BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT: PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION AND WOMEN

Can feminist theology take the shape of philosophy of religion without contradiction? Philosophy of religion as practised by privileged Anglo- Americans has posed epistemological and ethical problems for women which, in turn, have led to proposals for a feminist philosophy of religion. Before consideration of the latter let us gain background on the opening question.

Women have been excluded by Western philosophy since its earliest days in Ancient Greece. Genevieve Lloyd has argued that the history of philosophy begins by imagining female powers as what have to be excluded by thinkers seeking to be rational. For Lloyd, ‘femaleness [is] symbolically associated with what Reason supposedly left behind – the dark powers of the earth goddesses, immersion in unknown forces associated with mysterious female powers’. Today it is a great concern for women, and at least some men, who seek recognition as philosophers of religion, that reason has been defined by the symbolic, if not the actual exclusion of femaleness. To address the problem of gender exclusion, this essay will set the scene for an alternative sketch of rationality.

Admirers of Mary Wollstonecraft are often reluctant to see her as a religious thinker. This should not surprise us. The reiterated “appeals to God and virtue,” in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman are “a dead letter to feminists now,” a leading feminist critic tells us, and if by dead letter is meant a failed communication, then it is certainly true that of all aspects of Wollstonecraft's thought it is her religious faith that has failed to speak to modern interpreters. Most studies do no more than gesture toward it, and then usually dismiss it as ideological baggage foisted on her by her times, with no positive implications for her views on women. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is generally located in a tradition of Enlightenment humanism that is assumed to have been at least indifferent to religion, if not actively hostile to it.

Virginia Woolf, in 1929, described Mary Wollstonecraft's remarkable “form of immortality” through the memorable conceit that “she is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living.” A strong sense of unfinished business hovers about Wollstonecraft's legacy – the effects of a life cut short and a political agenda not yet met, but also of something less straightforward, emanating from the combined – but disjunctive – force of her life and work as well as yoked with the seductive fiction that revolution and romance have some natural and dangerously volatile affinity. For “even now,” at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Woolf's perception of an embodied, social and affective presence – “alive . . . among the living” – captures what has proved most enduring but also most troubling about Wollstonecraft's reception, the aura of unreconciled emotion that hovers around her shifting reputation. Wollstonecraft remains an ambiguous symbol both of feminism and of femininity, her significance disputed most strongly by the diverse western feminisms of the last quarter of the twentieth century which have made her and her feminist peers living and legible in her own time and in theirs. Their disagreements have been productive as well as divisive; it is to the credit of Wollstonecraft's interpreters that she remains a restive presence, who cannot be easily framed or honorably laid to rest as the distinguished foremother of modern feminism.

The republican milieu

When she set up her school in Newington Green in 1784, Wollstonecraft joined a circle rich in adversarial political experience. As religious Dissenters, they were opposed to the established Church of England. Dissenters could not take the oaths necessary to secure offices under the Crown or even to take degrees at English Universities. Politically they debated the terms of the Whig triumph of 1688 when parliament had seemingly affirmed its paramount power by dismissing James II and calling a Protestant monarch, William of Orange, to the throne. “Real,” or “true,” Whigs complained that Parliament, instead of extending its power and becoming more representative of the people, had used the influence of the throne to establish a monopoly of power in the hands of great landowners. James Burgh, whose widow was Wollstonecraft's personal friend, had compiled a damning dossier on the oligarchy of “borough-mongers,” its manipulation of elections, its system of patronage and nepotism. Republican ideas, from a tradition including Greece, Rome, and Renaissance Italy as well as the seventeenth-century English Commonwealth, were frequently used to attack courtly corruption and democratic arguments were voiced, especially after the American Revolution. Many saw a remedy for corruption in extending parliamentary representation to newly populous towns and widening the franchise to make bribery and intimidation less common. However radical their ideas, few ventured to actually propose dismantling rather than reforming a constitution that purported to balance monarchical, republican, and democratic principles and had brought peace and prosperity to Britain.

