William Shakespeare has many interesting female characters throughout all of his different types of works. Some of his women are leading ladies while others are just supporting characters that help move the story along. No matter the depth of the characters’ role, each lady gives some type of unthinkable personality trait that would be unique to women during Shakespeare’s time. Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear all have female characters that portray women who wouldn’t be seen during the time of William Shakespeare’s writing. It took creativity and skill for Shakespeare to get his characters around the censor who would check the plays. His female characters are strong, but not overtly so. He gives them characteristics of his time, but also gives them new traits one wouldn’t normally see in the women of his time.
During the time of William Shakespeare, it was very immoral to court a woman on stage. This may become a problem for a play-write, but this problem was solved with one simple solution: have men play the women. When males play females on stage, the reader of a future generation may see some homosexual tones. During this era, this would be completely normal. When the plays were performed, there were rarely any women in the audience. The groundlings, people who couldn’t pay for seats high up, were predominately male. On occasion, the females that were in the audience were whores and prostitutes. Women were rarely workers, they were meant to be homemakers and mothers. Women had a hypocrisy when it came to the rules of who they could marry. In reality, men could marry whoever they wanted. Men could marry above their social class and most controversially, under their social class. The same cannot be said for wo...
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...The one the other poisoned for my sake and after slew herself” (5.3.214-216). His comments just go to show what kind of women these girls were just by the personality of the man they fell in love with.
Being a women in Shakespeare’s time seems as if it is nothing to be proud of. Women were treated poorly, almost like second class citizens. William Shakespeare did give women a bit of a voice and shed a new light on them through his plays. He showed that women could be strong, smart, and even showed that they could be violent and cruel. This would be a huge contrast to the quiet subordinate women he was used to seeing. Shakespeare contrasted the type of women he knew to the type of women he thought the world would never see.
Works Cited
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Macbeth. Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1915. Google Books. Web. 3 Sept. 2015.
Upon reading Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and Henry V, I have noticed that the issue of gender ideology and identity has been an intriguing study in both Shakespearean comedies and histories. These traditional Western views have, in a sense deemed which roles are appropriate and socially acceptable, in regards to both males and females. This practice of ‘social typecasting’ has given men and women certain socially acceptable characteristics, which has influenced how they should think and act. In this essay I take an in-depth look regarding how Shakespeare dealt with gender identity, and if certain characters in The Taming of the Shrew and Henry V accepted their socially predetermined gender identity or if they rejected it.
Neely, Carol Thomas. “Shakespeare’s Women: Historical Facts and Dramatic Representations.” Shakespeare’s Personality. Ed. Norman N. Holland, Sidney Homan, and Bernard J. Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. 116-134.
The way the men acted and treated the women in the play was an over exaggeration of how things actually were back then, and this contributed to the comedic aspect of the play. In a way, Shakespeare seemed like he was trying to get a point across to the audience, to let them know how absurd sexism really is, and how easy things would be if it were to not
Imagine being a woman in sixteenth century Europe. Females were raised to believe that they were subservient and that men knew better on any subject. Basically, women had no rights. They were considered property, first “owned” by their fathers and then control was “transferred” to the husband chosen for them. Marriage was not about love, but in most cases, it was a business deal that was mutually beneficial to both families – an interesting fact is that like young women, most young men had no choice in the selection of their future betrothed. These traditions and the gender roles assumed by men and women at that time had an impact on Shakespeare’s writing and performances and a great example of this is evident in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Imagine a world where women were completely subservient to men. Imagine what it would be like to live in a society where women were home-schooled, and not allowed to attend any type of university. What would today’s society be like if women lawyers, doctors, actors, and military soldiers were nonexistent? It would be a modern day version of the Elizabethan era in England. This was a time period where women had little rights, but the dramatic arts flourished due to Queen Elizabeth’s appreciation for them. It was during this time period that literary genius William Shakespeare wrote his many plays including The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. Living in this time period caused him to look at women in a somewhat submissive way and portray them as so.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Macbeth. Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1915. Google Books. Web. 3 Sept. 2015.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Macbeth. Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1915. Google Books. Web. 3 Sept. 2015.
