Affirming the presence of mind in so-called affairs of the heart is a signal Wollstonecraft achievement. The conviction emerges out of her intense experiences of the shaping realities of family life. The range of familial settings in which Mary Wollstonecraft lived play a defining role in her reflections on what it means to be born into a particular family and how this beginning affects what follows. The topic informs her life, writing career, reputation, and legacy for a number of interconnected reasons. Wollstonecraft comes of age in an era when familial roles and their connection to civic duties and the rights of men and women are being hotly contested. The contestation is sharpened by debates about the revolution occurring in France, but is not synonymous with it. Wollstonecraft enters an unusually wide range of familial arrangements that heighten her perspectives on the desirability of social and domestic reform. They include the households she resides in as a child with her biological parents and siblings, aristocratic households where she works as a lady’s companion and governess, residences in Europe as a single woman and then single mother, and households she occupies as the lover and then wife of William Godwin along with daughter Fanny Imlay and, for a few days, baby Mary Godwin. In addition, Wollstonecraft is a sex radical in her practice and occasionally in her writings. Her legacy is governed by changing estimations of feminism, egalitarian family roles, sexual liberation, and intersectional identity politics. It is also animated by glaring inconsistencies in what she says, writes, and does as a family member and how these divergences continue even today to shape the contours of family life.

In the black

Ripe for analysis is the startling fact that from the 1770s to the 1830s London patent theatre managers stood a good chance - often, their best chance - of being in the black by staging plays including black characters, topics or settings. Isaac Bickerstaffe's comic opera The Padlock (DL, 1768), famous for introducing the first blackface comic figure on the London stage, received fifty-four performances in its first season, 142 in its first nine years and instituted Mungo, the character's name, as a byword in late eighteenth-century cultural discourse. George Colman the Younger's version of Inkle and Yarico was not only the most popular new play in the 1787-88 season, but ultimately became the sixth most popular London mainpiece during the years 1776-1800. John Fawcett's pantomime Obi; or, Three Finger'd Jack (HM, 1800), featuring the rebellious activity of the escaped Jamaican slave, Jack Mansong, ran for thirty-nine nights in a single summer, the longest single season run for any play at the Haymarket between 1777 and 1811. In 1807 Drury Lane mounted a Christmas pantomime entitled Furibond; or, Harlequin Negro which enjoyed twenty-eight performances. Then there is the remarkable series of adaptations of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko that together comprise the second most frequently produced drama in the eighteenth century, beginning with Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko (DL, 1695) and including plays by John Hawkesworth (DL, 1759), Francis Gentleman (Edinburgh, 1760; DL, 1769) and an unstaged adaptation by Dr John Ferriar entitled The Prince of Angola (1788). Isaac Bickerstaffe's Love in the City (CG, 1767) and Archibald McLaren's The Negro Slaves; or, The Blackman and the Blackbird (Edinburgh, 1799) both deal with African slavery.

Coleridge was not a feminist, although he included women amongst his best friends. Nor was his work directed systematically at issues of gender, definitions of masculinity and femininity, or the relations between the sexes, except as these matters intersected with other topics that fundamentally informed his work such as the French Revolution, social reform, faculties of mind, the professionalisation of poetry and the poet. Still, Coleridge is useful for thinking about gender and its articulation in the early nineteenth century, occasionally in what he wrote and more frequently in what he 'was' as writer and man. To proclaim in the early 1800s that 'there is a sex in our souls' when the revolution in female manners was being conducted on the opposite principle and was barely off the ground was to disassociate oneself from feminist causes and to align oneself with gender essentialists (Friend ii, 209). Most of Coleridge's comments on gender supported the social conservatism that usually follows from essentialist claims. They positioned women in the private sphere, viewed love as women's primary preoccupation, and characterised femininity as maternal, nurturing, dependent, and domestic. Even Coleridge's advocacy of androgyny, regarded ever since Virginia Woolf as his major positive contribution to gender analysis, supported a masculinist agenda, for it was attributed only to the genius of male minds.