In the early months of 2001 the Royal Shakespeare Company brought together productions of all eight of Shakespeare's Lancastrian history plays (with a rehearsed reading of Edward III thrown in for good measure). This ambitious endeavour, to which I shall return at the end of this chapter, long planned as the Millennium Project of a large and permanent theatre company, offering the plays in a variety of styles and periods, involving four directors and around 100 actors, and depending absolutely for its existence on subsidy, public and private, national and international, may usefully stand as the final milestone on the journey that Shakespeare theatre production has taken through the century with which this chapter is concerned. Many of its assumptions and characteristics are part of what we now take for granted in the performance of Shakespeare's plays; the evolutionary process that produced it is the subject of this chapter.

Stratford and London before the First World War

On 10 January 1900 Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s notorious production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with Oberon played (and sung) by Julia Neilson, and the rabbits of the wood near Athens played, inexorably (and, so far as theatre history records, unsung) by themselves, opened at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London.

In a searching essay on the principles of acting, the French actor François-Joseph Talma writes that the tragic actor must preserve the characters imagined by the playwright 'in their grand proportions, but at the same time he must subject their elevated language to natural accents and true expression; and it is this union of grandeur without pomp, and nature without triviality - this union of the ideal and the true, which is so difficult to attain in tragedy'. Although Talma is writing of French classical tragedy, his understanding of acting as the representation of the grand through the embodiment of the natural articulates well the basic dynamic of Shakespeare's tragic heroes. We might add that in tragedy we see the general through the lens of individual experience and the symbolic through that of the personal, a series of perspectives perhaps more effectively realised by Shakespeare than by any other tragic playwright. But to fulfil the task set by Shakespeare is no easy undertaking.

The popular culture of Victorian Britain, as described by a contemporary observer, comprised heterogeneous 'exhibitions, galleries, and museums' devoted to 'popular education in the young and in the adult'. These forms of respectable recreation became the 'libraries of those who have no money to expend on books . . . [and] the travel of those that have no time to bestow on travel'. Among the 'amusements for mind and senses' which 'woo the world of London at every turn', the National Review counted 'lecture-rooms, dioramas, panoramas, cheap concerts, oratorios, public gardens, and innumerable other diversions, suited to every scale of purse and every variety of taste and cultivation'. Informative entertainments such as the Diorama in Regent's Park, the Cosmorama (an indoor 'peepshow' gallery of famous sites from around the world) in Regent Street, and Wyld's Great Globe in Leicester Square exercised cultural governance over an imperial city whose population at mid-century passed 2,000,000. This thriving popular culture was nothing if not visual. From the Illustrated London News to stereoscope photographs (double images of the same subject which, when inserted into a viewer, create the illusion of three dimensions), and from the annual Royal Academy exhibitions to cartes de visite (small, inexpensive photographic portraits suitable for mounting in an album), the Victorians were insatiable consumers of pictures.

Although they constitute a substantial portion of her writing, the reviews Mary Wollstonecraft wrote for Joseph Johnson's progressive journal, the Analytical Review (launched in 1788), rarely receive sustained critical attention. This omission is unfortunate, for these reviews collectively testify to the breadth of Wollstonecraft's reading and to the extent of her activity within the literary marketplace of her time. As such they are a valuable resource for and index to her opinions during perhaps the most decisive and yet also the most neglected period of her career. But just as importantly, the reviews deserve close attention because they show us how Wollstonecraft developed her own distinctive voice as a feminist cultural critic by engaging with the texts under review. The reviewing experience thus simultaneously educated the private, anonymous writer and her reading audience. As Wollstonecraft learns and teaches, she also moves from tentative confessional author to the authoritative public figure who altered the social, political, and literary sphere during the transitional period of the 1790s.

Wollstonecraft served her literary apprenticeship as a reviewer for the Analytical Review and worked again as a journalist in her latter years when she was on the verge of artistic maturity. Interestingly, then, her reviews of poetry and popular romance cluster around the periods when she was herself most intensely involved in creative activity.

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 for professional actors in Elizabethan England than it is now. A genuine comic actor, though, is comparatively a rarity. We do not know who created the role of Caliban, but Shakespeare had someone in mind when he wrote it as an extreme stylistic contrast to Prospero.