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What was it like to be a women in Shakespeare's time

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What was it like to be a women in Shakespeare's time

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Aims:

To develop students' reading and speaking skills

To develop students' vocabulary (adjectives of personality)

To increase students' familiarity with female characters in Shakespeare's plays

Copyright - please read
All the materials on these pages are free for you to download and copy for educational use only. You may not redistribute, sell or place these materials on any other web site without written permission from the BBC and British Council. If you have any questions about the use of these materials please email us at: teachingenglish@britishcouncil.org .

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Aims: To develop students' reading and speaking skills To develop students' vocabulary (adjectives of personality) To increase students' familiarity with female characters in Shakespeare's plays Copyright - please read All the materials on these pages are free for you to download and copy for educational use only.

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96 Incredibly Useful Links for Teaching and Studying Shakespeare

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96 Incredibly Useful Links for Teaching and Studying Shakespeare

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http://www.onlinecollege.org/2009/12/16/100-incredibly-useful-links-for-teaching-and-studying-shakespeare/

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Seven Types of Females in Shakespeare's plays

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Seven Types of Females in Shakespeare's plays

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Certain types of female characters often resurface in Shakespeare's plays, telling us a great deal about his view of women and their status in Shakespeare's time.

The Bawdy Woman

These characters are sexualized, cheeky and flirtatious. They are often working class characters such as the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, Margaret in Much Ado about Nothing or Audrey in As you Like It. Mainly speaking in prose, as befitting their low social status, these characters often use sexual innuendo when conversing.

Low-class characters like these can get away with more risqué behavior - perhaps because they have no fear of losing social status.

The Tragic Innocent Woman

These women are often pure and chaste at the beginning of the play, and tragically die once their innocence is lost. In stark contrast to his presentation of bawdy women, Shakespeare's treatment of young innocent women is fairly brutal. Once their innocence or chastity is taken away, they are literally killed to signify this loss. These characters are generally courtly, high-born characters such as Juliet from Romeo and Juliet, Lavinia from Titus Andronicus or Ophelia from . Their high social standing makes their demise seem all the more tragic.

The Scheming Femme Fatal

Lady Macbeth is the archetypal femme fatal. Her manipulation of Macbeth inevitably leads them to their deaths: she commits suicide and he is slain. In her ambition to become Queen, she encourages her husband to murder.

King Lear's daughters, Goneril and Regan, plot to inherit their father's fortune. Once again, their ambition leads them to their deaths: Goneril stabs herself after poisoning Regan. Although Shakespeare seems to appreciate the intelligence at work in his femme fatal characters, allowing them to manipulate the men around them, his retribution is brutal and unforgiving.

The Witty, but Unmarriable Woman

Katherine from The Taming of The Shrew is a prime example of the witty but unmarriable woman. Feminists have commented that their enjoyment of this play is marred by the fact that a man literally "breaks" Katherine's spirit when Petruchio says "Come on and kiss me, Kate." - should we really celebrate this as a happy ending? Similarly, in the plot to Much Ado About Nothing, Benedick ultimately conquers the feisty Beatrice by saying, "Peace, I will stop your mouth." These women are presented as clever, bold and independent but are put in their place by the end of the play.

The Married Off Woman

Many of Shakespeare's comedies end with an eligible woman being married off - and therefore being made safe. These women are often very young and passed from their father's care to their new husband's. More often than not, these are high-born characters such as Miranda in The Tempest who is married to Ferdinand, Helena and Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Hero in Much Ado About Nothing.

Women Who Dress as Men

Rosalind in As You Like it and Viola in Twelfth Night both dress as men. Consequently, they are able to play a more active role in the play's narrative.

As "men", these characters have more freedom, highlighting the lack of social liberty for women in Shakespeare's time.

Falsely Accused of Adultery

Women in Shakespeare's plays are sometimes wrongly accused of adultery and suffer greatly as a result. For example, Desdemona is killed by Othello who supposes her infidelity and Hero falls terribly ill when she is falsely accused by Claudio. It seems that Shakespeare's women are judged by their sexuality even when they remain faithful to their husbands and husbands-to-be. Some feminists believe that this demonstrates a male insecurity about female sexuality.

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7 Types of Female Characters You'll See in Shakespeare's Plays

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Certain types of female characters often resurface in Shakespeare's plays, telling us a great deal about his view of women and their status in Shakespeare's time. These characters are sexualized, cheeky and flirtatious. They are often working class characters such as the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet , Margaret in Much Ado about Nothing or Audrey in As you Like It.

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Monologues of Shakespeare's Female Characters

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Monologues of Shakespeare's Female Characters

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Making it easier to find monologues since 1997. A complete database of Shakespeare's Monologues. The monologues are organized by play, then categorized by comedy, history and tragedy. You can browse and/or search so you can find a monologue whether you know which one you want, or you're looking for monologue ideas.

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Slideshare presentation

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Representation of Women in Shakespeare's Plays, an Occasional Paper

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Rosielyn Mae T. Bolon October 17, 2013 III-13HC BSE English EngLitt/ Prof. Marla Papango Occasional Paper no. 2 The Representation of Women in Shakespeare's Pl...

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enotes critical notes

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SOURCE: "Introduction: Their Infinite Variety," in Wooing, Wedding, and Power: Women in Shakespeare's Plays, Columbia University Press, 1981, pp. 1-6.

[ In the following essay, Dash discusses the depth, individuality, and variety of Shakespeare's female characters, and the ways in which stage portrayals of these women have been ruled by gender stereotypes of different eras.]

Strong, attractive, intelligent, and humane women come to life in Shakespeare's plays. They not only have a clear sense of themselves as individuals, but they challenge accepted patterns for women's behavior. Compliance, self-sacrifice for a male, dependence, nurturance, and emotionalism are the expected norms. Yet independence, self-control and, frequently, defiance characterize these women. In The Winter's Tale, for example, Hermione disdains tears although unjustly imprisoned; her husband, Leontes, weeps in self-pity. In Othello and Romeo and Juliet, women, exercising their independence, defy their fathers as well as the mores of their society.

Shakespeare's women characters testify to his genius. They are drawn with neither anger nor condescension. In personality they vary. Some are warm, delightful, friendly; others cold, aloof, and scornful. Some speak with confidence; others with diffidence. They range in age from the youthful, joyous Juliet to the wizened, bitter Margaret. But most have a vitality; they grow and develop during the course of a drama. Their actions spring from a realistic confrontation with life as they learn the meaning of self sovereignty for a woman in a patriarchal society.

But critics, limited by their own perceptions of a woman's role, fail to hear all the texts' cues and wrestle with interpretation. Simplification or evasion results. Some of the women are castigated as shrews; others are removed from the human sphere and their resemblances to deities or goddesses are emphasized; still others are considered as merely personifications of ideas. Occasionally a critic asserts, as [Hugh Richmond, in Shakespeare's Sexual Comedy] did recently, that Shakespeare's women are "the conscious sustainers of society and culture, as are Modern American Women." This critic, however, then continues:

The prime sources of disaster in Shakespeare's plays are to be found in women who neurotically forget their biological role ... or their social tact (like Desdemona ...), or who attempt to seize physical supremacy from the male (like Queen Margaret or Cleopatra).

