course, Wrongs of Woman.