Women In A Midsummer Night's Dream

Midsummer Night’s dream is a great piece of work from the all-time famous writer William Shakespeare, many people have categorized this piece of work as romantic comedy. However, while this play is lovely and comic, it also has strong trace of darkness and cruelty, especially related to feminine characters. Even the happy ending with weddings was driven by attributed magic. Also, during the whole play it clearly depicts how male-female relationships can involve a great amount of cruelty, with the potential to spread discord throughout society.

During the play, nearly all the male character made their female a victim of cruelty at some point. Even Theseus who is claiming Hippolyta to be his love, won her by military conquest rather courtship.

The roles of women in society were very limited, matter fact they were not treated as first class citizen or human at some point. “It has become quite a truism that our women are like dogs, that more you beat them the more they love you.” (Wife Torture in England. 64). Even though there was an unmarried woman on the throne in during Elizabethan England, the women had been restrained. Elizabethan society was once patriarchal, which means that men had been viewed to be the leaders and females their inferiors. Female has been considered as "the weaker sex", no longer simply in phrases of bodily strength, however emotionally as well. It used to be traditional belief that women consistently needed any individual to look after them. If they had been married, their husband was anticipated to look after them. If they were single, then their father, brother or a further male relative was once anticipated to handle them. In that omnipresence, it was not something uncommon that they were being victimized of cruelty by those men, women abuse had become an “every-day Story in Victorian newspapers (234

With the aid of implication, then, the conflation of dogs'bodies with females’ bodies in nineteenth-century narratives invites readers to reflect on a person's "ownership" or control over his spouse, an issue which was crucial in the legal arguments concerning the husband's traditional right to confine and/or physically discipline his wife (Surridge). The breed of dog (a spaniel) reinforces this equation between beaten pet and beaten wife. Spaniels have most often been associated with the "female" qualities of gentleness, submission, subservience — and with a willingness to be crushed. That is exemplified through the natural adage, "The spaniel, the woman and the walnut tree: the extra you beat them, the simpler they be,"5 or Thomas Nashe's aphorism in Lenten Stuffe (1599), "fate is a spaniel that you can't beat you" (OED