The individuality of Shakespeare's portraits is buried beneath the generalizations in this statement.

Editors, too, rely on stereotypes, but they also react to the intellectual and moral climate of their era. Thus, Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century decries the frequent use of bawdy language in Love's Labour's Lost and wonders how the work could have been performed before a "maiden queen." The play, whose characters include outspoken, independent women, did not appear on the stage of his time. J. W. Lever, writing in our twentieth century, wonders what all the fuss is about in Measure for Measure. He can't understand why Isabella should refuse to capitulate to the threats of a rapist-seducer. This editor writes: "Chastity was essentially a condition of the spirit; to see it in merely physical terms was to reduce the concept to a mere pagan scruple."

Actor-managers, directors, and producers have difficulty transferring Shakespeare's vision of women to the stage. Shaped by the cultural mores of their particular society, they too conform to its biases. With sometimes slight, sometimes massive changes of the text, these men of the theater reshape the woman's role in the image of the age. Promptbooks-records of plays as performed-recapture those performances. They also permit comparison of the acted play with the original. Lines are cut, roles excised, scenes transposed, and stage directions interjected. The cumulative effect of these changes is usually an altered portrait of the woman character Shakespeare had intended.

In the dramatist's age, stage props were minimal: a tree, a table, a chair, and language that cued the audience in to the exact location of the action. In later times, large stage sets were devised. Striving for grandeur, the designers created costly scenery that took time to move. The uninterrupted performance of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage gave way to productions with long intermissions. But the cost of moving scenery also inspired producers to try to consolidate scenes occurring in one place. Antony and Cleopatra provides an excellent example. The scenes shift back and forth in kaleidoscope fashion between Rome and Egypt. Shakespeare's actors probably had no difficulty with such shifts. People listened to the language, looked at the costumes, and imagined. Later audiences, however, demanded verisimilitude. They wanted to see Rome and Egypt. To shift from Egypt to Rome then back to Egypt and again to move for a brief interlude in Rome before returning once more to Egypt required massive shifts of scenery. How much simpler it was to consolidate these many short scenes into a few long ones. But the intricacy of Shakespeare's method for developing a portrait was lost-and with it the subtlety of the statement.

Stage business also affects responses to a character. Ellen Terry, the famous Shakespearean actress, writing early in this century, tells of playing Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. When Beatrice's cousin swoons at being falsely slandered on her wedding day, Beatrice's suitor, Benedick, quickly goes to the aid of the fainting woman. Mr. Lacy, an old actor with the company, advised Terry to attempt to prevent Benedick from being of assistance:

"When Benedick rushes forward to lift up Hero after she has fainted, you 'shoo' him away. Jealousy, you see. Beatrice is not going to let her man lay a finger on another woman." I said, "Oh, nonsense, Mr. Lacy!" "Well, it's always been done," he retorted, "and it always gets a laugh." I told him then that not only was it impossible for me to do such a thing, but that it was so inconsistent with Beatrice's character that it ought to be impossible for any actress impersonating her to do it!

Terry triumphed on that occasion. But not all actresses are in that commanding a position. And even she, at other times, had to bow to the wishes of Henry Irving, the renowned actor-manager of the end of the nineteenth century, when he insisted that they play for a "gag" rather than be true to Shakespeare's portrait of a woman character. The word of the director usually prevails.

M. C. Bradbrook, the contemporary critic, observes that theatrical practices today-the open stage, the swift shifts of setting, and even the absence of scenery-most nearly approximate those of Shakespeare's age. The potential exists to recapture the quality of his dramas on the stage. But receptivity to Shakespeare's technique does not assure receptivity to his voice-his ideas and attitudes. A recent production of Richard III testified to this. Audiences should comfortably enjoy hissing Richard, one of Shakespeare's unrepentant villains. Instead, a 1979 audience applauded when Richard, through guile, won for his wife a woman whose life that audience knew would be tortured and tragic. The misogynistic tone of the production indicates that technical knowledge has little to do with substance. In this production, Shakespeare's vision was ignored and his insights into women's lives lost. Instead of seeing the powerlessness of Anne, a woman tragically marked by Richard for his bride, the audience saw a cold, aloof c' aracter who seemed to deserve her fate. And the one woman character with courage enough to challenge him openly, Margaret, never appeared. Absent too was the choral lament of the wailing widows-powerless queens. The production failed to show how Shakespeare dramatized the ways in which power impinges upon and shapes a woman's life.

The sweetest power a woman can possess is that over herself. Simone de Beauvoir calls it the sense of one's self as "subject, active, free." Virginia Woolf symbolizes it with the phrase, "five hundred pounds a year and a room of one's own," admonishing women to achieve economic and political independence. But this power is incomplete. As de Beauvoir later notes, a woman loses this freedom when she discovers her own sexuality. She then realizes that to fulfill herself sexually, she must think of herself as "Other," or secondary, and of man as primary, for she lives in a patriarchal society. Marriage dramatizes this power of one human being over another. John Stuart Mill, the Victorian philosopher, notes that the reason the majority of men refuse to relinquish this power is that they are still too much afraid of living with an equal. He reasons for a sexual equality that will free both men and women to enjoy the full value of life.

Shakespeare focuses on this inequity. Men and women confront the same experience from opposite perspectives. By creating confident, attractive, independent women whom we like, he questions the wisdom of a power structure that insists they relinquish personal freedom. Some of his dramas question accepted patterns of behavior. Some stress the value of mutual respect between a man and a woman. Some reveal the confusion in a woman's mind when she seeks to understand the limits of her world. Occasionally, a drama documents the tragedy of a woman who loses her way and her sense of self when she seeks to conform. To hear his voice, however, one must recognize the individuality and three-dimensional quality of his women characters. Like the men, the women too respond to a variety of forces in their environment and are troubled by the world they see. But that world differs from the one perceived by men.

Living at a time when a woman sat on the English throne, an artist of Shakespeare's sensitivity must have been affected by this extraordinary circumstance. Not only was Elizabeth I a remarkable woman and a person of power, but she remained unmarried, thus preserving that power. Her reign began before Shakespeare was born and extended well into his playwrighting years. C. H. Williams, the historian, describes the impact of her presence as monarch for forty-six years:

From the moment of her accession until the time of her death Elizabeth I was a phenomenon-it is not too strong a word-in European history. She was at once a crowned monarch and an unmarried woman. To such an unconventional conjunction some of the stiffest problems of the reign must be attributed. The Queen's methods of dealing with them often bewildered her contemporaries. They have not been any clearer to historians.

