Gender And Sexuality In The Birds And The Buzzkills

With social and cultural stereotypes in this era, men were viewed as more powerful while women were portrayed as weak. William Shakespeare tries to interpret the roles between genders by having characters of the opposite sex. In the play Macbeth, William Shakespeare uses rhetorical devices to demonstrate Macbeth’s and Lady Macbeth’s switch in traditional gender roles, which arise from the consequences for each character’s actions and speech.

Shakespeare uses female characters in his plays to illustrate a point or affect the plot, just like in Richard III. The world that Shakespeare shows us in Richard III is a man's world. Women are presented as being on the sidelines to grieve, complain, or bury the dead. Richard views women as instruments, as shown when he announces his plots to the audience. For example, the marriage with Anne and Elizabeth are only moves in his quest of intrigue and power. There are three main females characters that affect the plot with their interactions with the main character. They are Anne, Queen Elizabeth and Queen Margaret.

Shakespeare uses language to explore the controversial gender roles. His use of two distinctively opposing female

Shakespeare's use of cross dressing and deceitfulness extends beyond the actual writings in the plays and goes onto the stage. Women were not allowed to perform on stage in Shakespeare's time. ."..all the great women's roles in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, from Juliet and Lady Macbeth to the duchess of Malfi, were written to be

Gender, is it preordained or learned? With today’s society there are many complexities when trying to understand gender and what it really means to define it. The stereotypes of what are femininity and masculinity have been set for ages. Who is to say that everyone should or will fall into a stereotype? Women don’t have to wear dresses and enjoy shopping, men don’t have to play sports and be rugged, and not all do. In the essay “Rooster at the Hitchin’ Post” the author, David Sedaris, uses both himself and his brother as examples to show that Sedaris suggests that gender is how you chose to be. Having similar experiences as a child not being able to meet up to female

Women in Shakespearian plays have always had important roles. Whether they create the main conflicts and base of the plays, or bring up interesting proper and cultural questions, they have always been put in challenging situations. Some women are stronger than others, and their effect on the play is different for each one. One woman who plays a very important role in Shakespeare's plays is Cleopatra, in Antony and Cleopatra. Cleopatra is the dominant force in the play. Cleopatra takes on masculine qualities such as being bold, `alternative masculinity' and manhood of stronger determination. She is also viewed as a perfectionist. During the play many critics notice that Cleopatra and Antony switch roles, by Cleopatra acting more masculine, and Antony acting more feminine. Antony becomes jealous of Cleopatra because sometimes she acts more masculine than he does. Cleopatra is not dependant on anyone. Some critics say that Shakespeare discriminated against women because of his actions. He did not allow women to have a role in his play, nor let them have any say in his writings. He had boys or men play the parts of women until later on in his playwriting. Shakespeare favored men during his time period and was also very sexist.

Others have asserted that the roles of women in his plays were prominent for the time and culture that he lived in,his intent in creating characters to inspire much controversy. Two works, Taming of the Shrew, and Twelfth Night, stand out particularly well in regards to Shakespeare's use of female characters. If you could examine these two plays, you would see that Shakespeare, though conforming to contemporary attitudes of women, circumvented them by creating resolute female characters with a strong sense of self.

Shakespeare writes about themes that are still relevant because his theme of gender is still seen in modern societies. In Macbeth gender is explored when Lady Macbeth questions her husband’s manhood in order to persuade him to kill Duncan. She says that if he can kill in war, he can kill now. Lady Macbeth also wishes that she could be unsexed. In modern societies we see that many people question their own gender and wish that they too could be of

Shakespeare uses gender as a form of deceit, because Viola uses her gender as a disguise. Shakespeare uses dramatic irony throughout the play to show that Viola is not who she says she is, for example

Throughout Shakespeare’s works (most of them), we see Shakespeare challenging the system in some way, but we also often see a resolution that conforms to the cultural ideas of that time period. One of the issues I see throughout a lot of his plays is the challenging of gender norms; primarily focusing on King Lear, I would argue that Shakespeare uses King Lear to challenge the gender norms of that time period by giving power to women, but due to the time period, I also argue that giving women power results in negative consequences as resolutions to the play. Combining all of my arguments, I would say that Shakespeare challenges gender norms, but ultimately gets influenced by cultural ideals that are present at that time, which results in an ending that conforms to gender/cultural ideals that support masculinity as dominance.

Throughout time, the roles that women have in marriage, education, rights, and in the workplace have changed greatly. The roles that women had in Shakespeare's time, were to do anything and everything for their husband, if married. There are many things that men were allowed to do that if a women tried,

Main Idea: Shakespeare was not a sexist: All though the main three females in the play were seen as important and contributed tremendously towards the plot of the play. The readers see Shakespeare pushing the ideology of men and women being equal with the slow occurrence of many plots towards the play, and how it all unravels itself. These were proven in the play by when;

William Shakespeare wrote his works in a time where several societal norms were firmly entrenched in the attitudes and behaviour of the people of the time, and opposition to these norms was often met with controversy. Shakespeare, a progressive playwright for his time, explored and pushed the boundaries of these norms with two of his plays: Macbeth and Twelfth Night. These two plays explore the gender roles expected at the time and its subversion, the great chain of being and the consequences of its disruption, the boundaries between genders, the divine right of kings, heteronormativity, and the supernatural.

Female characters, whether they are mothers, sisters, daughters, or lovers, are used as essential roles in every play written by William Shakespeare. In the beginning of both plays, Twelfth Night and Othello, we see strong-willed ladies. Shakespeare enjoys giving women powerful minds and hearts in his works. I think that the female character development between these two plays is that women have the ability to be dominant in a man’s world, but can also lose themselves by becoming submissive to men. While Shakespeare wrote the later play with concepts about consequences of jealousy and not trusting a loved one, he used Twelfth Night to be an example to men to have more compassion for women.

Shakespearean tragedy is a story of one, or at most two persons. As a rule, they are male protagonists. But to say that Shakespeare’s female characters are shallow, undeveloped and used just as a decoration on the stage is very wrong. Women in Shakespeare’s tragedies have no leading role and they are, to paraphrase Northrop Frye,[1] not tragic heroines, but heroines in a tragedy.