During Shakespeare’s time, women lived in a patriarchal society where they were limited in power and dependent on men. Women in this society were expected to be submissive and to let men pave their path to a successful life by being passive. For Rosalind and Celia, the two main women in Shakespeare’s comedic play As You Like It, their identities through their disguises challenge this social construct by elevating their power as women rather than weakening them by allowing them to explore multiple facets of their behaviors that they could not do before. Despite being belittled by the male characters, such as Touchstone or Duke Ferdinand, Rosalind and Celia do not allow the men to suppress or influence their identities. These independent …show more content…
This shows how both Rosalind and Celia possess more power and authority than the weak men in this play. When Rosalind falls in love with Orlando, she falls into the traditional female category by becoming weak for a man. However, rather than making her weak, this love elevates her control because through her disguise, she is allowed to order Orlando to meet her every day in the forest. Rosalind, as Ganymede, says, “I would cure you if you / would but call me Rosalind and come every day to / my cote and woo me” (3.3.433-435). Her claim of being able to cure him, as well as giving him a command, presents her as an empowered woman, despite her behaviors indicating that she is a traditional woman by falling in love and becoming dependent on a man. Rosalind’s disguise presents her the opportunity to exercise an advantage of giving orders that she is not privileged to have as a woman. In contrast, Celia also demonstrates how she can command men around. Before departing to the forest, she enlists Touchstone to join them. Celia acknowledges that she does not need the help of others to be in control; she is confident enough to be “alone to woo him” (1.3.140). These women demonstrate how they are not afraid to venture into the natural world and how they have more strength than the
From the bitter Emilia to the pious Isabella, Shakespeare was a champion of crafting women. With a wide range of personalities, professions, and situations, Shakespeare mastered early in his illustrious career the art of creating diverse, dynamic, and multidimensional female characters. When stepping outside the traditional roles for female characters in theater, Shakespeare pushed boundaries by giving his women intelligent wit, innate humor, motives and goals which the Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences could relate directly to their own experiences. More than anything else, Shakespeare created a race of theatrical females who were first and foremost described as complete human women with virtues and vices which were believable and realistic. With these attributes, Shakespeare’s women were able to perceive unequal distributions of power in their worlds, particularly the distribution of power in the romantic relationships which in many cases were chosen for them. Comprehending with a bitter distaste the lack of control they held over their future lives, the women of Shakespeare took matters into their own hands more often than not, utilizing revolutionary or unconventional means to gain dominance in the power dynamics of their relationships. William Shakespeare offered his female characters the abilities and opportunities to recognize their subordinate positions concerning romantic relationships as well as the initiative to attempt a shift in these power dynamics.
names - ""and I'll no longer be a Capulet" - to be together. Giving up
As You Like It is a typical Elizabethan comedy. There are puns galore, and plenty of dramatic irony to drive the plot forward. The title is even a reference to how the play ends – with a giant wedding uniting three couples the way an audience would like it. While on the surface Shakespeare’s As You Like It may seem like a straightforward play, there are a few different examples of power dynamics strung throughout: the most obvious being the power struggle between Dukes Ferdinand and Senior. More interestingly, the play dives into social and cultural norms at the time to display the power dynamic. This is displayed in the familial ties between Orlando and Oliver, as well as with Rosalind and Celia. It is also
Shakespeare's As You Like It is a good play for anyone to read or see. Some readers would enjoy one aspect of it, some would enjoy another. But all would, in general, enjoy the play. Albert Gilman says that Shakespeare intended to imply that all that people need to live together in harmony is "good sense, love, humor, and a generous disposition." (Gilman lxvii) This play is deeper than the surface, and that is part of its appeal to every kind of person.
In a romantic forest setting, rich with the songs of birds, the fragrance of fresh spring flowers, and the leafy hum of trees whistling in the wind, one young man courts another. A lady clings to her childhood friend with a desperate and erotic passion, and a girl is instantly captivated by a youth whose physical features are uncannily feminine. Oddly enough, the object of desire in each of these instances is the same person. In As You Like It, William Shakespeare explores the homoerotic possibilities of his many characters. At the resolution he establishes a tenuous re-affirmation of their heterosexuality. In this essay I will show how individual characters flirt with their homoerotic inclinations, and finally reject these impulses in favor of the traditional and socially accepted heterosexual lifestyle. I will explore male to male eroticism through the all-male court in the forest and through Orlando's attraction to Ganymede. I will inspect female to female attraction through Celia's attachment to Rosalind and through Phebe's instant attraction to the effeminate boy, Ganymede.