The Queen's life dramatized a woman's potential for greatness and the subordination that a patriarchal society mandated for her if she were to marry. With great skill, Elizabeth evaded marriage and avoided that possible loss of power. She refused to share her life or her throne with any man. As she knew by observing her sister monarch, Mary of Scotland, in a patriarchal society, marriage transforms even a queen's power. If Elizabeth is an enigma to historians, perhaps it is because they have difficulty understanding the effect of this inequity on a woman's thinking and acting. Surely the dramatist drew on this example.

Today, Shakespeare's women characters have a relevance and vitality. They offer insights into women's perceptions of themselves in a patriarchal world. They reveal the conflict women know as they move from that early awareness of themselves as "essential" to that later eroding of self-confidence when they discover that they are merely "Other." Shakespeare's plays show the diversity of the mind of a sixteenth-century man whose understanding of the human condition extended beyond his own sex and beyond his own time.
Marianne Novy (essay date 1981)
SOURCE: "Demythologizing Shakespeare," in Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 9, No. 1, 1981, pp. 17-27.

[ In the following essay, Novy examines Shakespeare's presentation of a range of female character types from a feminist critical perspective.']

I begin with a question: what is it about the experience of feminist Shakespeare criticism that is different from the experience of feminist criticism of Spenser, Milton, Hemingway, or Virginia Woolf? Suppose that feminist critics of all these writers are interested in the relationships of characters and imagery (and other literary elements) to sex roles and expectations, and refuse to take conventional stereotypes for male and female behavior for granted as normative. Are there any experiences specific to the Shakespeare critic?

In addition to demythologizing masculine and feminine stereotypes, the feminist Shakespeare critic must also deal with two other stereotypes that are polar opposites: Shakespeare as the uncritical adherent of the most conservative views of his time, and Shakespeare as the universal genius who totally transcends all historical and psychological limitations. If feminist Shakespeare criticism is to continue its growth towards more significant insights, I believe we must demythologize these stereotypes as well. In some ways Shakespeare's choice of the drama, where the writer's position is more elusive than in a lyric or epic poem, contributes to the temptation to adhere to one or other of these stereotypes; Shakepeare's ability to give life to widely different characters increases it. Corresponding to the variety of Shakespearean characterization is the variety of the critics who have found their own attitudes in Shakespeare's plays-a discovery sometimes mediated by the image of the transcendent genius, sometimes by the image of the conversative, and sometimes even by a paradoxical blend of the two. On the other hand, feminist critics who see Shakespeare as only the celebrant of conservative orthodoxy about male dominance may still reduce his complexity. We can find a range of attitudes in Shakespeare partly because a range of attitudes really exists in his work. In short, both because of Shakespeare's unique status in our culture and because of the particular complexity of his attitude toward women, the feminist critic of Shakespeare confronts a somewhat different situation than the feminist critic of the other authors I have mentioned.

My own thinking about Shakespeare's women started, I suppose, in adolescence, before I read any feminist literary or social criticism. The first occasions that I remember hearing discussions of Shakespeare's women that did not take conventional stereotypes of femininity for granted were in the early sixties, when I heard (three years apart) an actress and my college Shakespeare teacher, Nancy Pollard Brown, talk about The Taming of the Shrew. In different ways, both were calling attention to important aspects of a play that many critics still take as simply a cautionary tale for the uppity woman. Kate is not a conventional subservient passive woman, and both of them, in their interpretations of the play, made clear that they liked her unconventional spirit, much preferred her to her more traditionally feminine sister Bianca, and felt that the way Shakespeare wrote the play encouraged this preference. Neither one saw Kate as defeated by the ending: the actress emphasized the attraction and love between Kate and Petruchio, and the teacher suggested that Kate is the real victor because she has learned how to control him.

When I wrote my dissertation on Shakespeare's comedies, I wanted to express a positive view of the play as combining an attractive, strong, unconventional woman and a happy ending, but I found my writing becoming rather strained. Love is hard to demonstrate in the farcical text, and if Kate is manipulating Petruchio by belittling herself at the end, I could no longer see such a modus vivendi as happy. Eventually I tried to justify the last scene by describing it as a game. Proud of finally discovering a way to deal with it, I described Kate's satisfaction at being able to use patriarchal language in the last scene in terms that applied to my own satisfaction at being able to write about the play without being rendered incoherent by conflicting emotions. My dissertation chapter was basically an attempt to understand the play in its own terms-not to point out any of the problems with the patriarchal elements in those terms-and in that sense I was using patriarchal language very much as Kate was, and remaining within the mythology of Shakespeare as transcending all limitations.

Whenever I saw or taught the play, however, my discomfort with it came alive again. I would insist that directors removed key scenes, or that actors' gestures distorted them. It was hard to admit that elements in the play lent themselves to interpretations suggesting that Kate was forced into submission. But eventually, having read more in feminism and Elizabethan social history, having lived more, and having been prodded by arguments with colleagues and friends, I wrote a paper that tried to confront this problem. The Shrew uses imagery of play and games, I concluded, partly to make us feel that the institutions of patriarchy can be as freely entered into and as enjoyable as play. It may suggest that they are also as arbitrary as play and that other modes of play, such as Kate's wit combat with Petruchio, are also enjoyable and valuable, but it leaves us with a situation in which Petruchio's power as husband coalesces with his power as leader of games, and the audience may take as primary whichever definition of Kate's relationship to him they prefer-patriarchal or playful. This ambiguity seemed to me to reflect and respond to the tension in Elizabethan attitudes toward marriage between patriarchy and companionship. Whether the situation of Elizabethan women was better or worse than that of their predecessors, historians may argue, but such tension clearly existed in practice and in ideology. For example, the popular preacher Henry Smith fills his Preparative to Marriage, published in 1591, with images suggestive of marriage as equal partnership. Husband and wife are like a pair of oars, a pair of gloves, and even David and Jonathan. Yet he also declares that "the ornament of a woman is silence; and therefore the Law was given to the man rather than to the woman, to shewe that he shoulde be the teacher, and shee the hearer."

After I had finally confronted and named the patriarchal elements in Shrew, however, my tendency was still to see that play as essentially an anomaly. (As I still do, but not as much as when my Shakespeare mythology was stronger.) In most Shakespearean comedies the women control the games, and most of them are easy to see as models of strong, intelligent, resourceful women attractively portrayed. Portia, Beatrice, Rosalind, and Viola all escape the trials that Kate undergoes, and none of them give long speeches on their duty to their husbands. Surely any playwright who can create four heroines like these is affirming female activity. He even allows them to criticize the limits that their society places on them as women-both by their words and by their competence in the masculine disguise that removes some of these limits.

