Gender Roles in Shakespeare Essay -- essays research papers

It is a peculiar feature of Shakespeare's plays that they both participate in and reflect the ideas of gender roles in Western society. To the extent that they reflect existing notions about the 'proper' roles of men and women, they can be said to be a product of their society. However, since they have been studied, performed, and taught for five hundred years, they may be seen as formative of contemporary notions about the relationships between males, females, and power. Derrida was right in asserting that "there is no 'outside' to the text." His claim is that every text is affected by every other text and every other speech act. As an instance, most of Shakespeare's plays have traceable sources for their central plots. Representations of gender in Renaissance drama are tied to their original presentation: "bearing the traces of their history in a theatrical enterprise which completely excluded women, (these texts) construct gender from a relentlessly androcentric perspective" (Helms 196). It is the ways in which these texts reflect or distort the gender expectations of society, either Elizabethan or contemporary, that is so important. Comedy that centers on the relationship between conventional couples rather than on resolution of the situation that keeps them apart is really quite difficult to find in Shakespeare. Ferdinand and Miranda are so uninteresting as a couple that their chief function seems to be as an excuse for Prospero to exhibit his art. The lovers in Midsummer Night’s Dream are certainly at their most entertaining when they're in love with the wrong person. It is the exaggerated character--Falstaff, Petruchio, Paulina, or Cleopatra--or those who step outside th... ...sp; Works Consulted Bamber, Linda. Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1982 Belsey, Catherine. â€Å"Desire's Excess: Edward II, Troilus and Cressida, Othello." In Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage. Susan Zimmerman, ed. New York: Routledge,1992 Cook, Carol. "Unbodied Figures of Desire (on Troilus and Cressida)." In Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre., Sue-Ellen Case, ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990 Dollimore, Jonathan. Subjectivity, Sexuality, and Transgression: The Jacobean Connection. Renaissance Drama n.s. 17 (1986), 53-81 Evans, G. Blakemore ed. The Riverside Shakespeare. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974 Kahn, CoppÃ… ¾lia. Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981 Traub, Valerie. Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama. New York: Routledge 1992