WOMEN
IN SHAKESPEARE
William Shakespeare
The women of
Shakespeare’s plays, though offering a
variegated human and emotional landscape, appear
to be symbols of beauty, purity, loyalty and
grace. Their personalities frequently manifest
all their potential qualities when they are in
love, and they appear to hold a very passionate
and profound view of this sentiment.
However, there are obviously different
reading keys applicable to them. They have been
often considered as heroines able to correct
their men’s mistakes and to have a crucial role
in the development of events in the play, being
frequently decisive in helping solving problems
and conflicts.
In Shakespeare’s plays, there are several
examples of women who have the courage to
challenge and oppose the constraints imposed on
them by patriarchal societies in which power was
placed in the hands of men, first of all based
on the father’s will and plans for them. All
Shakespeare’s women are ruled by love, so it is
expected that if a woman falls in love, she will
marry the man who has taken her heart, also
facing her parents’ disapproval. In
Romeo and
Juliet (1595),
Juliet fights against her family to love
Romeo, even to the point of death, despite her
very young age, showing an extraordinary and
uncommon maturity.
Juliet:
O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name;
Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.
(Act II, sc. ii)
In
Othello
(1603-04) Desdemona decides to take control of
her life, take her relationship into her own
hands and ignore the tradition of waiting for
her father’s approval when, challenging racial
prejudices, she decides to marry Othello.
Desdemona:
You are the lord of duty,
I am hitherto your daughter: but here’s my
husband,
And so much duty as my mother show’d
To you, preferring you before her father,
So much I challenge that I may profess
Due to the moor my lord.
In The
Merchant of Venice (1596-97) Jessica defies
her father and
abandons him to follow Lorenzo.
Jessica:
Farewell; and if my fortune be not crost,
I have a father, you a daughter, lost.
There is also someone who decides to love and
follow her own father’s wish as
King Lear’s
daughters. In this case we have two alternative
ways of showing love for the father. King Lear’s
arrogance and vanity are so strong that he asks
for a public confirmation of love from his three
daughters: whereas Cordelia refuses to do it,
Goneril and Regan hypocritically do. Cordelia’s
‘misdeed’ is her sincerity and honesty as she
believes that authentic love needs silence not
words: for this reason she is repudiated and
disinherited; yet, despite this, in the end, she
is the only one who stands by her father when
her sisters refuse to look after him. Goneril’s
and Regan’s adulations win but hypocrisy,
avidity and violence will be soon revealed. In
this sense, they can be considered as examples
of negative images of women.
Cordelia:
The jewels of our father, with washed eyes
Cordelia leaves you. I know what you are;
And like a sister, am most loath to call
Your faults as they are named. Love well our
father!
To your professed bosoms I commit him.
But yet, alas, stood I within his grace,
I would prefer him to a better place.
So farewell to you both.
Regan:
Prescribe not us our duty.
Gonerill:
Be to content your lord, who hath received you
At Fortune’s alms. You have obedience scanted,
And well are worth the want that you have
wanted.
Cordelia:
Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides;
Who covers faults, at last with shame derides.
Well may you prosper!
Instead, the vicissitudes of Portia
in The
Merchant of Venice (1596) are totally
different. She seems to have no power on her
destiny, that is already decided by her father,
but she manages to manipulate his wish with
cunningness. So we have not only a symbol of
beauty and richness, but also a symbol of great
intelligence and intuition.
The setting in which Lady Macbeth moves is
totally different. Macbeth (1606) is a
tragedy of violence and longing for power. She
presents herself as the incarnation of evil:
she’s a contradictory figure, her wish for power
becomes an obsession without limits. She’s
called “lady” by Shakespeare for her fragile and
helpless womanly aspect, but this good
appearance hides an effective evil side. She is
a woman with a strong personality, extreme
feelings and passions. Lady Macbeth
is both wife and mother to her husband:
she knows her husband’s weaknesses and, being
ambitious, she decides to encourage him to
achieve his own objectives. There is a strong
liaison between them, and in fact we see her
fragility when this tie becomes weak. Lady
Macbeth is determination, Macbeth weakness. She
is conscious that in a society governed by men
she must have some traditional masculine
qualities to reach power: in this way she loses
her femininity completely.
There are also women charged with ridiculous
accusations, for examples the false charges of
Desdemona’s adultery; but there are also fragile
and complex women: Hamlet, in fact, cannot
understand Ophelia’s behaviour
when she accepts to see her beauty
manipulated by her father and King Claudius for
wrong purposes.