But the masculine disguise sometimes breaks down. Shakespeare's women simply cannot fight a duel, except with words. Furthermore, even the strongest, most resourceful of the heroines end their comedies with ritual gestures of submission, as Clara Claiborne Park has shown [in American Scholar 42, Spring 1973]. Rosalind says to Orlando and her father, "To you I give myself, for I am yours," and after a few more ritual lines she is uncharacteristically silent until the end, where she comes back to say the epilogue. Benedick says to Beatrice, "Peace! I will stop your mouth," and after his kiss she says nothing more, while he goes on talking. Although the women are active throughout the plays, and the relationships are presented as developing by a mutuality of dialogue by women and men, nevertheless, as Park says, in all of the comedies female assertiveness is tempered, at least verbally. Beatrice explicitly recants her pride when she responds to the story of Benedick's love for her. Portia has a long speech of submission to Bassanio. One can argue that these heroines regain or retain their assertiveness in spite of what they say; but the need for a rhetoric of modesty must still be taken into account. Even male disguise can be taken as a softening of female assertiveness because it permits us to take anything a woman says or does while in disguise as only playing a role. And, as Carolyn Heilbrun has pointed out, we may take the relationships created by these couples as allowing the women more freedom only because their condition is still courtship and not marriage. Thus again Shakespeare gives us an ambiguous picture in which those who emphasize patriarchy and those who emphasize female activity can both find some elements to satisfy them and, if they wish, take those as the essentials. It seems that Shakespeare's ideal woman-the kind he presents in the most depth in the comedies-is active but willing to subordinate herself, like the ideal woman of the protestant preachers discussed by the Hallers. She can harmoniously combine strength and flexibility, individualism and compromise.

Tragic heroines like Juliet, Cordelia, and Desdemona also combine both of these qualities attractively. Desdemona, for example, bravely chooses Othello and defends her choice before Venice, but she uses the argument that she is acting just as her mother did in following her father. She stubbornly tries to carry out her promise to plead Cassio's case, but she lies about her handkerchief. She defends herself stoutly on her deathbed but she has put herself in the vulnerable position in which Othello can kill her. Her combination of qualities makes it possible for critics on both sides to praise her or criticize her, contrasts with the simple images Othello has of her, and contributes to the ultimate disaster.

If the women Shakespeare presents most attractively, different as they are, combine these seemingly opposed qualities of self-assertion and self-subordination, can we make any similar generalization about the women he presents as most destructive? What interests me about these women-Goneril, Regan, Lady Macbeth, Volumnia-is that all...

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William Shakespeare Shakespeare's Representation of Women - Essay - eNotes.com

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SOURCE: "Introduction: Their Infinite Variety," in Wooing, Wedding, and Power: Women in Shakespeare's Plays, Columbia University Press, 1981, pp. 1-6. [ In the following essay, Dash discusses the depth, individuality, and variety of Shakespeare's female characters, and the ways in which stage portrayals of these women have been ruled by gender stereotypes of different eras.]

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Shakespeare Re-imagined for a modern audience

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Shakespeare Re-imagined for a modern audience

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Article

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Her first season of plays will include a new production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, set partly in the modern day and partly in Elizabethan dress, designed as a "riotous celebration" of "music, dance and naughtiness".

She has also commissioned a new version of The Taming of the Shrew, retelling the Shakespearian story that "taunts women" with a "brave, fierce, passionate" tale for the 21st century set in Ireland.

Imogen, a version of Cymbeline, will be directed by Matthew Dunster to show the story through the King's daughter's lens.

Rice, who pointed out Imogen already has three times more lines than anyone else in the original play, said she and Dunster had decided to give the character the title in a "reclaimed, edgy and urban" version of the classic.

Speaking at the launch of the 2016 Wonder Season at Shakespeare's Globe, she said she was keen to prove actresses' careers had just as much longevity as men's even after children, taking inspiration from Shakespeare's day to be creative with characters.

"No-one was better at playing with gender than Shakespeare," she said. "There's no reason the Duke of Gloucester can't be a woman. I would love it to be 50-50 [gender split], so never say never to anything."

The Globe has previously put on all-female productions of Taming of the Shrew and Richard III under artistic directors Mark Rylance and Dominic Dromgoole, as well as all-male productions.

Actresses including Dame Helen Mirren have previously pointed out the inequality of parts in Shakespeare's plays, saying there are "very few roles" for women her age.

Rice said she is also intent on steering the Globe away from the "stuffiness" of more traditional indoor theatres, and making it a place everyone feels they visit for £5.

As such, she added, rowdy, noisy crowds would be welcomed, fairy-like trees built outside to entice new audiences in, and young children invited in with their parents with no tutting at tantrums.

Directors will also be encouraged to think outside the Elizabethan dress box, feeling free to put on original practice plays without "breeches and doublets".

In particular, she said, she will be adding "relaxed" performances of each production, where the play is signed, captioned and special lighting and sound levels taken into consideration for disabled audience members.

"If you make involuntary noises, that's great," she said. "If you've got babies you're worried might cry, bring them to the Globe. If you want to shout out, this is the place to do it."

On the language of Shakespeare, Rice said she was "very respectful but not reverent", having only directed one Shakespeare play in the past and sometimes struggling to understand the texts herself.

"There's no way that every line can still be relevant, in my opinion," she said. "There is a great case to be made for great editing, making the plays a little bit shorter and punching through the language that has stood the test of time and we do understand."

She added: "Shakespeare would be cheering me if he heard me speak. This is celebrating Shakespeare in the truest possible way: come in, drink beer, shout at the stage, come and go as you please and get involved.

"The doors are wide open to everybody."

Rice takes up her new position at Shakespeare's Globe in April, with A Midsummer Night's Dream opening on the 30th.

Plans for Shakespeare's Globe 2016:

Editing the trickiest bits of Shakespeare's language, if it no longer makes sense for a modern audience

Welcoming noisy audiences, slipping in and out as they please, to a "Relaxed Performance" for every production.

Going back to the folk roots of Shakespeare, with an emphasis on touring companies

No need for actors to wear Elizabethan costumes

Captioned, signed and relaxed performances for those with special needs

Cutting plays to make them shorter, if necessary

Bringing in new, non-Shakespeare productions including a reimagining of Michael Morpurgo's The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips

Building a "magical forest" to spill out of the Globe onto Bankside to welcome people in

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Noisy audiences, magical forests and more women in new-look Shakespeare's Globe

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Her first season of plays will include a new production of A Midsummer Night's Dream , set partly in the modern day and partly in Elizabethan dress, designed as a "riotous celebration" of "music, dance and naughtiness".

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Shakespeare's Female Characters on Screen

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Shakespeare's Female Characters on Screen

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Shakespeare's Female Characters Through the Years On Screen

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The women of Shakespeare are some of the most memorable, complex characters to ever walk the stage. Shakespeare's female characters were traditionally played by all men, but now they have been interpreted and brought to life in a myriad of ways by some of the most capable film actresses of our...

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Shakespeare's Women: More than merely players

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Shakespeare's Women: More than merely players

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One morning this month, Tina Packer was rushing across Harvard's campus to professor Marjorie Garber's 11 a.m. class on Shakespeare's early plays when she learned a secret: The class, which she was guest-teaching, typically didn't really get going till 11:07. She stopped short on the sidewalk. "Tricked! Tricked! Tricked!" she cried.