Often times in society, people have a set image of what roles specific people should have, especially when it comes to men versus women. The love between men and women is often a complicated position to be in and the way society places gender roles on people does not make it any easier. In the play Twelfth Night, Shakespeare utilizes character’s romantic relationships in order to portray the standards that society places on gender roles. Shakespeare uses the characters Olivia and Viola to show how women are often given gender roles, showing that women can have power over men, and that women have the ability to be strong and fight for what they want even if it means breaking a few rules along the way.
Shakespeare, one of the most famous play writers in history, wrote Macbeth in 1606. Many women were not allowed to perform in plays during that time period; however, Shakespeare did have very few females act out roles in his play (Shakespeare: Sample). Shakespeare viewed his women as strong-willed individuals (“Macbeth.” 227 ) when in reality they were often gone unrecognized (Women in Anglo). The character, Lady Macbeth, was a frightening, ambitious woman. Lady Macbeth often wished to “unsex herself” to carry out the killing of King Duncan on her own as her husband showed no manly characteristics to do it. Women during the Anglo-Saxon time period however, were way different then the way Shakespeare viewed his women during his time period.
In Shakespeare's As You Like It loyalty is dominant theme. Each character possesses either a loyalty or disloyalty towards another. These disloyalties and loyalties are most apparent in the relationships of Celia and Rosalind, Celia and Duke Fredrick, Orlando and Rosalind, Adam and Orlando, and Oliver and Orlando. In these relationships, a conflict of loyalties causes characters to change homes, jobs, identities and families.
At the heart of this courtship is a very complex ambiguity which it is difficult fully to appreciate without a production to refer to. But here we have a man (the actor) playing a woman (Rosalind), who has dressed herself up as a man (Ganymede), and who is pretending to be a woman (Rosalind) in the courtship game with Orlando. Even if, in modern times, Rosalind is not played by a young male actor, the theatrical irony is complex enough.
As Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, the fiction was set in the Renaissance era and therefore the persona of women was reflective of that period. The natural stereotype of that time viewed women as weak, fickle, and dependent of the men in their society and subject to the decisions that men make for them. It was an exceedingly common depiction and very rarely was it proven wrong to the men of that time. Women’s rights were nonexistent in this time period so it wasn’t unusual for the portrayal of women to be so negative and offensive. Given that women of that age had known nothing else they attempted to fit the stereotype to please the ‘natural order’.
In the Elizabethan society, it was expected for women to be obedient and to be in her place.
... Critical Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987) 43. For further discussion on renaissance gender performance and identity politics among Shakespeare's cross-dressed heroines, see Michael Shapiro's Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages (Ann Arbor: The University of MIchigan Press, 1994).
Nor does it seem a coincidence that while disguised, each woman rebels against the social structure which prohibits her from doing certain things and making certain decisions simply because she is a woman. Under male disguises, the women are able to act with the same freedoms men possess. Thus, it is plausible to suppose that Shakespeare meant to make a statement about the social hierarchy prevalent in the world in which he lived, encouraging a reevaluation of its fairness. Whatever Shakespeare meant to say about the issue, for today’s audiences, The Merchant of Venice certainly encourages questioning the justice of its male-dominated social hierarchy.
Over the course of the semester, we have read some beautiful plays from comedies to tragedies; Shakespeare’s later plays exhibited an extensively wide range of female characters from the weak, obedient to the strong, empowering woman. One of the examples of this would be Ophelia in Hamlet exhibits weak and obedient characteristics whereas Viola in Twelfth Night is a strong female role that breaks the gender roles by disguising herself as a male and proving women are equivalent to men. Even Shakespeare’s weakest female characters seem to break some of the stereotypical role of the period. For example, Ophelia does listen to her father, however, talks back to Hamlet which during the Renaissance breaks the stereotypical role. Shakespeare was an early feminist because of his nontraditional female characters; despite his weak female characters, Shakespeare still provides his female characters with some trait that follows a nontraditional role. I will focus on in this paper are King Lear, Twelfth Night, and Hamlet. I will use Hamlet to show that even the weakest of female characters have gender breaking characteristics.
William Shakespeare and the new millennium seem to be diametrically opposed, yet his works are having a renaissance of their own after 400 years in the public domain. Why have some major film producers revisited his works when their language and staging would seem to be hopelessly outdated in our society?Perhaps because unlike modern writers, who struggle with political correctness, Shakespeare speaks his mind with an uncompromising directness that has kept its relevance in this otherwise jaded world.