During Shakespeare’s era, men normally held pretenses of superiority over women, garnered from their positions above the women of the time. Shakespeare’s Macbeth challenges the view of manhood and manliness of the time, emphasizing the strength of women, the weakness of men, and the definition of manhood. Macbeth’s challenges to the patriarchal society of the period show that Shakespeare’s views of gender roles were different from those held by the common people of the time period. In the beginning of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”,the character of Macbeth was expressed as a nebbish that lacked ambition while Lady Macbeth was portrayed as very ambitious and demanding, telling Macbeth that nothing worthier will come his way should he not take risks and ascend to higher aspirations, provoking him to murder Duncan. “When you durst do it, then you were a man; and to be more than what you were, you would be so much more the man.” Lady Macbeth putting Macbeth’s manliness into question prompted him to vie for a …show more content…
His cousin Ross had no words, he tried calming her down, but he becomes silent. He created no actions an Macduff’s wife is incredibly furious with him and yells in an orotund tone; “All is the fear and nothing is the love; as little is the wisdom, where the flight so runs against all reason.d had let her speak this way and just stood there. Women during the actual era didn’t have the courage to tell such repulsive things, to say what they felt, and to say the truth while having a man just stand there and just observe. Shakespeare expresses women in this play as blunt and has them entitled to their opinion and beliefs while leaving men at times with empty words (which was never the case in