For a mere seven-minute reprieve, it was a Shakespearean level of drama. But despite a whirlwind of activities concerning the playwright, Packer, who at 76 stands as one of the country's most notable interpreters of Shakespeare's work, seems to seize every minute as an opportunity for more.

On top of her usual tasks - performing, directing, teaching - the founding artistic director of Lenox's Shakespeare & Company is currently traveling to promote a new book, "Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare's Plays." In it, she makes a provocative argument: Shakespeare's female characters matured as he did, and everything changed when, early in his career, he fell in love with the mysterious woman known as the Dark Lady.

"I suddenly got this realization about the women characters in Shakespeare, and that there was a progression to them," Packer said later in the day, over a lunch in Harvard Square peppered with phone calls and run-ins with colleagues. (The class, she said, had been a success, with Packer acting out bits of the plays and pushing students toward buried meanings. "She's a hero," Garber, a friend, said beforehand.) "There's only two or three women in every play," Packer went on. "They're always on the outside. They're always looking at power, or they're being projected upon."

Packer, who performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company in England before coming to the United States, dates that realization to a 1991 production she directed of "The Tempest" in which the maiden Miranda and the spirit Ariel, both headed for independent lives beyond the control of Miranda's father, Prospero, looked each other in the eye. "If I hadn't had been a woman, and a creative woman, and gone on this journey from England to America, I don't know that it would have ever come up. It was a major moment for me," Packer said. Struck, she began to map out how Shakespeare wrote about women over the course of his life.

With one departure after another from its top ranks, the Lenox-based theater troupe has buffeted some stormy weather.

Though the exact dates are hazy, scholars believe William Shakespeare wrote the 38 plays credited to him between 1590 and 1613. From the start, the young actor created female characters as intriguing as the fierce Margaret of Anjou, who figured in all three parts of "Henry VI" and "Richard III" - "the first woman in the canon I ever passionately wanted to play," Packer said. (She is directing an Actors' Shakespeare Project production of "Henry VI, Part 2," opening in Boston on May 13.) But ultimately the women of the earliest plays, which include "The Taming of the Shrew," are "either ferocious, overbearingly assertive, or they are idealized virgins-on-the-pedestal," Packer writes.

Then, something happened, she believes: Shakespeare, who was already married, fell in love. Many who try to connect the scanty facts of the author's life to his plays - who on earth was this Renaissance man to give us the most enduring body of literary work in English? - have been fascinated by a character who enters his sonnets in the 1590s: a dark-skinned female musician whose "eyes are nothing like the sun," yet who enchants the narrator.

Packer, following certain scholars, has a theory about who this Dark Lady was: Aemilia Bassano (also known as Emilia Lanyer or Lanier), a talented poet from a Venetian family of Christianized Jewish court musicians. "When he falls in love, it's not with a conventional person," Packer said. "She's not suitable. She's a musician who stands up for herself." Shakespeare also performed at court, which means he and the Bassanos would almost certainly have met.

From this point, starting with "Romeo and Juliet," Packer argues, Shakespeare conceived women as full human beings with agendas and souls of their own. That's not to say these characters are free of 16th-century social constraints: "It's a man's world," she said, "and it's about what the role of women is in that." Juliet risks her father disowning her, or worse, for her forbidden love. But Shakespeare gives Juliet equal billing - and, Packer said, "writes her just as deeply if not more deeply than Romeo. He follows the vicissitudes of her internal life. He gives her just as much courage."

Packer sees a middle stage in which Shakespeare's women may command their own destiny by dressing as men, like Rosalind in "As You Like It," or die for their commitment to truth, like Cordelia in "King Lear." She traces a dark period in which women's will to power - like that of Volumnia in "Coriolanus," "the most horrendous portrait of a mother you could have" - plunge the world into despair. Finally, she says, he produced plays in which women, or the men who stand by them, redeem terrible sins of the past. "There are the young women like in the early things, but they're feisty now," Packer said. There also older women like Paulina in "The Winter's Tale," who restores the queen Hermione to a husband tortured by the belief that his jealousy had caused her death.

Amid millions of analyses of Shakespeare, Packer's stands out for one reason: She has played a huge number of his female characters herself, sometimes in just one week. In 2009, she left Shakespeare & Company to create a theatrical version of "Women of Will." (She is still on the company's board and was frank in her frustration over the "absolute chaos" it saw this year with the hiring and abrupt departure of executive director Rick Dildine.) Working with director Eric Tucker and opposite actor Nigel Gore, Packer developed the show as a lecture-play exploring the women's roles, from early to late, in either one "overview" or a bravura five-part series. The shows have traveled widely.

To Tucker, that gives Packer a rare perspective. "The plays are obviously written for actors, by an actor," he said in a telephone interview. "It's like you're trying to look at a house . . . You can walk around and get a pretty good view of what's in the house. But it's not the same as walking in the house. That to me is the difference, when you're an actor taking on the role. There's nothing like being on the inside." He watched Packer uncover insights about these characters over years of rehearsal and interaction with audiences. "You find something new every single performance," he said. "That's an experience only the actor can have."

Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt, whose speculative Shakespeare biography "Will in the World" was a bestseller, readily agreed. Actors have a special insight, he said by phone, "because they live the characters, if they're any good at this game." Though he cautioned that any biographical consideration of Shakespeare occupies "a very misty and difficult world," he found Packer's guesses plausible. Was Bassano the Dark Lady? "It doesn't seem to me unreasonable to imagine," he said. Above all, he added, "The large general principle that Shakespeare's life is in his work, even though it's to some extent an academic heresy, seems to me deeply true."

Packer, whose own book overflows with anecdotes and comparisons to current events, defended that biographical perspective as well. "I know if I'm writing something, it's always reflecting what was happening in my life," she said.

But she insists that her vision of Shakespeare's journey is about more than her own 21st-century politics. "I do believe it's a universal truth, that men and women are equal," she said. "And we suffer if one tries to dominate the other."

"That," she added, in the plummy tones of a woman used to commanding a stage, "has been true from the day we started emerging out of the primordial slime."

Amanda Katz can be reached at amkatz@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @katzish.

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Shakespeare's women more than merely players - The Boston Globe

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One morning this month, Tina Packer was rushing across Harvard's campus to professor Marjorie Garber's 11 a.m. class on Shakespeare's early plays when she learned a secret: The class, which she was guest-teaching, typically didn't really get going till 11:07. She stopped short on the sidewalk. "Tricked! Tricked! Tricked!" she cried.

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Article

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Aims:

To develop students' reading and speaking skills

To develop students' vocabulary (adjectives of personality)

To increase students' familiarity with female characters in Shakespeare's plays

Copyright - please read
All the materials on these pages are free for you to download and copy for educational use only. You may not redistribute, sell or place these materials on any other web site without written permission from the BBC and British Council. If you have any questions about the use of these materials please email us at: teachingenglish@britishcouncil.org .

