What is the chief characteristic of Shakespeare's women characters?

Answer 1

Women were not allowed to work in theatre during the Elizabethan period (there were strict controls on the type of work a woman could do through most of English history, pretty much until the 1980's).

This meant that women's roles during Shakespeare's lifetime had to be played by teenage boys wearing women's clothes. (This remained the case until the 1660's - almost fifty years after Shakespeare died).

Before Shakespeare, most dramatists coped with having boys play all the female roles by not writing very many female roles, and no really important ones. The boy actors tended not to be the star players, so it was natural that the playwrights would avoid writing strong roles for female characters.

This stopped with Shakespeare. Shakespeare began to write important roles for female characters. Queen Margaret in Henry VI.3 dominates the play so much that in 1592 Robert Greene complained about how much Shakespeare was changing the ways that people wrote plays (in Greene's Groatsworth of Wit).

There were very few important female characters before Shakespeare, but Shakespeare's plays are full of strong women: Juliet, Imogen in Cymbeline, Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Isabella in Measure for Measure .... and many others.

Perhaps Shakespeare was not entirely alone. Christopher Marlowe's Edward II also has a strong female character in Queen Isabella. But Christopher Marlowe died young (he was probably murdered), so it was mainly Shakespeare who began strong female characters on the stage.

So the main characteristic of Shakespeare's women is that they are strong and independent characters. Shakespeare really began the idea of writing important roles for women on the modern stage. Every time you see a play with an important woman character, you are seeing a piece of stage history which William Shakespeare began.