Gertrude, instead, appears to be an ambiguously
‘silent’ presence in
Hamlet and to elude easy interpretations. She seems to remain indifferent to the moral issues of her son and
she is described as a lustful, adulterous and
incestuous woman. Feminist criticisms of
Shakespeare’s plays have tried to read her
character differently and have understood that
“she is intelligent, penetrating, and gifted
with a remarkable talent for concise and pithy
speech”.[1]
Traditional critical interpretations are
frequently mistaken when they fail to see the
hidden meaning of her words and actions, and
only take them at face value. She is an
obedient, dependent, unimaginative woman who is
caught miserably between “two mighty opposites,
her heart cleft in twin” (Act III, sc. 4, l.156)
by her divided loyalties to husband and son. She
loves both Hamlet and Claudius, but their
conflicts make her unhappy. Some critics have
seen Gertrude’s death as a suicide in order to
protect her son Hamlet and to show a sort of
determination in disobeying Claudius’s command
not to drink the poisoned wine. These, however,
are only suppositions because Gertrude remains a
passive and silent figure in the course of the
tragedy.
Margaret Atwood’s
Gertrude
Talks Back (1992)
The Canadian postmodernist writer, Margaret
Atwood, re-elaborated
Hamlet’s
Act III, sc. iv, with a precise objective in
mind: to fill in the silences of Shakespeare’s
text and give a ‘strong’ and highly
transgressive voice to Gertrude, a figure who
lives actually on the margins of the canonical
text.
Gertrude Talks Back
is a feminist rewriting of Gertrude’s reaction
to the violent charges of her son Hamlet in the
famous closet scene. In Atwood’s text there is
no real dialogue between mother and son, as in
this case the reader only hears Gertrude’s
voice. The ‘new’ Gertrude lists a number of
utterances separated by pauses, that we can
define as an exchange, part of which has been
left out; the elided sections would correspond
to Hamlet’s words in Shakespeare’s play. This
achieves a double objective: on the one hand,
the pauses in Atwood’s text send the reader
constantly back to Hamlet’s words in the
original play; on the other, Gertrude’s words
sound as an open challenge and answer to her
son’s charges but, more importantly, they also
obviously balance the predominance of Hamlet’s
voice against her inarticulacy in the
Shakespearean tragedy.
Atwood’s text touches different points in order
to achieve “a de-sacralization of Hamlet through
both humour and re-contextualization in the
quotidian, the dismissal of guilt, and
correspondingly, a rejection of his (male)
construction of her”.[2]
In Shakespeare’s text Hamlet has just killed
Polonius, who was hiding behind an arras in
Gertrude’s chamber, believing he was Claudius.
Then he addresses his mother.
Hamlet:
Look here, upon this picture, and on this;
The counterfeit presentment of two brothers.
See, what a grace was seated on this brow;
Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself,
And eye like Mars to threaten and command;
A station like the herald Mercury
New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill,
A combination and form indeed,
Where every god did seem to set his seal,
To give the world assurance of a man.
This was your husband:
[…]
Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty, —
[…]
Not this by no means that I bid you do:
Let the bloat king tempt you again to bed;
Pinch wanton on your cheek; call you his mouse;
And let him, for a pair of reechy kisses,
Or paddling in your neck with his damn’d
fingers,
Make you to ravel all this matter out,
That I essentially am not in madness,
But mad in craft. (Act III, sc. iv)
Atwood’s re-writing begins with references to
the name of Hamlet, objecting strongly to its
appropriateness.
“I always thought it was a mistake, calling you
Hamlet. I mean, what kind of a name is that for
a young boy? It was your father’s idea. Nothing
would do but that you had to be called after
him. Selfish. The other kids at school used to
tease the life out of you. The nicknames! And
those terrible jokes about pork. I wanted to
call you George.”
The root of Hamlet, “ham”, is the meat of pigs;
for this reason, Gertrude maintains, the kids
laughed at him when he was at school. She calls
her dead husband “selfish”, because he only
wanted his name to be transmitted, while she
wanted to call her son George, that is the name
of England’s patron. With these first
observations Gertrude starts to justify her
actions and her choices, talking about her
married life.
During her son’s charges she seems agitated, yet
she retorts:
“I’m not wringing my hands. I’m drying my
nails.”
This gives a humorous lie to Hamlet’s declared
intention of wringing her heart (Act. III, sc.
iv, ll. 34-35). In this case she could appear
unconcerned about her son’s issues; actually,
Atwood is rewriting Gertrude’s behaviour as that
of an adult, of a parent, who is merely showing
resoluteness in this situation.
The next passage touches something personal:
“Darling, please stop to fidgeting with my
mirror. That’ll be the third one you’ve broken.”
In Shakespeare’s play Hamlet obliges his mother
to look at herself in the mirror and see her
most secret self reflected in it, in order to
make her feel ashamed of herself. Here he
invades her private affairs: he becomes a sort
of intruder and she reasserts her right not to
see those intimate borders trespassed on .
According to Jardine, the closet- where the
scene tales place- was the only domestic space
over which early modern women exercised total
control.