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Aims: To develop students' reading and speaking skills To develop students' vocabulary (adjectives of personality) To increase students' familiarity with female characters in Shakespeare's plays Copyright - please read All the materials on these pages are free for you to download and copy for educational use only.

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What is Shakespeare's Biggest Role for Women

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What is Shakespeare's Biggest Role for Women

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DCPA is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating unforgettable shared experiences through beloved Broadway musicals, world-class plays, educational programs and inspired events. We think of theatre as a spark of life - a special occasion that's exciting, powerful and fun. Join us today and we promise an experience you won't soon forget.

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Article from The Guardian

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A leading lady seeking the challenge of a truly great stage role - the equivalent of Lear or Hamlet - often has to reach back into the ancient world, perhaps for Medea or Antigone, or to go to Scandinavia for Ibsen's Nora or Hedda Gabler. To remedy this failing in British theatrical tradition, the Royal Shakespeare Company has announced that it is reviving three major female roles from Jacobean drama. The plays, The Roaring Girl by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, the anonymous Arden of Faversham from 1592 and The White Devil by John Webster, will be produced partly as a "provocation", according to deputy artistic director Erica Whyman. She does not aim, she said, to solve the issue of gender inequality on the stage, but she is "intent on asking some questions".

Whyman argues that the time is right to look at these rarely performed works because gender power today is in flux, as it was when they were written. But her bold foray into the Jacobean raises a question that sounds almost heretical, especially coming from the RSC in Stratford-upon-Avon: did Shakespeare short-change women?

The lack of classic roles for women in English-language theatre is widely acknowledged, but could it possibly be the Bard's fault? Brigid Larmour, award-winning artistic director of Watford Palace Theatre, suspects the great playwright is guilty as charged.

"The impact of Shakespeare is still inspiring, of course, but it can also be limiting," she said. "There are huge characters, such as Cleopatra or Beatrice, that we reference all the time in the rehearsal room. But the problem is that we have kept the same gender balance in today's theatre because of the success and genius of his plays. It created a blueprint that means playwrights do not notice when they have written something for nine men and one woman."

Larmour, who has worked to create an even proportion of female and male parts in her Ideal World season at Watford, understands Whyman's concern. "At Stratford the other day I heard actresses talking about how few roles for older women there still are. And these are the actresses who have learned their craft and can really deliver."

Shakespeare, despite his confident genius, was unaware of the influence his dramatis personæ would have down the ages. And the question of his original gender bias is further complicated by the fact that in his day all parts were played by men.

One actress who has gone on the record about her disappointment in Shakespeare's legacy for women is Janet Suzman. She complains: "There are no soliloquies of any note, although Cleopatra comes nearest, achieving a Lear-like clarity about her place in the world after the death of Antony. And none of them earns the lengthy scholarly analysis accorded the eponymous heroes of the canon."

Suzman regards Cleopatra, the second-biggest of Shakespeare's female roles, as "the chiefest among his female creations", while Volumnia, Coriolanus's persuasive mother, also gets a vote. Lady Macbeth, Hamlet's mother Gertrude and lost love Ophelia she dismisses for "fizzling out".

Conventionally, among the most coveted female roles in Shakespeare are the cross-dressing duo of Rosalind in As You Like It and Viola in Twelfth Night. Rosalind, with 685 lines, is Shakespeare's biggest female role, while Viola, despite the warm appeal of her character, comes in tenth. The spiky Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing also packs a big dramatic punch with relatively few lines. But throughout the works the power of a role cannot be measured in lines alone. Lady Macbeth, who drives the plot by calling on her murderous husband to "screw his courage to the sticking place", has fewer than half his lines. Similarly, the voice of Othello's Desdemona, the lyric, gentle centre of the play, is dwarfed by her jealous groom's 880 lines.

Heroines such as Portia in The Merchant of Venice and Isabella in Measure for Measure carry both the weight of their legal arguments, as well as the play's moral argument, although men get much more airtime. Other roles, such as the wild Katherina in Taming of the Shrew or the passionate teenage Juliet, might come close to seeming mere objects of dispute, if deft characterisation had not ensured that they burn bright.

For 400 years even Shakespeare's minor female roles have been desired by great actresses. Titania, the fairy queen of A Midsummer Night's Dream, has only 141 lines to speak but in 2010 was played for the second time to acclaim by Judi Dench, though the part is usually doubled up with that of Hippolyta to give it bulk.

Young girls in Shakespeare are full of innocence, yet they are also repositories of wisdom. Among this line-up, with under 200 lines apiece, appear Hamlet's Ophelia, Lear's Cordelia and The Tempest's untouched Miranda, the only female character in her play.

"I always find it an annoying misinterpretation when these small, key roles are played at a high emotional pitch," said Whyman. "Ophelia is often portrayed as if she is a mess. Why don't directors think she means what she is saying? She has seen everything, more than anyone else, and yet there is nothing she can do. She is profound and political, as Miranda is at the top of The Tempest."

While there are some larger neglected parts, such as Imogen in Cymbeline, many memorable female characters in Shakespeare might be described as truth-speaking old dames. The three witches are a clear example, but the nurse in Romeo and Juliet, Mistress Quickly in Henry IV part I, Paulina in The Winter's Tale and Emilia in Othello are all also strong in this field.

So can it be fair to say there are no Shakespearean roles with real heft for women? Suzman has no doubt: "There is simply no spiritual, intellectual or metaphysical equivalent to Lear, the Richards, the Henrys, nor the twin peaks of Othello and his demonic tempter, Iago - and certainly no woman baddies of that order. No crazed Timons or Tituses, nor anything like the Everest of Hamlet, towering above them all."

Larmour agrees, adding that there are still few of the "arduous, testing parts like Lear or Hamlet" in the wider repertoire. "Charlotte Keatley [author of the award-winning My Mother Said I Never Should] is writing the role of Émilie du Châtelet, the mathematician, for us and that will really put the actor through their paces. Otherwise, we tend to go to Ibsen, or to America, or over to Ireland for Shaw or O'Casey."

In Shakespeare's time, gender politics was a perilous subject, with Elizabeth I's power waning at the end of her reign. Women were forbidden to appear on stage and this may well have dampened Shakespeare's enthusiasm for female roles. Larmour suggests that had this dramatic genius been born later, British theatre would be different now. "If Shakespeare had been writing during the freer Restoration era, we would have far more women's parts."

Whyman at the RSC also believes politics were critical. "The confidence of the Elizabethan age had faded a bit when Shakespeare was in his prime. People were anxious about the succession and about the idea that it might not be a man again," she said. "So although things had fundamentally changed, they swung back. We see that kind of shape-shifting today, where identities and roles are not fixed."

In the past directors have tackled the lack of weighty women's roles in Shakespeare with gender-blind casting. Larmour would like to see more of this. "When it comes to colour-blind casting, there is still a long way to go, but there has been some progress. With gender-blind casting we have not got any further at all. If anything we have gone back." She applauded last winter's all-female production of Julius Caesar at the Donmar Warehouse. "It was great, but that kind of casting was fairly standard in the 1980s."

