Women Don't Exist in Their Own Right in the Play

In the time `Hamlet' was performed, the Elizabethan audience would not have believed in equality for women, so the play seems far more sexist to us, the modern audience, than it ever would have to the Elizabethans. In our lifetimes women are viewed as equals to men, women can have a job and don't have to take orders from the men in their family. As Paul Thomas says in `Authority and Disorder in Tudor times', `It would seem that the least dignified, that of uncomplicated submission in a brutally male world, was a standard and sensible policy for most females for most of the time'. In Shakespearian times women were viewed only as one of two extremes, whores or virgins. Paul Thomas talks about a bishop in Elizabethan times named Aylmer, who said that one type of woman was `foolish, wanton, witless, without council, rash, proud, worse-minded', amongst other things, he also described a virtuous kind of woman and this emphasises how women were viewed as one of two extremes. Paul Thomas also quotes Patricia Crawford as saying, `When, in practice, women stepped outside the clearly defined boundaries which had been drawn, they challenged fundamental axioms of social life in ways which men found socially subversive and deeply threatening to their sexuality.' Queen Elizabeth even banned women from visiting universities, as she thought they would distract the students, who were of course mostly male. Queen Elizabeth admitted that she believed she was a man in a woman's body, because she was nothing like what the stereotypical female of that time was, frail and dependant. She was a strong-stomached woman, `I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and body of a King'. Many modern critics claim th...

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...he female characters. He uses her and Ophelia to represent the warped view at that time of women as callous sexual predators, and also as innocent fragile beings who were dependant on men. Ophelia and Gertrude are both led by their male counterparts. However Ophelia seems to embody all that is good and complete pureness, she does not know anything of the harsh realities of life at the beginning of the play, unlike Gertrude who has experienced death of a loved one and is not seen to be pure at all. Through Ophelia we see Hamlet's evolution, into a man who believed all women are whores and corrupt, into an insane person, like herself. She has the potential to be a tragic heroine but instead she falls apart and goes mad. I feel that Ophelia exists very much in her own right, but she is repressed and controlled by her father and Hamlet, and this is her downfall.