Then she comes back to the first part of her
son’s charge, when he obliges her to look at the
portraits of her dead husband and his brother
Claudius:
“Yes, I’ve seen those pictures. Thank you very
much. I know your father was handsomer then
Claudius. High brow, aquiline nose and so on,
looked great in uniform. But handsome isn’t
everything, especially in a man, and far be it
from me to speak ill of dead, but I think its
about time I pointed out to you that your Dad
wasn’t a whole lot of fun. Noble, sure, I grant
you. But Claudius, well, he likes a drink now
and then. He appreciates a decent meal. He
enjoys a laugh, know what I mean? You don’t
always have to be tiptoeing around because of
some holier-than-thou principle or something.”
Step by step Gertrude begins to deconstruct
Hamlet’s perception of his parents’ marriage and
to show her feelings of weariness of an
oppressive married life: she is conscious of her
dead husband’s handsomeness, however at one
point she states
her own
rights as a woman to choose a man she likes, who
can entertain
and reassure her, though this might
appear ‘offensive’ to her prudish son.
Here, instead, she begins to charge her son with
different accusations:
“The rank sweat of what? My bed is certainly not
enseamed, whatever that might be! A nasty sty,
indeed! Not that it’s any of your business, but
I change those sheets twice a week, which is
more than you do, judging from that student slum
pigpen in Wittenberg. I’ll certainly never visit
you there again without prior warning! I see
that laundry of yours when you bring it home,
and not often enough either, by a long shot!
Only when you run out of black socks.”
She advises him not to talk of “enseamed bed”,
because while he was in Wittenberg, his room was
very dirty. By using this strategy, Atwood
actually deconstructs the whole psychological
construction of Hamlet as we have it in
Shakespeare’s play and makes a very
down-to-earth portrait of the young, melancholic
Prince.
“And let me tell you, everyone sweats at a time
like that, as you’d find out very soon if you
ever gave it a try. A real girlfriend would do
you a heap of good. Not like that pasty-faced
what’s-her-name, all trussed up like a prize
turkey in those touch-me-not corsets of hears.
If you ask me, there’s something off about that
girl. Borderline. Any little shock could push
her right over the edge.”
[…]
“No darling. I am not mad at you. But I must say
you’re an awful prig sometimes. Just like your
Dad. The Flesh, he’d say. You’d think I was dog
dirt. You can excuse that in a young person,
they are always so intolerant, but in someone
his age it was getting, well, very hard to live
with, and that’s the understatement of the
year.”
[…]
Some days I think it would have been better for
both of us if you hadn’t been an only child. But
you realize who you have to thank for that. You
have no idea what I used to put up with. And
every time I felt like a little, you know, just
to warm up my ageing, it was like I’d suggested
murder.”
In this passage we do not have understatement,
because she speaks clearly and with great
seriousness: she talks about his “girlfriend”,
his arrogance and his being spoilt; she talks
about her banal sexual life with her dead
husband and his refusal of her body. Here her
sensuality and her femininity are underlined.
She voices her frustration of the impossibility
of making free choices.
“Oh! You think Claudius murdered your Dad? Well,
no wonder you’ve been so rude to him at the
dinner table!
If I’d know that, I could have put you straight
in no time flat.
It wasn’t Claudius, darling.
It was me.”
Before she defended herself, now she openly
admits to being guilty. Gertrude may not confess
to pangs of conscience, but she does own up the
murder of her first husband. She is guilty of
having provoked her husband’s death, the death
of a man unable to listen to her and feel her
needs, a man who ignored and despised her
sensuality: it’s a sort of Freudian murder and
she is here claiming her own responsibility.
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In Shakespeare’s work we meet all types of
women. The result of this “journey” is that we
cannot consider Shakespeare as a great defender
either of women or of men. He breaks with the
Medieval-Renaissance tradition, that saw woman
as a symbol of purity, as unattainable who could
not return the poet’s love. He introduces
something different in
Sonnet
130:
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red, than her lips red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speaks, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound:
I grant I never saw a goodness go,
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the
ground:
And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare,
As any she believed with false compare.
This
poem rejects many of the traditional conventions
of Elizabethan love poetry. He represents the
beauty of her own particular nature in all its
uniqueness and differences. The “dark lady” of
the sonnet textualises a much more honest, real
account of a love affair than any other poems
from the period. He describes the woman as she
actually is: a creature who has the same
qualities and abilities as any other human
being. She doesn’t need fighting to obtain a
space in society or to see her rights respected;
above all she does not need hyperbolically
deceitful celebrations of her qualities and
attributes.
All these examples show
how the view of woman has often been, at best,
partial, at worst deceitful. Apart from their
different physical features women and men follow
the same existential trajectory: they are born,
grow up, die in the same way. Maybe there
is a
difference between the two: women act following
not only the heart but also the mind.
