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Gender Identities in Tragedy and Romance. It is a peculiar feature of
Shakespeare's plays that they both participate in and reflect ...
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Submitted by kurstin6903 on April 6, 2006
Category: English
Words: 2223 | Pages: 9
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It is a peculiar feature of Shakespeare's plays that they both participate in and reflect the ideas of gender roles in Western society. They reflect existing notions about the 'proper' roles of men and women, they can be said to be a product of their society. However, since they have been studied, performed, and taught for five hundred years, they may be seen as formative of contemporary notions about the relationships between males, females, and power. Masculinity, “is not a natural given, something that comes with possession of male sexual organs, but an achievement, and something that must be worked toward and maintained “(Smith 131 Most of Shakespeare's plays have traceable sources for their central plots. Representations of gender in Renaissance drama are tied to their original presentation bearing the traces of their history in a theatrical enterprise which completely excluded women, construct gender from a relentlessly andocentric perspective. It is the ways in which these texts reflect or distort the gender expectations of society, either Elizabethan or contemporary, that is so important.
It is the exaggerated character--Falstaff, Petruchio, Paulina, or Cleopatra--or those who step outside the borders of their assigned gender roles--Rosalind, Portia, and Viola--who generate the greatest theatrical and critical interest. Elizabethan society had a loosely determined set of normal behaviors that are frequently linked to gender. Despite diffusion of these gender expectations in both time periods (see Dollimore), there are definite behaviors that either lie within the constructs of gender or go beyond patterns accepted as conventional. Female characters in Shakespeare do take on male roles, and whether it is because their true identity is hidden or simply by virtue of their acceptance as non-female, they are able to function in the text in ways that an undisguised female character could not.
“If it is the man's part to swagger, roar, thunder,...
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