Women In The Age Of Shakespeare

This book offers a look at the lives of Elizabethan era women in the context of the great female characters in the works of William Shakespeare. Like the other entries in this fascinating series, Women in the Age of Shakespeare shows the influence of the world William Shakespeare lived in on the worlds he created for the stage, this time by focusing on women in the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras in general and in Shakespeare's works in particular. Women in the Age of Shakespeare explores the ancient and medieval ideas that Shakespeare drew upon in creating his great comedic and tragic heroines. It then looks at how these ideas intersected with the lived experiences of women of Shakespeare's time, followed by a close look at the major female characters in Shakespeare's plays and poems. Later chapters consider how these characters have been enacted on stage and in film, interpreted by critics and scholars, and re-imagined by writers in our own time.

By examining how female characters speak and act during coming of age, engagement, marriage, and intimacy, Consent in Shakespeare will enhance understanding about how and why women spoke, remained silent, or acted as they did in relation to their intimate partners in Early Modern and contemporary private and public situations in and around the Mediterranean. Consent in intimate relationships is front and center in today’s conversations. This book re-examines the verbal and physical interactions of female-identified characters in Early Modern and contemporary cultures in Shakespeare’s Mediterranean comedies and the sources from which he derived his plays. This re-examination of the words that women say or do not say, and actions that women do or do not take, in Shakespeare’s Mediterranean plays and his probable sources sheds light on how Shakespeare’s audiences might have perceived Mediterranean cultural mores and norms. Assessment of source materials for Shakespeare’s comedies set in the Balkans, France, Italy, the Near East, North Africa, and Spain suggests how women of diverse backgrounds communicated in everyday life and peak life experiences in the Early Modern era. Given Shakespeare’s impact worldwide, this initiative to shift the conversation about the power of consent of female protagonists and supporting characters in Shakespeare’s Mediterranean plays will further transform conversations about consent in class, board and conference rooms, and the international stage.

Women of Will is a fierce and funny exploration of Shakespeare’s understanding of the feminine. Tina Packer, one of our foremost Shakespeare experts, shows that Shakespeare began, in his early comedies, by writing women as shrews to be tamed or as sweet little things with no independence of thought. The women of the history plays are much more interesting, beginning with Joan of Arc. Then, with the extraordinary Juliet, there is a dramatic shift: suddenly Shakespeare’s women have depth, motivation, and understanding of life more than equal to that of the men. As Shakespeare ceases to write women as predictable caricatures and starts writing them from the inside, his women become as dimensional, spirited, spiritual, active, and sexual as any of his male characters. Wondering if Shakespeare had fallen in love (Packer considers with whom, and what she may have been like), the author observes that from Juliet on, Shakespeare’s characters demonstrate that when women and men are equal in status and passion, they can—and do—change the world.

This booklet is about the women characters in Shakespeare's plays, and how he portrays them. He does what no other writer has done – or could do. He presents women as the one force in society capable of saving mankind from itself: the essential earth-mother, the nurturing force behind everything born, and the solver of problems. He shows that women can be the main force in society for civilising men, for curbing their instincts to fight and kill, and to replace those violent impulses with the gentler arts of tolerance, love and forgiveness.The Elizabethan age, despite the fact that a woman is on the throne, is a supremely masculine age, and the drama reflects this. Scenes of military power and conquest proliferate, where the women are completely subservient to the controlling males. Yet, when Shakespeare starts to write, from the first play onwards, he gives women a power in his plays that no other writer of this period can even understand, let alone dream of doing. As he matures, women demonstrate an ever increasing power.His position is not only that women are the equal of men, which would be a revolutionary belief in that age, as in most other periods before the twentieth century. But he shows that they are superior to men in certain definite aspects. A more challenging notion could not be imagined then – or even now. He demonstrates this superiority in most of his plays.

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 0,7, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen (Anglistik), language: English, abstract: The aim of the present paper is to examine the role of women in Shakespeare’s "A Midsummer Night’s Dream". The first section investigates women in early modern England and is divided into the subsections "Sex and gender in early modern England" and "Norms of femininity". Section two explores the role of women in the sixteenth century comedy. More precisely, the emphasis here will be upon the analysis of female-female and female-male bonds of the characters in the play.