Romeo And Juliet Women

In his lifetime, William Shakespeare wrote 37 plays. These plays had a running theme: the comedies contained more strong female characters than the tragedies. Women in Shakespearean works like Twelfth Night and Taming of the Shrew had more power, agency, and spoken lines than their male counterparts, whose power resided in tragedies like Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. This suggests that Shakespeare believed that happy endings can be attributed to the machinations of powerful women, while tragic endings were due to those of powerful men. The Bard’s stance on puissant women aligned perfectly with the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. The newfound idea of Protestantism granted independence and dignity to women of the time, asserting that

Romeo and Juliet ends tragically because no one listens to Juliet’s pleas to delay her wedding “month, a week” (3.5.200), insisting she’d rather die than get married at this moment. The belittling, abuse, and disrespect for women carries from this play into Hamlet. The titular protagonist brutally mistreats and shuns his potential wife, Ophelia. She already lives in a world of dispowerment with an overbearing, impetuous father, and the combination of these two aspects of her life eventually drives her to suicide. Once she dies, any chance of reconciliation dies with her. The palace, and thus the monarchy, collapses on itself. Shakespeare’s tragedies deliver the message that a society built on martial, masculine honor is unsustainable. That women know what is right and if must listen to

Rosalind, the protagonist of As You Like It, spends the duration of the play pulling strings and manipulating situations to make sure everything works out. Thanks to Rosalind’s doing, her father is welcomed back to the land from which he was exiled, and she marries the man whom she loves while also marrying off three of her friends. We can also see a woman The Merry Wives of Windsor defies all typical misogynistic tropes of the time period. Two wealthy married women, Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, realize that a washed-up, overweight man is attempting to con them into giving him their money. Together they devise a plan to teach him a lesson. The townspeople chastise a woman’s parents for trying to make her marry a man whom she does not love. The idea of comedy in Shakespeare’s day wasn’t a funny play, but rather a plot that begins in turmoil but demonstrates the path to salvation. And the way that female characters are described in comedies directly juxtaposes the tone used toward them in tragedies, with Juliet of Romeo and Juliet bearing the title of “disobedient wretch” (3.5.160) while Rosalind of As You Like It is referred to as a “sweet girl” (1.3.5). The outcome of a potentially tragic situation relates to the treatment of women in said situation. The reconciled, happy endings of Shakespeare’s comedies, typically marked by a marriage, can be attributed over and over to female