Shakespeare wrote in the Elizabethan age, so naturally he based most of his plays on the morals and social standards of the time. During the Elizabethan period noble women were expected to be married off to rich, socially acceptable men. Fathers choose the men they considered “suitable” for their daughters, aiming to marry them off to higher social circles to levitate their own. Men were considered the bread winners of the family and women inferior to them. It was thought unconventional for women to make important decisions for themselves, they were incapable and therefore men where to make their decisions for them, not just regarding their marriage.…
In the books ‘Of Mice and Men’ and ‘Macbeth’ both author/writer have presented women through the corresponding eras of where the setting of the book is and the time when the author wrote and published these two books. Steinbeck showed us how women were treated in 1930s using the character Curley’s Wife, whilst Shakespeare uses the character Lady Macbeth to present women in the 1600s. In this essay I will explain how these characters and women at the time have been presented by their author/play-writers.…
A Feminist Lens in MacBeth MacBeth written by Shakespeare can be viewed through a feminist lens. Lady MacBeth and the witches are very strong important characters in MacBeth. When Shakespeare wrote this, feminism wasn’t a huge important aspect at the time, but he wrote it based on what he thought of women. Witches are often thought to be evil or mean, and Lady MacBeth was portrayed as a character who was very strong and could easily manipulate other people.…
In past years women have played a role economically, politically, and socially, therefore having a huge impact on the way they are perceived in literary works. Women have been oppressed and undermined by men for centuries, thus creating feminist criticism within literature. Mary Wollstonecraft author of, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, highlights the inequalities between the sexes. For example, men were seen as freethinkers that ruled and changed the world for better, while women were recognized as pretty objects that bear children and took care of household duties. In Shakespeare's Hamlet, the women in the play are portrayed as extremely weak, passive, and submissive, illustrating the power dynamics between men and women.…
Feminism did not begin in any organized form until 1848 with the Seneca Falls convention, and “women began to realise that in order to transform society they would need their own organisations to do so”(Greenberg). Knowing this, it is obvious that feminism did not exist during Shakespeare’s era, and he was essentially doing something no one had ever had the gall to attempt before. In The Taming of the Shrew, he created a strong willed woman who voiced her opinions and refused to be married off like a object. Most notable in this play is how Shakespeare presents the men; each one in the play is powerful, wealthy, handsome, or a combination of the three, as there is no man that does not have some ability to get what he wants. Yet Shakespeare uses extreme amount of humor, much of it crude due to his being influenced by Marlowe, and intelligent female characters to make the men seem like egotistical idiots. It may have been a social norm to act like an arrogant fool in the Renaissance, but as time goes on and Shakespeare’s plays only become more popular, it becomes more and more obvious that the men and women in the novel are on completely different intelligence levels. Although having only two female characters, The Taming of the Shrew passes the Bechdel Test, which is a social…
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) probably didn't know the impact of his words writing "Hamlet" would affect the history of literature, playwriting and poetry. Written at the peak of his career, it's considered his masterpiece and the most controversial of his works, not only because of its philosophical insights into human nature but for showing the reality of the political system during Elizabethan times and the abuse of power. If Shakespeare portrays these issues through strong male characters and their concerns about life, he on the other hand portrayed women still in the way they were supposed to behave and act. Elizabethan women were submissive, subservient to men and they had no voice other than 'I do' the day they married. Such a paradox, as the chief of state at the time was Elizabeth I, considered almost as a supreme being and who intentionally never got married because that would've made her the consort of the King and therefore she would've lost her authority for issues far more domestic. This submission and the fact that they were also dependant on their men relatives made them the perfect tool to forge alliances with powerful families normally through arranged marriages.…
And it just so happened that they created the stereotypical setup of how they thought women acted by displaying their biased, opinioned portrayals in a production. “Feminist critics have considered the implications of this complex sexual impersonation, arguing that representation of females by males reinforced stereotypes of women found in many Elizabethan plays,” (Wilson and Goldfarb, p. 183) For starters, women were portrayed in plays as weak, vulnerable, and even as whores in many production. In some productions women were called dim-witted and played off as prostitutes. It did not help much either that the reason they were kept off the stage in the first place was because society viewed women on the same ranks as whores already. “Most historians believe that the absence of female performers was a continuation of a medieval English tradition and also a result of the religious attitude toward actresses: it was contended that actresses were little better than whores.” (Wilson and Goldfarb, p. 183) Women were not worthy enough to act, thus allowing men to further generate societal gender stereotypes against women on the…
Since the Renaissance, when Shakespeare born and wrote his works, many of the plays and literature styles have gained wide popularity among the readers and influenced many of the readers and the critics. Furthermore, people often say, it is widely believed at this time that role of males stand completely opposite to that of females; however, through the play of Hamlet, Shakespeare portrays a complex representation of human beings including femininity in its protagonist and title character, prince Hamlet. The Women in Literature and Life Assembly states in one of their articles, “Defining masculine and feminine characteristics allowed writers like Shakespeare to draw males with certain ‘feminine’ characteristics and females with certain ‘masculine’…
