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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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Another profession women were not allowed to take part in was acting, as it “was considered dishonorable for women and women did not appear on the stage in England until the seventeenth century.” It was forbidden for women to perform on the public stage or to compose works for the public stage. Young boys were also frequently cast to play the female characters in Shakespeare's plays (Shanette). In summary, the Elizabethan period was marked by important and strict gender expectations that extremely influenced the opportunities of men and women, which helped maintain the social

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During the Renaissances time period women were portrayed as the submissive sex, but times have changed, women are now depicted as powerful and independent. The roles of women have changed drastically since the 14th century because of a decrease in teen marriages, women are now allowed an advanced education, and an increase in civil rights. William Shakespeare showed many social norms in his plays to depict the nature of how women were treated during his time, mostly the significance of marriage. During the Elizabethan time period women were expected to be married at a very young age, typically between the ages of 13 through 15 years old. In Shakespeare's play, the Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet.

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During the time of the renaissance it was not uncommon to see a male playing the role of a female in theater. However, as time has progressed women have been given more opportunities and rights. It has been seen that women have taken over the roles of not only female but male as well. In popular plays like Hamlet or Julius Caesar, women played the major roles of the opposite gender. This can be seen in not only in Shakespeare 's theater, but in other popular scripts as well.

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During that time, women were not socially prominent so it was odd for an author to give such an important role to a female, and make her such a key figure in the play without the readers knowing much about

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The Elizabethan Era was a time where men were in charge and women and children were expected to obey. Nowadays, men and women have equal roles in society and one gender is not better or smarter than the other. During the Elizabethan Era, men, women, and children all had specific and defining roles. Men had a dominant role in society during the Elizabethan Era. Men could do many things that women were not allowed to do.

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In the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Shakespeare uses character and rhetoric to display how ones hatred and anger are impulsively taken out upon woman, from this the reader learns how misogyny is difficult to acknowledge, but rather easy to practice. To begin with, Shakespeare uses rhetoric to illustrate how Hamlet is a misogynist. Throughout the play Hamlet refers to his mother as an incestuous, cold hearted, whore, whose actions are only defined by her sexual desires. This was displayed during his soliloquy when he

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Seventeenth century England also witnessed a rather puritanical understanding of a woman’s life. A woman in the Elizabethan era was a daughter, a wife and a mother and her entire being was restricted to the duties she was required to dispel as any of the aforementioned roles. A woman could not and was not spoken about without the appendage of her father’s, and eventually, her husband’s name. All in all, a woman had no independent identity and Shakespeare in his, allegedly most famous, tragedy presents to us a female character that openly and rather unapologetically trespasses across these exclusive boundaries. Presenting her as a barren woman automatically becomes denying her a position within the feminine stereotype as motherhood was considered

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The man was always supposed to be in charge and the woman just go along with it. These gender roles used to be pretty strict and there was no other way to life, but we have come along way. Today, we even have a woman running for president. Overall, I think a person’s gender shouldn’t affect they go about their day to day life, but unfortunately, even though it has gotten better, people are still labeled and have expectations because of it. For example, in the play, Orsino was expected to be very manly and to be the duke of Illyria.

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For Shakespeare’s plays, the actors had to meet specific and required standards in order to play important roles in his greatest plays. The usage of younger boys taking on the role of females was especially crucial, due to the fact that no women were allowed to be actors. The young apprentices were bought by someone of higher-ranking among the social class, and they were heavily trained. The writer Christine D. Billy states “the actors retained a place similar to that of a royal servant, which included many privileges and protections of the court. ”(The Renaissance Theatre’s Boy Actresses Paragraph 2) in order to gain entrance into the theatre required a member to leave and to ensure that the open position was bought and could buy out the member

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This source explains the difference between the portrayal of women and men in Shakespeare's plays. She discusses the stereotypes between the different genders and how characters reflect those roles in societies. This article is opinionated and only shows one

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