Abstract

This thesis is a search for female agency, unrecorded in theory and in history. My enquiry is also a bid to recover, through Shakespeare, the performative presence of the Victorian actress, Ellen Terry, hovering on the threshold of women's emancipation and our modernity. The lost female presence she represents is, I suggest, a gap in our Western social and political narrative, and in the philosophical investigations of personhood that have occupied thinkers since G. W. F. Hegel.