There are many reasons why boys would play the female roles throughout the 1800s during Shakespeare's influence over the theatre. Young boys would often play the parts of women in Shakespeare plays and an entrance into an acting career. Often there would be only around 4 actors performing in one production at a time therefore multi rolling was common and each actor had to be versatile. Audience members gave positive impressions of the quality of the acting of boy players.…
Shakespeare found the story of Venus and Adonis in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a poem in fifteen books that retells more than two hundred pagan myths of transformation. Velasco describes in her study, the fascination and popularity of mythology in the Elizabethan period. “Elizabethans were fascinated by stories about gods who loved, but could not pursue the loveliest object of their desire, without experiencing terrible transformations in doing so. These stories represented the natural way of expressing the processes of human feelings, especially the anguish of love.” In Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare shapes his poem so that it might in some respects communicate more closely to a Petrarchan norm. When Ovid’s Venus is dazzled by Adonis she resolves to appeal him by feigning an interest in his favorite sport. By donning hunting gear and resolutely chasing rabbits, she successfully captures the gorgeous huntsman. Shakespeare’s Venus, in a much more forthright fashion, is desperately attracted to the young Adonis who, unlike Ovid’s, being more interested in the art of hunting, remains unresponsive to Venus’ charms. Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis was Ovidian in technique, however Shakespeare’s originality is in the way he retold and reworks the main source. Shakespeare’s concentration was psycological; he appeared to be more interested in exploring the lover’s mental state under the stress of emotion and desire which entail produced an extraordinary drawing-out of action. Ovid spends about eighty-five lines on Adonis, beginning with a brisk description of his birth and ending with an equally succinct account of his metamorphoses into an anemone flower. Shakespeare manages to devote almost twelve hundred lines to the last twenty-four hours of Adonis’s life. (Greenblatt, Cohen, Howard and Maus 630) Shakespeare’s revisions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses exaggerate the effects of this transposition. He attributes some traditionally masculine traits to his heroin and feminine traits to…
The Elizabethan era may have only lasted for 45 years, but it brought forth a blossoming of literature, and changed the way that people viewed themselves and their society. The gender specific roles in the Golden Age may have not suited the people of today, but in the 1500’s they were acknowledged and seen as a common practice. During the Elizabethan era, diverse family and societal roles were demonstrated through men, women, and children.…
Finally, near the end of the play, Emilia realizes “we must think men are not gods” (3.4.144). Although she knows her correct role in society in order to be accepted, she has come to see the lack of equality between men and women. She understands that in order to be presented to society, they must put on an act for their husbands. They do not need to think of them as gods, but must treat them as they are. She now believes that a woman being referred to as “whore” (4.3.74) is not tolerable. When something goes wrong, the men should not have the power to put the blame on the women. Emilia comes to this realization when she speaks her mind to Desdemona and says “But I do think it is their husbands’ faults / If wives do fall” (4.3.87-88). This is foreshadowing the fate of both woman’s lives in the play. They both die by “faults” of their husbands. “The ultimate irony in the play’s representation of male-female relations is the fact that two women accused by their husbands of “falling” morally, actually fall not morally but physically, before [their] eyes” (Vanita 352). In a…
Shakespeare’s eminent play, Romeo and Juliet is a classic love story. Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet are two young kids who fall in love. Their families have an on-going feud and cannot stand each other. The two star-crossed lovers rush to their marriage and end this family feud through an unexpected turn of events. Shakespeare writes this novel to criticize and exaggerate young love. In the novel, Romeo and Juliet, written by William Shakespeare, young love is made to seem impulsive through how rapidly the two characters manage to “fall in love”, the roles in which each gender takes, and the brevity of the play entirely.…
The Giver is an example of dystopian literature, because they don’t allow people to make their own choices. Differences were hated so much that they made them only see black and white. The elders don’t know anything about the real world like war or starvation. The elders control the people of the civilizations food rations. The elders live in a community where when you get too old, or if you don’t comfort yourself as an infant, or if you’re the smaller of twins, or if you want to leave then you are released (killed off).…
Shakespeare enforces the idea that for a woman to be different, she is an outsider, for example in Macbeth the witches are seen to be outcasts of society. Macbeth refers to them as “imperfect speakers”, the emphasis on the word “imperfect” suggests that Macbeth believes the witches are inferior to him and what they say shouldn’t be taken seriously. Shakespeare gives the idea to the audience that there is a ‘perfect’ speaker, someone who can manipulate him that he respects and listens to. Perhaps his ‘perfect’ speaker is Lady Macbeth, despite the fact that she is a woman Macbeth recognises and acknowledges her thirst for power. Not only are the witches’ outcasts to society, they are also women, who in the Jacobean era would have been considered as the underclass and inferior to men. Women with the power to determine the fate of a higher class man would have been seen as something quite disturbing to a renaissance audience, a woman’s duty was to marry and have and take care of children not to govern the life of a man.…