Given the historical context, Whyman is happy to let Shakespeare off the hook: "While we can say he didn't write as many parts for women of the kind where you travel with them on a long journey, I do think he thought of them as people, just like his other characters. The range of women Shakespeare writes is, I think, second to none."

Whether or not the Bard qualifies as a feminist, for Whyman the astonishing achievement is that all his female characters remain so distinct.
Topics

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A leading lady seeking the challenge of a truly great stage role - the equivalent of Lear or Hamlet - often has to reach back into the ancient world, perhaps for Medea or Antigone, or to go to Scandinavia for Ibsen's Nora or Hedda Gabler.

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So who are the women in Shakespeare's plays?

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So who are the women in Shakespeare's plays?

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How many lines do the women in Shakespeare's play have?

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This article picks out Shakespeare's most powerful female characters across all of his plays. Social and political power was entirely in the hands of the men in Elizabethan England and particularly, well-born men. Both women and men in the lower classes were powerless but women in the upper classes were in a particularly unenviable position as their value was generally reckoned to be a rich or powerful man's path to more riches or more power: daughters were considered to be possessions and were passed from father to husband to forge alliances between the rich and powerful. The father had the sole right to make the decision about his daughter's marriage. Once she was married her function was to produce an heir, and daughters who could be used for the family's further advancement.

One cannot therefore talk about Shakespeare's powerful women in the social or political sense, but there are a number very powerful women in Shakespeare, in the personal sense. They sometimes have political influence behind the scenes, working on their husbands to bring about some political result. Also, using the Elizabethan theatre convention of women disguising themselves as men, Shakespeare is able to present some women in a way that allows them to be taken seriously. At the end of the plays where he does that, however, the women always revert to their female role and the conclusion is marriage and declarations of their subservience to men and their reversion to the conventional female role. Perhaps even Shakespeare failed to imagine the model of equality that is so familiar to us and which we take for granted.

Nevertheless, all the men in those cultures are surrounded by women, some ineffectual but many very strong. Every male has either a grandmother or a mother, a sister, or a daughter who he knows to be strong, even though she may be wearing clothes that signify her submissive condition, such as head and face covers, whole body coverings etc.

One of the most interesting things in Shakespeare is his presentation of strong women. Here is a list of ten of his strongest women.

The vain and foolish Lear decides to retire as king and give all his lands and money to his three daughters, their portions based on their declarations of how much they love him. The two older daughters, Goneril and Regan, go overboard in their hypocritical statements. Cordelia says she loves him according to her duty as a daughter and the bond between a parent and child. Enraged, he banishes her and tells her two suitors, both princes, that whoever wants her can have her but without the dowry they had been expecting. The Duke of Burgundy declines but The King of France agrees to take her for herself. She has stood up to her father, showing great courage. Later, when the other two have cruelly rejected Lear and he lies, defeated and imprisoned in a dungeon, she is with him, also imprisoned - she comforts him and raises him up. She has helped him to learn what the bond between a father and daughter is. She has shown great strength throughout, and when her sisters have her hanged. Lear dies of a broken heart.

Portia is unusual in that, since her father's death, having no brother, she has had to perform the role of a man and manage the very wealthy estate he has left her. Nevertheless, he has been able to exercise power over her from beyond the grave by stipulating in his will that those wealthy and powerful men who come to woo her from around the world will have to undergo a test and choose from three caskets, one of which contains the permission to marry Portia. When a judge is required by the Duke of Venice to try the case Shylock has brought against Antonio, who is reluctant to yield the pound of flesh he has agreed to give Shylock if he is unable to pay a loan in time. Portia comes disguised as a famous young judge and shows extraordinary qualities in delivering her judgment. Her power lies in her wisdom, recognised by all those who do not know that she is a woman. In a real sense she exercises power over everyone present.

Lady Macbeth is thought of as a very strong woman. She certainly exercises power over her husband, Macbeth, in the first half of the play, as she encourages him to murder Duncan. She uses her sexuality, she taunts him and mocks his lack of courage. She appeals to his sense of obligation towards her. She comes in more strongly as he wavers and finally he goes ahead with it. She seems like a strong woman but psychologically, she is not strong enough to deal with her guilt. Their marriage falls apart and they become estranged. She suffers terrible nightmares and finally commits suicide.

Much Ado about Nothing is a remarkable play in which Shakespeare intertwines an ancient mythological story with an ultra-modern love story invented by himself. Beatrice is a feisty, independent woman, seen by all those around her as such. She does not have to disguise herself as a man because of her reputation in the family as a feisty woman who shouldn't be tangled with. She is highly intelligent and would be regarded as a feminist in our time. There is no question of her being told who to marry, as she will always do as she pleases, but in any case, she has contempt for men. She particularly dislikes Benedick, a soldier who visits Messina regularly and stays in her uncle, the governor's, house. Shakespeare has invented the most incredible wordplay between these two characters, who are both anti-marriage. But they are tricked by their friends into falling in love. Beatrice draws Benedick into a plot to get revenge on Claudio, who has betrayed her cousin, Hero, who was about to marry him. The play ends with the couple confirmed in their love and their decision to marry. Beatrice reverts to the traditional female role but in her case there is a decided edge to it.

EMily BLunt Gnomeo & Juliet

Juliet would not be thought of as a woman in our time but at just fourteen she is already a commodity which her father, a rich merchant, is preparing to trade for a connection with a noble family. He is in the middle of that process just as she is falling in love with the teenaged Romeo. She has only one thing on her mind - to marry Romeo, who is not only not her father's choice, but forbidden fruit in that their families are involved in an ancient feud in which all contact between them is forbidden. Without telling her father the reason, she refuses to marry the Count of Paris. This is spectacularly brave for the time and her father, Capulet, simply cannot understand it. He swears at her, threatens her and even strikes her. She does not give way, and desperate for a way out without giving up her love for Romeo, she seeks the advice of Friar Lawrence. His solution is to take a drug that will make her appear dead. She will be placed in a tomb and Romeo will come and take her away. She is terrified of waking in a tomb stuffed with corpses but takes the drug. She is a female of enormous determination and courage and is without doubt one of the strongest of all Shakespeare's characters.

Although Desdemona submits passively to her husband, Othello, as he strangles her to death, she demonstrates her strength at the beginning of the play when her father asks the Duke of Venice to stop her marriage to the Moor, Othello. He has ideas about who he wants to marry her to but she has fallen in love with a black man and he is opposed to their marriage, which has already taken place in secret by that time. The Duke asks her to give an account of herself and in a remarkable speech she convinces him. In that speech she comes across as a modern woman - an independent woman who has been a good daughter but is now ready to ally herself with her husband. If her father doesn't like that then it's just too bad. It isn't his business anymore. It required enormous strength to say things like that in a room full of powerful men at that time.

Rosalind is the central character in the play. She is disguised as a man throughout, until the end, and is able to organise everyone to fit in with her needs and desires. Her aim is to turn the man she wants to marry into someone who can match her qualities and be as strong as she is.

