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King Lear As You Like It Analysis

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Undeniably woman in both As You Like It and King Lear play key roles. Though the two plays fall under different genres it may be easier to contrast the role woman in both plays then to compare them, but within this essay similarities and contrasts between the woman in both plays will be highlighted. Though it seems that As You Like It offers a more open view to woman this essay aims to highlight how in fact the woman in both King Lear and As You Like It are viewed the same, who both plays offer a “disturbing attitude to female sexuality”
King Lear and As You Like It fall under completely different worlds of Shakespeare, tragedy and comedy retrospectively. The tone in As You Like It is romantic and comedic, (the humour was for an audience of shakespeare's time, not modern audience who would struggle to find laugh out loud comedy within this play), while King Lear has a tone which is “Serious and tragic; the occasional bursts of comedy are uniformly dark”.(SparkNotes Editors). Emma Smith puts the differences between the two genres simply “‘If things end up better than when you started out, at least for the central characters, the world is a comic on; it’s a tragedy where they are getting worse’ …show more content…

In King Lear the 3 daughters of Lear are central to the play. Regan and Goneril within this play are controlling, horrendous woman while Cordelia is virginal and pure. The woman within King Lear have no depth and are one-dimensional. Regan and Goneril start off horrible and stay horrible through the duration of the play, while Cordelia stays pure and righteous thought-out. The woman within King Lear don't develop. This is a central point on how the attitude to women is within these Shakespearean plays,by being one dimensional the sisters are seen as uninteresting and inhuman due to the fact that a complex reader cannot identify with a uncomplex

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