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Shakespeare's female characters cover a lot of territory, and it is clear that he understood that there is as great a diversity in the character of females as there is in males. For every character with one characteristic in the plays it is possible to find an opposite somewhere.

However, Shakespeare did make a point of lampooning the common prejudice that women are flighty and inclined to adultery. While a number of Shakespeare's women are accused of unfaithfulness, what is most remarkable about such women as Hero, Desdemona, Imogen, Hermione and Mistress Ford is that they are remarkably free of the fault of which they are accused. Shakespeare may have been underlining their faithfulness to make his point here. Of course, there is the counterexample, in this case Goneril in King Lear, one of two actual adultresses in the plays (the other being Henry VI's Queen Margaret).

Again, while the common notion now is that Elizabethan women were subservient to men (a simplistic notion which does not hold up well in the face of actual history), Shakespeare's women are not as a rule subservient. Some of them are actually dominating, some of them villainous characters like Lady Macbeth or Goneril, and some not, like Coriolanus's redoubtable mother Volumnia. Even those who appear subservient may not be; Bianca in The Taming of The Shrew is adored because she appears to be so "tame" but we find out that she is just sneaky. However the list of strong, capable, courageous and independent women is very long--these are the characteristics of a Shakespearean heroine--of a Rosalind or Imogen or Paulina or Hermia.

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Q: What was William Shakespeare's view of women in his plays?
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Women were not allowed to perform professionally on stage in Shakespeare's time; so all the female characters in plays from Shakespeare's period were played by teenage boys in drag. (You can see some examples of this in the film Shakespeare in Love - which is remarkably historically accurate for a mainstream film).Since there weren't any real actresses at the time, most playwrights tried to avoid having important female characters in their plays. Shakespeare's slightly older contemporaries Thomas Kyd and George Peele have few female characters in their plays, and no really important ones.The idea of having important female characters pretty much started with Shakespeare. Juliet dominates Romeo and Juliet in a way that no heroine had ever done in a play before that. (Isabella is a fairly major character in Christopher Marlowe's Edward II - at around the same time; but Marlowe still leaves the main story of the play to the male characters).When Juliet shares a sonnet with Romeo (I.v), that was pretty explosive stuff at the time. You wrote poetry about girls at that period, but to have a girl join in was nearly unheard of.Shakespeare's later plays regularly gave starring roles to 'women'. Katarina in The Shrew, Imogen in Cymbeline, Helena in All's Well.Shakespeare writes roles for old women, young women, good women, bad women - he doesn't have a 'view' of women: he writes about women as if they were people.Marlowe didn't write any other important roles for women. In part this was because he was murdered relatively young (again, you can find out about this in Shakespeare in Love).Shakespeare was probably the first modern dramatist to write plays with major roles for women; he was certainly the most important.But he never had a 'view' of women: for Shakespeare women were real people.


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