Finding herself shipwrecked of the beach at Ilyria, and having lost her twin brother in the wreck, Viola's first instinct is not to appeal for help as a helpless woman but to disguise herself as a man and find a job as a servant in the household of the Duke. As a man she has the freedom to move around without a chaperone. Her ability to adapt herself to her circumstances in spite of her female upbringing where she has been protected by men and all decisions about her have been made by men, is an indication of her strength. It is not only that adaptation that suggests strength but the ability to manipulate her circumstances for her own desired outcome, which is to marry the Duke.

Margaret of Anjou is a character in four of Shakespeare's plays: Henry VI pts. 1, 2, 3 and Richard III. The historical Queen Margaret was the wife consort of King Henry VI of England. In Shakespeare's tetrology Henry is a weak king and a meek and mild man. Shakespeare's Margaret is a ruthless, ambitious, intelligent woman who dominates him completely. She becomes involved in the power games that are going on around her and takes her enemies on. She thrives in a man's world of politics and war, and even enters the battlefield in Henry VI Part 3 and stabs the Duke of York. In Richard III she acts like a prophet, cursing the nobles for their responsibility for the downfall of the House of Lancaster. All of her prophecies about them come true: they are all betrayed in one way or another and end up being executed.

Rather than marry Demetrius, the man her father has chosen for her, after arguing her case, she runs away with Lysander, the man she loves. Her father begs the Duke, Theseus, to use the full weight of the law to make her comply and she is told that if she does not marry Demetrius her punishment will be death. Like other strong female characters in Shakespeare, Hermia stands up to her father, and even the most powerful man in their world. She does this with logical argument and remains calm while doing it. She then courageously runs away with her lover. Her strength lies in her calm assertiveness and her determination to control her own destiny rather than hand it to the men around her.

That's your lot for Shakespeare's top women characters. Any we've missed out?

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Shakespeare's Top 10 Most Powerful Female Characters

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This article picks out Shakespeare's most powerful female characters across all of his plays. Social and political power was entirely in the hands of the men in Elizabethan England and particularly, well-born men.

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Shakespeare's Evolving Attitudes Towards Women

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Shakespeare's Evolving Attitudes Towards Women

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What did Shakespeare think of women?

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If you could take on the role of one woman from Shakespeare's plays, who would it be?

Perhaps the passionate Juliet appeals, a hormone-addled adolescent whom love transforms into a full-blooded woman aware of her sexuality and not afraid to express it.

Could some situations at work call for the dubious talents of Lady Macbeth? (Remembering, of course, that actions have consequences)

Or maybe you'd relish the chance to coach your lover by disguising yourself as a man, following Rosalind's lead in As You Like It.

The choice is as varied as the characters themselves - and Tina Packer knows them all intimately.

An actress and Shakespeare expert, Packer has just published a new book - Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare's Plays. It looks at the way Shakespeare developed his female characters, and how his own views of women changed over time.

She says Shakespeare didn't understand women in the beginning of his career.

"I think something happened, somewhere around Love's Labour's Lost and the early history plays and going into Romeo and Juliet. Either he fell in love or he just grew up, but something happened to him where he suddenly 'got it' about women and there was a profound shift in his writing," she says.

"You see it in his first full blown version, in Juliet herself. Through her he began to take on what it meant to be a woman."

Packer reckons it took Shakespeare about three years of professional writing to reach that point.

The change is particularly noticeable when comparing Kate, the unfortunate subject of The Taming of the Shrew, to Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing.

Both women are being wooed, but while the sparks fly verbally between Beatrice and Benedick, Kate and Petruchio get physical.

"Beatrice and Benedick begin sparring, much like Kate and Petruchio do, but the outcome is so profoundly different," she says.

"You feel theirs was a good marriage, but Kate and Petrucio? I don't think so. It was such a horrid way of taming her - starving her, taking away her clothes, not allowing her to say what she thinks and feels. You can't be a whole person if somebody is beating you up in that kind of way."

How Shakespeare's women are perceived depends on contemporary attitudes.

Audiences several centuries ago might have had fewer problems with Kate being forced into submission.

"The popularity of Shakespeare's heroines waxes and wanes according to how they seem to represent certain moments and notions of femininity," says Gail Kern Paster, director emerita at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

"One of the major figures in the 19th Century was Imogen in Cymbeline, who is not very important to us at all. But they thought she was just a remarkable example of feminine constancy."

Imogen incurs her father's displeasure by marrying the man of her choosing.

The usual misunderstandings and betrayals take place and Imogen, like so many of Shakespeare's women, resorts to disguising herself as a man.

Throughout it all she remains true to her love and almost everybody lives happily ever after.

"But women now bring to the parts their own sense of independence," says Michael Kahn, artistic director of the Shakespeare Theater Company.

"I have done Measure for Measure maybe four times in my life and the later it is [performed] the more women have to figure out what they do in that last scene and whether they forgive the duke or not."

"In the 19th Century of course the women always forgave the duke."

Female characters in Shakespeare are often so perceptively drawn that it can be easy to forget that they would have been played by men, or at least young boys.

"So many of the great women's parts like Rosalind [As You Like It] and Viola [Twelfth Night] were based on the fact that they were boys being girls playing boys being women," says Kahn.

"But nobody has ever said to me, a woman wouldn't feel this way or a woman wouldn't do that."

Packer says putting women in trousers also allowed Shakespeare more freedom in creating important roles for them.

"They start becoming the characters in the plays who are telling the truth about what's going on," she says.

"If they tell the truth and stay in their frocks, they're killed or they run mad and kill themselves.

"But if they disguise themselves and go underground, they not only can have their voices, they can organise society and it all ends up terribly well," she says.

In some plays, Shakespeare goes "goes into this dark place where the women want the same things as the men".

"Think of Lady Macbeth, Volumnia in Coriolanus, and the eldest daughters in King Lear. What happens when the women are as ambitious as the men? It's terrible."

Tina Packer says one of her favourite characters is Paulina in The Winter's Tale.

"I love the way she keeps telling the truth, come what may, and is fearless."

Michael Kahn doesn't have a favourite but says he loves Cleopatra, Rosalind and Viola.

He's also very fond of the Countess in All's Well That Ends Well "because she knows how to get from other people what she wants to find out in an extraordinarily clever way".

And Gail Kern Paster says she likes Rosalind but "definitely wouldn't want to be Desdemona in Othello because he doesn't have a clue."

But all the roles have one thing in common, Paster says.

"Whether they're mothers, ingenues or unruly woman, they are all women discovering how to find their way in the world. And it's a pretty tough world."

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If you could take on the role of one woman from Shakespeare's plays, who would it be? Perhaps the passionate Juliet appeals, a hormone-addled adolescent whom love transforms into a full-blooded woman aware of her sexuality and not afraid to express it. Could some situations at work call for the dubious talents of Lady Macbeth?