ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book considers the variety of positions Shakespeare's female characters assume outside and the wide range of places they inhabit. Representing a woman as a traitorous criminal or disguised princess, anonymous orphan, pitiful prisoner, or downtrodden exile, Shakespeare reveals how her expulsion can be religious, political, sexual, or economic. The book analyzes how women's alleged "illiteracy" often disguised a secret and subversive talent with letters and resistance to the work of the male writers around them. It also analyzes women's continued capacity to uproot themselves, to recover family in their travels and deploy power in their experiences abroad even while they remain uncomfortable and unsettled, uncommitted to new homes or states. The book argues that Shakespeare's plays link female characters' agency with their mobility and thus represent women as abject inmates only uneasily occupying domestic space, their ties to the household tenuous and threatening and less important.
