Gender Roles in Shakespeare Essay -- essays research papers

     It is a peculiar feature of Shakespe bes plays that they both participate in and debate the ideas of gender roles in Western society. To the extent that they reflect existing notions active the proper roles of men and women, they can be said to be a harvest-home of their society. However, since they have been studied, performed, and taught for fivehundred years, they may be seen as fictile of contemporary notions about the relationships between males, females, and power. Derrida was right in asserting that " in that location is no removed to the text." His claim is that every(prenominal) text is affected by every other text and every other speech act. As an instance, nigh of Shakespeares plays have traceable sources for their central plots. Representations of gender in spiritual rebirth romp are tied to their original presentation "bearing the traces of their history in a theatrical enterprise which completely excluded women, (these text s) construct gender from a relentlessly androcentric perspective" (Helms 196). It is the ways in which these texts reflect or filtrate the gender expectations of society, either Elizabethan or contemporary, that is so important.Comedy that centers on the relationship between conventional couples rather than on resolution of the station that keeps them apart is really quite difficult to find in Shakespeare. Ferdinand and Miranda are so uninteresting as a couple that their chief                                                    last seems to be as an excuse for Prospero to exhibit his art. The lovers in Midsummer darknesss Dream are certainly at their most socialise when theyre in love with the wrong person. It is the exaggerated character--Falstaff, Petruchio, Paulina, or Cleop atra--or those who step                                                    outside th... ...sp                                  Works ConsultedBamber, Linda. Comic Women, Tragic Men A Study of sex and Genre in Shakespeare. Stanford, California Stanford University Press, 1982 Belsey, Catherine. Desires Excess Edward II, Troilus and Cressida, Othello." In Erotic regime Desire on the Renaissance Stage. Susan Zimmerman, ed. New York Routledge,1992 Cook, Carol. "Unbodied Figures of Desire (on Troilus and Cressida)." In Performing Feminisms Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre., Sue-Ellen Case, ed. Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990 Dol limore, Jonathan. Subjectivity, sexual practice, and Transgression The Jacobean Connection. Renaissance Drama n.s. 17 (1986), 53-81 Evans, G. Blakemore ed. The Riverside Shakespeare. New York Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974 Kahn, Copplia. Mans body politic 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