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Gender Roles In Shakespeare's Romeo And Juliet

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1 Introduction
In Shakespeare 's time gender roles mattered a lot more than they do now and they contributed to many aspects in life. To identify if the plot of Shakespeare 's play “Romeo and Juliet” was influenced by gender roles I am going to lay out what gender roles are and their importance in the Renaissance. Further I will examine scenes and the whole of Romeo and Juliet on characteristics of gender roles and their embodiments by different characters. Additionally, I am going to take a closer look on the main characters Romeo and Juliet and analyse if they match or challenge the expectations they are supposed to fulfill based on their gender.
2 What are gender roles?
2.1 Gender roles in general Every society and culture is structured around patterns that initiate how we interact with each other. There are different categories of these patterns such as gender (sex), ethnicity and social class. These categories combined can be called a status. (cf. Lindsey 2016)
“A role is the expected behavior associated with a status. Roles are performed according to social norms, shared rules that guide people’s behavior in specific situations.” ,so Linda L Lindsey in her book “Gender roles” (2016, p.2)
Relating this to gender means that gender roles are behaviors and characteristics that are considered to be appropriate for a person based on their biological sex. (Other than gender, sex is distinguished by actual biological differences and not expectations and images of

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