Cross Dressing In Shakespeare Essay

The very act of cross-dressing itself was subversive, especially in Spain where costume was hugely important, not just on stage but in real life. Literary critic William Egginton notes in An Epistemology of the Stage, that when it came to costume the "Spanish public was extremely sensitive to such signifiers of class and could not, for example, tolerate or comprehend a scene in which the signs of social status presented by costume and speech would conflict". (402) With the audience so sensitive to costume details, what must they have thought about Rosaura 's male attire? Women dressing as men was a common device used by playwrights in the Golden Age (mujer vestida de hombre ) and one wonders was it merely because it was practical?

William Shakespeare is one of the most enduring playwrights of the last 1,000 years. It is rare for an average American high school student to graduate without reading at least one of Shakespeare’s works. The themes of Shakespeare’s most famous works still resonate with readers of all ages, race, and economic backgrounds today. Love, betrayal, and revenge always seem more powerful when spoken in Shakespearean English by actors wearing tights. She’s the Man and 10 Things I Hate About You deal with teenage rebellion, friendship, and unruly family members, while still managing to embrace original themes from their source material.

The question of feminine insanity and madness within literature has been a topic of much debate within literary studies, particularly among those scholars who focus on feminist readings of the texts in question. Many of these new readings and analyses are based on or heavily rely on the influential work of Gilbert and Gubar, who focused on the issue of female madness within Victorian fiction in their work The Madwoman in the Attic. As they posit in their work, female authors of the time were confined to only two models of femaleness within their works, either the pure angel or the untamed madwoman. Here they also introduce the idea of the double, which harkens back to the dark doppelgänger from the gothic tradition. As they explain in the preface to the text, many of these work is dealing with female madness while seemingly placing two models of femininity opposite one another are in actuality “fantasies in which maddened doubles functioned as asocial surrogates for docile selves” (Gilbert and Gruber 6).

Olivia Lynch Mrs. Butterfield AP Lit 5/1/16 When you are ready to dive into the vast world of Shakespeare, you can begin by using what is known as a critical lens. The lens that may help you understand the background details of one of Shakespeare’s plays would be the Historical lens. Although there are many different lens that you can use to interpret a story, the Historical Lens is a great lens to dive into to find what really influenced the great ideas of William Shakespeare as he wrote Hamlet including the role gender plays, the comparison of Elizabeth Tudor, and the religious incorporation throughout the play. First, we can take the Historical Lens and dive into the idea of how gender roles were highly represented in Hamlet

There is some speculation of women pretending to be men in these times to play female characters as that was the only way they could be on stage. This, however, can’t be proven. The perception in society was that the theater was better suited for men. The roles of women in English drama were all roles conceived by men, because all the ancient playwrights were men. It is a testament to how great theater of the time was that it became so popular with men speaking love soliloquies to each other.

Gender is a common thread that is woven through most major Shakespearean plays. An argument that follows the story lines of works such as Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and a more dominant role in Othello. Written in 1603, Othello examines the contrast between female and male characters, and where their place is in society. As this was written in a time where women were seen as the lesser sex compared to their male counterparts. Males take on more power hungry roles, drowning out the roles of females by minimizing their thoughts and actions.

“People are always ready to see the lesbian as wearing a felt hat, her hair short, and a necktie; her mannishness is seen as an abnormality indicating a hormonal imbalance” (De Beauvoir, 479). With this quote French feminist writer, Simone the Beauvoir, starts her chapter on “The Lesbian” in her book The Second Sex (1949). It is peculiar that the stereotype of the masculine lesbian can still be found in contemporary popular culture and literature, yet slightly altered to a more contemporary version. This chapter will explain what lesbian literature is, give some historical background on how lesbian literature developed from 600BC to present day, and show various lesbian identities and stereotypes that recur in lesbian fiction. As stated in

Author Timothy Materer was impressed with and wrote the following commentary on “Exchanging Hats” “which he saw in New World Writing, 1956.”(Mirrored Lives, 180) He goes on to say “In its ingenious quatrains, the poem 's aunts and uncles experiment with the ‘headgear of the other sex’

As its theoretical framework, this chapter relies on Judith Butler’s (1956- ) theory of gender and sexuality in In the Time of the Butterflies and studies the construction of identity and the effect of socially constructed gender roles on creating gender identity. The chapter, thus, focuses on the effect of gender roles and norms in the process of identity formation, and examines Judith Butler’s performative theory of gender and

“The very thing that was meant to protect natural beauty has turned and threatened our very definition of beauty. A beautiful woman should strike you as different; as unique; as an individual. Her body can be attractive based on a number of things, but shouldn’t one of those criteria be that she is real?” (Curly) Martin’s play Beauty helps bring forth two different women living two different ways, one receiving all the attention of men and the other wanting to be receiving that attention.

In this way we can identify the importance of society and expectations in the portrayal of the different identities. To illustrate one more example, there is the case of Myrtle, leading on to the importance of clothing in the portrayal of these identities. Nick Carraway notes that “under the influence of the dress, her personality had also undergone a change”. Through clothing, Myrtle obtains the tools to change her identity, hence expressing a different identity to achieve the ultimate purpose of ‘belonging’ to the

In Euripides’s The Bacchae and in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, I found the gender roles in these particular plays to be very interesting because this was my first exposure to cross-dressing in works of literature. In The Bacchae, women play a huge role because women are often portrayed as feminine and inferior in many past works, however, in The Bacchae, the women of Thebes decide to rebel against the men and join the Greek God of grape harvesting, wine, fertility, and partying, in the woods. The women were manipulated by Dionysus and were turned into maenads because they joined Dionysus and rejected the norms for women, to stay in their place and they all went from the first world they were living in, Thebes, to the second world,

Each female character is treated by men as a possession. However, there are also moments when they are presented as confident and challenge a male authority. This would have been exiting for Shakespeare’s female Elizabethan audience as women

During the Elizabethan period, the role of women in society was very different from what it is today. According to the system of patriarchal society that dictated that women were inferior to men, they had to obey the male figures in their lives. The woman was seen as the weaker sex either physically or emotionally which meant that it was entirely dependent on her husband if married and members of his family if single. Moreover, in the Elizabethan theater, women were not allowed to play because of this hierarchy. Therefore, they were replaced by men disguised as women.

William Shakespeare’s works, written primarily from the late eighteen hundreds to the very early sixteen hundreds, have long been the subject of academic debates and analysis. Potent with double entendres, metaphors, and social commentary, it is easy to apply queer theory to Shakespeare’s plays, notably Twelfth Night, written in 1601. Though Twelfth Night’s ending pushes its characters into traditional heterosexual romances and binary gender roles to satisfy the genre and placate conservative Elizabethan audiences, the characters in the comedy defy tradition by exploring homosexual love and expression of gender. The most apparent homosexual themes are present in the relationship between Antonio and Sebastian.