Female Characters, By Lisa Jar Dine, Bertram And Juliet '

Female characters do not normally go into battle or see themselves as the active partner in love. These female characters disprove the connection between femaleness and passivity, maleness and activity. This exceptional status marks appoint of difference between contemporary interpretations and our own. Once exceptions proved the rule because they were exceptional. Today they demonstrate that women may do things which have only been thought to be exceptional. Action also entails isolation for these characters, who lack political allies and genuine friends, and are compelled to reject, or are rejected by, their families. This isolation both strengthens their resolve and weakens their power. LisaJar dine suggests that the presentation of such characters is carefully managed, since "it is a matter of considerable patriarchal importance for social stability to celebrate brilliant exceptions to the female 'rule' only reluctantly, and then as exceptions".1 In fact the plays cannot so carefully control their own significance, although it is true that within them, female characters may have the power of action without necessarily altering the status quo. The plays make it clear that France and England need Joan and Margaret, Helen ought to catch Bertram and Juliet is right not to marry Paris. But their assertiveness is are placement of, not a rival to, men's authority. Charles Frey sees such exceptions as "heroic exceptions to the more general rule of depressing male dominationThere is also a more optimistic
Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of
Shakespeare, secondedn., Harvester Wheat sheaf, Hemel Hempstead, 1989, pp. 56 - 7.

2- Charles Frey,' "O sacred, shadowy, cold, said constant queen": Shakespeare's Imperiled and
Chastening Daughters of Romance', in Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, & Carol
Thomas Neely, The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticismloj'Shakespeare, University of Illinois
Press, Urbana, 1980, pp. 295 - 313, p.