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How women are portrayed in Shakespeare plays
Characterization of women in Shakespeare
How women are portrayed in Shakespeare plays
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The Duchess in John Webster’s tragic play, The Duchess of Malfi, and Beatrice Joanna in Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling, are both strong women living in a male-dominated society. The two women attempt to free themselves from this subordination by choosing to love that they desire. Both pay with their lives for this chance at freedom, but differ in their moral decisions about how they attempt it. Beatrice Joanna’s plan involves murder, whereas the widowed Duchess merely lives the life she chooses, then plots to leave Malfi. Both women are forced into their actions, but, whereas Beatrice Joanna is Machiavellian in her actions, the Duchess is morally superior. Webster based his play on a real-life 16th Century scandal where a widowed Duchess remarried for love and did so beneath her class. The widowed Duchess had certain advantages and freedoms that the younger and unmarried Beatrice in The Changeling did not. The Duchess had significant wealth and independence, and she need not answer to a father or a husband. She no longer had the burden of protecting her virginity and the stigma attached if it was lost. Beatrice, on the other hand, had little sexual freedom, and she had to answer to her father and to the man to whom she was engaged. However a the Duchess, and Beatrice were doomed to subject to a patriarchal and male-dominated society. Upon her capture the Duchess declares: “I am Duchess of Malfi still” (4.2.141). She is a duchess only in name. In the end in both tragedies, it is the men –fathers, brothers, suitors, and the Church—who rule by physical force and by law. Moreover, both women are driven by their passions and further choose to defy society by attempting to love who... ... middle of paper ... ...d such harm and destruction. In the end it is Beatrice herself who says it was love that forced her to kill. She ultimately made that moral decision. She confessed to Alsemero at the play’s conclusion, To your bed scandal, I stand up innocent, Which even the guilt of one black other deed Will stand for proof of: your love has made me A cruel murd’ress (5.3.63). Therefore, our sympathies lie with the Duchess, who only desired to live the life she chose. She does her best to protect those she loves, hiding Antonio and caring for the safety of her children to the very end. She murders no one, and before her death forgives all. She is a most noble duchess and a true heroine.
During the medieval ages, women were described as evil creatures that would destroy anyone standing in their way to get what they want. People claimed that women's malicious intentions clouded their judgment from doing the right thing forcing them to be selfish. In Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and Malory’s The Death of King Arthur, both focus on women’s behavioral impulses through their dishonesty, manipulation, and their promiscuity.
According to Elizabethan society, the center of Olivia’s dilemma with her marriage was ensuring her wealth, not marrying a man she loved (Joseph 170). Social class increases division among individuals in society. This play “ is not the story of a Juliet's or an Orlando's love .., but of the very realistic struggles and intrigues over the betrothal of a rich Countess, whose selection of a mate determines the future” (170). Readers looking past these boundaries created by class and gender, can find striking similarities in emotions characters have for each other. The personal struggles the characters face in this play demonstrate the obstacles that individuals faced because of their gender or place in the social hierarchy.
While neither Machiavelli’s The Prince nor Shakespeare’s Henry V focus explicitly on gender roles, they both make assumptions and implications sufficient to illustrate their opinions about the nature and place of women in relation to men. In Machiavelli’s The Prince, men and women are depicted in traditional gender roles with women as tricky and unreliable, but ultimately yielding to men who are portrayed as tough and immovable. Shakespeare’s Henry V acknowledges these ideas, but also portrays women as able to influence events within the small domain they are given.
(Essay intro) In the modern day, women have the luxury of belonging to themselves but unfortunately this was not always the case. During his life, William Shakespeare created many positive female characters who defied the traditional gender roles and brought attention to the misogynistic patriarchy of Elizabethan England. One of these true feminist icons is ‘Much Ado about Nothing’s. Beatrice. The women in ‘Much Ado about Nothing’ defy traditional gender roles. Beatrice represents a brave and outspoken woman who defies the oppressive, traditional gender roles for the female sex. Her cousin Hero, however, represents those women who were successfully oppressed by the patriarchy and accepted the traditional gender roles without much complaint.
This is part of her “merry war” with Benedick. Beatrice appears to loathe Benedick and vice versa; they engage in many “skirmishes of wit.” However, although Beatrice appears hardened and sharp, she is vu...
