Internet Resources
- Five astonishing facts about women in ShakespeareWhat would Macbeth be without Lady Macbeth? Or Romeo and Juliet with only Romeo? Yet there’s an enormous disparity between female and male representation in Shakespeare’s play.
- Gender on Shakespeare’s Stage: A Brief HistoryTheatre as an art form has a long history of pressing the boundaries of gender.
- Shakespeare's evolving attitudes towards womenIf you could take on the role of one woman from Shakespeare's plays, who would it be?
- Shakespeare and Gender: The ‘Woman’s Part’In Shakespeare's day, female parts were played by male actors, while more recently, actresses have taken on some of his most famous male roles such as Hamlet and Julius Caesar. Clare McManus explores gender in the history of Shakespeare performance.
- Women onstage and offstage in Elizabethan EnglandThough a Queen ruled England, gender equality certainly wasn’t found in Elizabethan society. Everything from dress to employment followed strict gender roles, and yet there was a certain amount of room for play.
Women's Contribution to Shakespeare Productions
Julie Crawford, Mark van Doren Professor of Humanities at Columbia University, discusses Shakespeare’s portrayal of the power balance between the sexes, women’s contribution to the Elizabethan stage, and Renaissance ideas about gender. She also considers key speeches by Desdemona and Emilia in Othello.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCbzT3_vc_M
Perspectives
Shakespeare and Women
Shakespeare and Women situates Shakespeare's female characters in multiple historical contexts, ranging from the early modern England in which they originated to the contemporary Western world in which our own encounters with them are staged. In so doing, this book seeks to challenge currentlyprevalent views of Shakespeare's women-both the women he depicted in his plays and the women he encountered in the world he inhabited.Chapter 1, 'A Usable History', analyses the implications and consequences of the emphasis on patriarchal power, male misogyny, and women's oppression that has dominated recent feminist Shakespeare scholarship, while subsequent chapters propose alternative models for feminist analysis. Chapter 2,'The Place(s) of Women in Shakespeare's World', emphasizes the frequently overlooked kinds of social, political, and economic agency exercised by the women Shakespeare would have known in both Stratford and London. Chapter 3, 'Our Canon, Ourselves', addresses the implications of the modernpopularity of plays such as The Taming of the Shrew which seem to endorse women's subjugation, arguing that the plays-and the aspects of those plays-that we have chosen to emphasize tell us more about our own assumptions than about the beliefs that informed the responses of Shakespeare's firstaudiences. Chapter 4, 'Boys will be Girls', explores the consequences for women of the use of male actors to play women's roles. Chapter 5, 'The Lady's Reeking Breath', turns to the sonnets, the texts that seem most resistant to feminist appropriation, to argue that Shakespeare's rewriting of theidealized Petrarchan lady anticipates modern feminist critiques of the essential misogyny of the Petrarchan tradition. The final chapter, 'Shakespeare's Timeless Women', surveys the implication of Shakespeare's female characters in the process of historical change, as they have been repeatedlyupdated to conform to changing conceptions of women's nature and women's social roles, serving in ever-changing guises as models of an unchanging, universal female nature.