Shakespeare's Treatment of Women in His Plays Essay

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.

Through Helena Shakespeare created a woman so pitiful and wretched that he openly mocked the modern sixteenth-century women who allowed themselves to be treated in such a manner. Had a man been the monarch of England when this play was written, the bard might have been more discrete in his support of feminism. Luckily, Queen Elizabeth was fond of autonomous women and showed little animosity towards such mockery.

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

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.

William Shakespeare constantly filled his plays with cultural and mythological references that engulfed viewers in the story. He was well educated and progressive for his time; however he still had a few downfalls. His main one was that he often portrayed women as objects. Take Othello, for example; Desdemona is rarely seen as a person and often referred to as an object. Thus Shakespeare portrays women as mere possessions and deprives them of their humanity.

     The treatment of women in Hamlet is very troubling. The leading female characters, Queen Gertrude and Ophelia, are pawns or puppets for the men around them. Like chess pieces, they are moved about and influenced by the men they love with little say of their own; in fact, Shakespeare does not even develop their characters.

Imagine living 400 hundred years ago and you were thought less of a man. Man that would be hard for us 20th century girls! During the time of Shakespeare women were be seen as the weaker sex. They had little control over there destinations and always depended on males. Men on the other hand were seen as tough beings and expected to take care of everything. Shakespeare's prove these gender roles wrong throughout his writings. One of his writings is Macbeth. All through this play women were looked as fragile and insulted each other not being manly enough. Over all Shakespeare saw women as extremely powerful beings even if society neglected them. He act knowledge them throughout his work and proved they were not always scapegoats or the tools

Challenging the Roles of Gender in Shakespeare In Shakespeare’s play, Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare challenges the use of gender roles, which are social and behavioral standards assigned to the sexes, which were established during his time period. Shakespeare challenges these roles through his characters, Romeo and Juliet, by having them rebel against the social construction of gender set in Verona. Gender roles during the Elizabethan age were formed under patriarchal social construct.

William Shakespeare’s, Othello, expresses the lack of respect and authority given to women during Shakespeare’s time. Throughout the piece, women are repeatedly put in positions subordinate to men and are stripped of a voice. Women in this piece are portrayed as “belongings” to men, and never resist how they are treated. Iago is able to use women in his plan, like pawns in a chess game, to benefit himself. However, it is a woman in the end who puts the pieces together and solves Iago twisted plot. It is also the women in the end who stay sane and loyal to their men. Shakespeare discreetly communicates to the audience the message that women were underestimated during the time, and shouldn’t be treated as subordinates.

Shakespeare is often criticized or analyzed over his perceptions and representations of Elizabethan gender roles in his works. Many describe Shakespeare as a misogynist, while others argue that he is, in fact, a feminist. Gender roles play a large role in many of Shakespeare’s works, with one in particular being his tragedy of the Prince of Denmark, Hamlet. In this work, Shakespeare uses both male and female characters to comment on and represent Elizabethan gender roles in the play, through syntax, word choice, and character relationships. Each of his characters, either male or female, are tied to a different take on Elizabethan gender roles, such as Hamlet not fulfilling the expectations of being a man, and Ophelia wanting to be more than the roles of her gender would allow.

Shakespeare was possibly the first writer to portray women as strong, crafty, and intelligent. However, he has still received criticism from feminists about his representation of women. Some have even accused him of misogyny. There are only two female characters in the play Hamlet - Gertrude, Hamlet's mother and Ophelia, daughter of Polonius. Any debate based upon gender roles must therefore focus upon these two characters.

Typical of how women were treated was shown by Desdemona in Othello. Although people were shocked when she was slapped in the face by her husband, there was no legal action taken. She acted as Othello’s slave and was subservient to his wishes. If women were seen outside in public they were required to be in the company of an attendant or friend, while the men were free to roam as they pleased. In contrast, the male characters in the plays held important jobs like merchants and generals while women were typically housewives or servants. With the exception of Lady Macbeth, women were rarely seen playing the roles of villains in Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare reserved this role almost exclusively to males. We also never see women in careers, just in roles of serving or pleasing men. Portia in The Merchant of Venice had to dress up as a man to represent Bassanio as his attorney in court. The idea of a woman lawyer defending a man in court would have been laughable in Elizabethan times. Shakespeare may have tried to show his disagreement with this practice by creating the character of a woman who breaks the

Feminism is and has always been a prominent focus in society. Specifically during the Renaissance, when Shakespeare’s Othello was written, were women thought of as subordinate to men. Shakespeare portrays women as merely FOIL characters to their male counterparts throughout the play. They help shed light on the men’s dark sides as well as their true faults. Their roles include wives, prostitutes, and even messengers. The women in the play are disrespected and treated as lesser beings. Although there are imperative female characters in Shakespeare’s Othello, many of them are treated as tools or objects and are disrespected by the men, specifically Iago, Othello and Cassio.

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.

    When one considers Shakespeare’s female characters, one has to remember that the plays were written in a time when women were considered weak-minded creatures who were apt to make bad choices if given the freedom.  Shakespeare, for the most