Was Shakespeare A Feminist?
April 5th 2007 05:45
Unlike majority of critics and feminists who disagree completely with this proposition. I’d like to think on the contrary. That is because he at least showed an understooding about the diffficulties and oppression women experienced by their male counterparts and societial insitutions that witheld such subordinating beleifs. Including specifically their status as women and the limitations that status within their time meant. It is through his play-writing ability that he was able to give women of his time a voice and action on the stage. Despite the fact that women were excluded completely from the public sphere which included the theatre stage. If you haven’t seen Shakespeare in Love or if you have next time you watch think about how differently he is portrayed compared to misoginist barraging my many feminst writers of the modern era. Even though it is a fictional account it seems a good sentiment to the idea that Shakespeare was more in tune with releasing women from their oppressions and is more of a pro-feminist figure more than we would like to admit . For example look at his female characters, Macbeth, Cleopatra …etc just to name a few that compete with the oppressing renaissance-Elizabethan views about women. Thier behaviours known for breaking and questioning the boundaries of femininity and morality that bound women the domestic sphere and home. This includes his strategic use of foreign landscape to combat the censorship measures being implemented by the government and monarchal figures, preventing such a social and political representation of his characters through his writing and performances on stage. To think he was able to explore messages across in his plays about women and men, getting his audiences thinking and provoking them to act, during a time of fear in social, religious and political upheaval and change. Shakespeare paved the way for his contemporaries in the post-17century Jacobean era allowing them to write more explicitly and more candidly about such issues facing women in more controversial and disrupting ways. For book burning was rampant within his era regarding any deemed in-appropriate immoral material, a reaction to the anti-Christian and anti-religious positions that Shakespeare and his contemporaries were attempting to explore through their plays.
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