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Shakespeare Gender Roles In The Elizabethan Era

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It is time to discuss the meaning of gender, its significance, its importance, and how this could play a major part in one’s life. What is gender you might ask? Could it determine the role you play if you may play a role at all? Gender is socially learned and reinforced characteristics that include one’s biological sex and psychological characteristics. It is said that gender has nothing to do with male or female. However, we can say that Shakespeare has a way of being sexist in his playwrights, or having a sexist attitude. Let us say just because you are female you could not get a job, nowadays this is considered discrimination, but during the Elizabethan times this was a way a life. Could we say that Shakespeare wrote his plays this way because he himself was truly sexist, or was it solely based upon the way of life during this time. We really do not know much about …show more content…

Therefore, during the 1500s men and boys were required to play women roles. Why did gender matter when it came to plays? What was the importance of the gender role? Women were inferior to men, they weren’t equal. Men felt as though the woman should stay home and take care of the house and the kids. Women during this time had to basically submit to men and were considered as nothing but objects of beauty. The two main female characters in the play Hamlet were looked down upon and treated very rudely. For example, Hamlet referred to his mother Gertrude as frail, and was disgusted by the fact that she had married his uncle so soon after the death of his father. Hamlet stated “Frailty, thy name is woman”. Even though in this quote he was referring to all women, he had no respect for his mother. Gertrude in this play was seen as a sexual being and very shallow, she only thought about her body and other pleasures. Again this goes back to how the men during this time viewed women, only as a sex

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