Gender Roles and Women's Status in Shakespeare's King Lear

William Shakespeare’s King Lear, however, takes a different approach. During Shakespeare’s lifetime, the Elizabethan Era, or more commonly known as the Renaissance, life for men and women differed greatly from what people are used to today. For example, during that era only young boys had the privilege of being educated in a school, women had arranged marriages, women were considered the property of the head of their household, whether that was their father or their husband. In addition, women were to believed to “perform their genders” (Silver), meaning that how behaved during that time period was not their true selves, but an act for approval from their husbands and fathers. Women were also greatly disregarded, not having much, if any, say in their own lives. While not all of these issues have been solved, even as of 2017, there has been an large amount of improvement. It is easy to see then, why Shakespeare wrote his female characters the way he did, particularly the ones in King Lear.

Goneril and Regan, empowered women by their own work, were evil, conniving women who both ended up dead by their own faults. Cordelia, while she also ended up dead, was killed through no fault of her own and her death was not a cause of her unnatural disobedience. This was the women’s main roles within King Lear; to display the result of disobedient women as well as provide an acceptable example of reasonable feminism. Though this work was not to get carried away, even then the female protagonist ended up dead in the end. Within early literature there will always be those whose female characters are static. However, in some cases, there are authors that offer a female character with a refreshing take on a woman’s plight; that instead of simply being a man’s property with no thoughts or wants of their own, women are capable of so much