Gender Roles in Shakespeare Essay -- essays research papers

     It is a peculiar feature of Shakespeares plays that they twain participate in and reflect the ideas of gender roles in Western society. To the limit that they reflect existing notions about the proper roles of men and women, they can be verbalize to be a product of their society. However, since they have been studied, performed, and taught for fivehundred years, they may be seen as formative of contemporary notions about the relationships between males, females, and power. Derrida was in good order in asserting that "there is no outside to the text edition." His claim is that every text is affected by every other(a) text and every other speech act. As an instance, most of Shakespeares plays have traceable sources for their central plots. Re demos of gender in Renaissance drama are tied to their original presentation "bearing the traces of their history in a theatrical enterprise which on the whole 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 kinda than on resolution of the situation that keeps them apart is really quite demanding 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 stage his art. The lovers in Midsummer Nights Dream are sure at their most entertaining when theyre in love with the wrong person. It is the magnify character--Falstaff, Petruchio, Paulina, or Cleopatra--or those who s tep                                                    outside th... ...sp                                  Works ConsultedBamber, Linda. Comic Women, Tragic hands A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare. Stanford, calcium Stanford University Press, 1982 Belsey, Catherine. Desires intemperance Edward II, Troilus and Cressida, Othello." In Erotic Politics Desire on the Renaissance Stage. Susan Zimmerman, ed. saucily York Routledge,1992 Cook, Carol. "Unbodied Figures of Desire (on Troilus and Cressida)." In Performing Feminisms Feminist Critical possibility and Theatre., Sue-Ellen Case, ed. Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990 Dol limore, Jonathan. Subjectivity, Sexuality, and Transgression The Jacobean Connection. Renaissance Drama n.s. 17 (1986), 53-81 Evans, G. Blakemore ed. The Riverside Shakespeare. refreshed York Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974 Kahn, Copplia. Mans 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