No title in the Coleridgean canon characterizes its subject so succinctly as does the “Remorse” of 1813. Even more than Shakespeare's “Winter's Tale,” a title Coleridge praises for presenting a “peculiarly” illuminating “bill of fare before the feast,” the title and play “Remorse” is worth pondering as foretaste – and lingering aftertaste – of Coleridge's involvement in theatre. Why dish out remorse to an audience hungering for sensational fare? By what stretch of imagination can remorse satisfy an impoverished playwright or his political-aesthetic schemes? Seamus Deane establishes one context for approaching the first question by surveying the period's philosophical interest in this moral trait. Although he does not mention Coleridge, his discussion of remorse as signifying attitudes toward revolution and criminality sets the stage for Coleridge's Remorse. A profitable approach to the second question considers the positioning of this play in Coleridge's middle stage of theatre. With Remorse (1813) Coleridge atones for the youthful enthusiasm of The Fall of Robespierre (1794) and Osorio (1797). Representing Coleridge's maturity in theatre, Remorse puts moral states, not actual or potential men, center-stage. The wisdom of this shift has raised lasting doubts about Coleridge's merit as playwright, yet the psychic and theatrical payoffs of Remorse should encourage us to take a second look at it. Apparently at times Coleridge can turn theatre, like remorse, to his advantage.

In a series of remarks preparatory to analysis of Romeo and Juliet, Coleridge makes a surprising assertion, unravelling the logic of which constitutes the project of this chapter. Having already articulated several well-recognized prerequisites to the appreciation of Shakespeare, Coleridge finds it still “necessary” to “say something of the language of our Country” in order to “[aid] himself as well as others in judging of all writers of all countries.” He then specifies the peculiar advantages of several European languages by way of arguing that “various languages arising from various circumstances of the 〈people〉 might fit them more for one species of Poetry than another.” “Take the French,” he says in that offhand manner that bespeaks the intensity of his focus. It is “best fitted for” the “expression of light passion” because it “appear[s] to have no substratum; constantly tampering with the morals without offending the decency. As the language for what was called modern genteel comedy all other nations must yield to them.” But “in the English,” there is that which is “possessed by no other modern language, and which appropriate[s] it to the Drama” (LoLi: 290–1).

Coleridge's habit of conducting warfare between England and France on literary terrain is documented in recent scholarship on him. Contradicting prior assurances that “he never could agree that any language was unfit for Poetry,” Coleridge in this lecture implies what he later comes out and says: the French language is “wholly unfit for Poetry.”

Two results of the foregoing analysis of Coleridge's plays prove useful in evaluating theatre criticism by the best-known romantic writers on theatre, William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and Charles Lamb. As with the content of plays in Coleridge's second stage, these men's theatre criticism evaluates acting and the proper nature of acts through categories of gender. Like the plays, it devotes special attention to the activity of female characters as part of cultural reflections on the French Revolution. But while Coleridge's plays arrive at their scrutiny on women through an interdiction on commanding geniuses like Napoleon, romantic theatre criticism departs from the fact that the most commanding performer of the day is a woman, Sarah Siddons. Both bodies of work register profound ambivalence toward the increased visibility of female actors in this age. Like Zapolya, theatre criticism capitalizes on this visibility while seeking to eliminate it from the public sphere.

The second result concerns the formal status of Zapolya as Coleridge's most theatrical because feminocentric play and the play that terminates his involvement with theatre. It foregrounds the antitheatricalism of these men's writings on theatre and its inseparability from sexual politics. This strain in the work of Hazlitt, Hunt, and Lamb comes as more of a surprise than in Coleridge's, since, unlike with him, their enthusiasm for theatre is widely acknowledged. Equally surprising, perhaps, is the suggestion that misogyny shapes their antitheatrical impulses, for their antitheatricalism is generally restricted to the idea of representing Shakespeare.

In the Theatre of Romanticism dwells on the wish embedded in this narrative of the growth of a romantic poet's mind. It sees as characteristic Wordsworth's wish for drama in recounting his experience of the French Revolution and analyzes the impulse toward theatre in all five of the canonical poets when accounting for their illusions regarding national and aesthetic reform. Not only “less guarded” words but “livelier shapes” enhance the fancy-work of refashioning individual patriots and collective dreams. But this book also sees as symptomatic the disavowal of drama and theatre accompanying virtually every romantic accounting of mind. For Wordsworth's wish ignores the site that perpetually reveals the “errors into which [he] fell,” not simply in applauding the drama unfolding in France but anticipating applause first at Drury Lane and then Covent Garden for his tragedy The Borderers. In linking revolution and drama, the wish of The Prelude captures the canonical poets' reactions to both. Their imagined futures recompose the past: either past errors in endorsing revolution and the stage (the task of the first generation), or errors of the past that, according to the second generation, necessitate social revolution and theatrical reform.