... heart in the marketplace.” (A4; S1; L 315-321). When Hero was wrongly accused is when Beatrice showed this the most. She believed that because of what he had done, Claudio deserved to be dead. She wanted no bad deed to go unpunished and what she seen fit was for Benedick to challenge Claudio to a dule and she didn’t want Benedick to stop until he was dead.
The theme for honour and fidelity apply for both men and women in Shakespeare’s play ‘much ado about nothing’. Honour and fidelity is represented very differently for men and women as it would have been for the people in Elizabethan times. In this first section of the essay, I will be exploring double standards and Shakespeare’s awareness of the double standards between sexes and his feminist approach, the differences of honour and fidelity for men and women and upper class and lower class comparisons.
In medieval England, society’s roles were dominated by men and women were either kept at home or doing labor work. Among the most famous medieval English literature, “The Canterbury Tales” by Geoffrey Chaucer, lies ‘The Wife of Bath's Prologue’ and ‘The Wife of Bath's Tale.’ Within, Chaucer shares his perspective of the Wife of Bath, the Queen, and the Crone. Through the use of symbolism and diction, Chaucer aims to change society’s expectations of women.
As a man fascinated with the role of women during the 14th Century, or most commonly known as the Middle Ages, Chaucer makes conclusive evaluations and remarks concerning how women were viewed during this time period. Determined to show that women were not weak and humble because of the male dominance surrounding them, Chaucer sets out to prove that women were a powerful and strong-willed gender. In order to defend this argument, the following characters and their tales will be examined: Griselda from the Clerk's Tale, and the Wife of Bath, narrator to the Wife of Bath's Tale. Using the role of gender within the genres of the Canterbury Tales, exploring each woman's participation in the outcomes of their tales, and comparing and contrasting these two heroines, we will find out how Chaucer broke the mold on medievalist attitudes toward women.
Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem, The Canterbury Tales, contains a character that is read by some as “the epitome of the modern feminist,... takes on the men at their own game of name-dropping, and refuses to be silenced by the patriarchal powers that be” (Evans, Ruth, and Johnson 1). The Wife of Bath contains all the negative stereotypes of women portrayed by men of the Medieval time period, such as being a chatterbox and promiscuous. Which greatly contrasts the other fictional women of her time, who were silent and suppressed in literature. The Wife’s argument “offered a defence of women against their misogynist critics” (Rigby 137) of the Medieval Age. Presented as a critic who beats males at their own game, and gives her the authoritative stance
During the Renaissance, England was dominated by a repressive patriarchal culture. It was natural for women to be “submissive to men [as] they were raised to be obedient” (Kakkonen, 25); hence being seen as objects since the “patrilineal descent principle”, advocates the “absolute authority of male, the father in the family” (Kakkonen, 25). Breaking through the absolute patriarchal structures and “exposing gender as a powerful but vulnerable patriarchal construction designed to repress or contain volatile realities” shows that “the structures and strictures of gender and patriarchy are ultimately powerless” (Hunt, 49). I claim that Shakespeare intricately breaks through the hierarchal structures at the time due to subtle emancipation of his
I was gratified to see that this critic agreed with my interpretation of the Duchess’s demise, viz., the Duke had her murdered. The theory advanced by my brilliant and magnificent Professor had been that the Duke gave her so many orders and restrictions that she pined away. I had been looking at his famous line “And I choose/never to stoop.” He married her for her beauty but would never lower himself to tell her when she angered him.
...hair, she decides to kill herself because she thinks that is what Hugo would have wanted, "She climbed up on the chair, her eyes staring in front of her like a sleepwalker's... She adjusted the noose round her neck. Hugo was there to see she did what she had to do. She kicked away the chair...."(269). This shows that even though she hid her guilt, it was there all along. When she could no longer control it, she takes her own life.
is much more difficult to be a woman in power than to be a man in
In William Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” a unnatural love triangle unfolds as the leading heroine, Viola, disguises herself as a male to obscure her social class in society in order to find herself without being bound by her gender. While many of Shakespeare’s works elaborate on the traditional and religious understanding of marriage during the 1600s, “Twelfth Night” obscures these traditional motifs by creating a humanistic portrayal of love that blurs not only social class but gender as well. The determinism throughout the play demonstrates how nature imposes limitations on the characters through cause and affect. For the characters