Shakespeare was clearly ahead of his time with his view of women. He likely drew inspiration for his female characters from Elizabeth I, the English monarch at the time. Like Beatrice, Elizabeth I was a strong and very independent woman, she was the sole ruler of England during her reign as she never married. Elizabeth I was a strong ruler, defying the traditional gender roles for women, which Shakespeare would have drawn from for his characters.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Macbeth. Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1915. Google Books. Web. 3 Sept. 2015.
...These characters all show traits of wittiness, determination and strength. The traits Queen Elizabeth expressed as she ruled England, a single woman taking on a man’s job. Shakespeare included these characters in his play because he knew the Queen would enjoy seeing characters that portrayed her; it showed a sign a respect towards her. The Queen supported the theatre and Shakespeare in his work. Shakespeare thanks her by giving her females characters leads in his play with characteristics of her reflected in them. Queen Elizabeth ruled throughout Shakespeare’s life so it would influence him in his writings. She showed him through her rulings that she was a feminist. She did whatever it took to get what she wanted and to rule her country, she showed fierceness and compassion. Shakespeare took these characteristics and portrayed them in his female characters.
During the times in which Shakespeare lived, women had certain roles which ensured they were a permanent underclass to men. In Women in Shakespeare’s world by Theresa D. Kemp, Kemp states that “The roles of early modern women included daughters and wives, sisters and mothers; they learned and worked and played but for the most part they were not expected to be school girls (whining or otherwise) As women they were expected to be the slightly beautiful beloved and not the balladeer. Women were not seen as fit to play soldier or the judge. And as keepers of the homes and the households, as in our own time, women withdrawn from a “world too wide” ( 29). This quote from Kemp shows how victorian women were seen a just a pretty face to do as told. They were to be obedient and non opinionated. A woman of that time period was very objectified and used, basically women weren't real people.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Macbeth. Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1915. Google Books. Web. 3 Sept. 2015.
Throughout the historical literary periods, many writers underrepresented and undervalued the role of women in society, even more, they did not choose to yield the benefits of the numerous uses of the female character concerning the roles which women could accomplish as plot devices and literary tools. William Shakespeare was one playwright who found several uses for female characters in his works. Despite the fact that in Shakespeare's history play, Richard II, he did not use women in order to implement the facts regarding the historical events. Instead, he focused the use of women roles by making it clear that female characters significantly enriched the literary and theatrical facets of his work. Furthermore in Shakespeare’s history play, King Richard II, many critics have debated the role that women play, especially the queen. One of the arguments is that Shakespeare uses the queen’s role as every women’s role to show domestic life and emotion. Jo McMurtry explains the role of all women in his book, Understanding Shakespeare’s England A Companion for the American Reader, he states, “Women were seen, legally and socially, as wives. Marriage was a permanent state” (5). McMurtry argues that every woman’s role in the Elizabethan society is understood to be a legal permanent state that is socially correct as wives and mothers. Other critics believe that the role of the queen was to soften King Richard II’s personality for the nobles and commoners opinion of him. Shakespeare gives the queen only a few speaking scenes with limited lines in Acts two, four, and five through-out the play. Also, she is mentioned only a few times by several other of the characters of the play and is in multiple scenes wit...
As we all know, gender inequality is a social issue that has been addressed over the years and has however, given rise to other issues such as misogyny, feminism, male sovereignty, female oppression and criticism, and the list goes on. Most times, especially during the Elizabethan era, before feminists began to fight for their rights as women, women were viewed as substandard when compared to men and they were classified more as possessions rather than as people. These gender biased opinions were developed under the reign of Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare’s explicit exhibition of this fact in his plays can be traced to the circumstances at which the society was at that time. Shakespeare shared this opinion and had few female characters in his works and even when he did have them, he portrays them as either “deceivers”, for example Cleopatra in “Anthony and Cleopatra” and Cressida in “Troilus and Cressida” or better still, he just cuts off the female role in the plays. Even if it appears as though Shakespeare exhibited a form of short shrift towards women in his works, we are however in no position to judge his beliefs concerning whether or not he had a hatred for women because it might just appear so because of the occurrences in the time at which he made his works, a time where the unsympathetic treatment of women was just a customary trend. We are however, uncertain as to whether Shakespeare’s display of sexism in The Tempest is intentional or not. However, I personally think most times it is unintentional, because sometimes he presents his female characters very outstanding roles, just like Miranda.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Macbeth. Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1915. Google Books. Web. 3 Sept. 2015.