The Status Of Women In Shakespeare's Comedies

William Shakespeare occupies a unique position at the top of the hierarchy of texts in the canon of English literature, and is considered to occupy the same position within the large category of English culture. In his life, he accomplished 39 plays, 5 long poems, and 154 sonnets, which enlist him among the great giants of the world literature. He is so prominent and important that nobody can avoid talking about him when approaching English literature. As a young learner of Shakespeare, I am much impressed by the diversity of his characters, and my particular interest, in this case, lies in those intellective women in his comedies.This dissertation accordingly has women as its topic, and it aims at understanding their promoted status in the Elizabethan society as depicted in Shakespeare's comedies. In my opinion, women characters occupy a dominant position in the comedies of Shakespeare, however, due to historical and social limitation, Shakespeare tended to redeem any women that go against social conventions at the end of his plays.In the first place, Shakespeare was a mirror of the struggle of the women of his times from the queen to the peasant woman as they struggle to gain more freedom, right, education, and respect. In his comedies, he portrayed woman such as Portia in The Merchant of Venice to illustrate his views on the need of change in society's opinion of the role of women. He also employed woman like Kate in The Taming of the Shrew to state against the follies of society which minimized the intellect of women. His well-developed characters of comic women far surpass his forerunners and they have no parallel among contemporary dramatists.Yet, Shakespeare's promotion of women has stimulated a broader range of thought about gender roles, and such discourse in turn has generated powerful cultural anxietyabout potential disruption of the social order. As a patronized playwright in the aristocratic dynasty, Shakespeare in response has mitigated such anxiety by redeeming any women that go against prevailing conventions by the end of his plays. As a result, Shakespeare's historic and gender limitation is also one of the objects of my attention.The whole paper is thus divided into five parts.The introduction of this paper tries first to arouse the readers' interest in the versatility of female characters in Shakespeare's comedies, to define the focus of this paper, and then to describe the critical approach used. This approach amounts to a sociological investigation of the fictional world of Shakespeare's comedies, which, though by no means identical with the society that produced it, tell much about the society, and the beliefs and practices that characterized it.Secondly, Shakespeare's comedies incorporate a number of elements from earlier dramatic and cultural traditions, especially from his Greek and Roman forerunners. Thus, part one concentrates on the development of images of women in the four periods of Greek and Roman Comedy: Greek Old Comedy, Greek Middle Comedy, Greek New Comedy, and Roman New Comedy. In addition, dramatic practices of some other Elizabethan playwrights are also discussed in this part for they break the medieval ideal of womanhood.In part two, the dominant status of women in Shakespeare's comedies is explored. Three sections contribute to the discussion of reasons for such a position of women, from either the angel of the matrimony theme or the love courtship plot in the comedies of Shakespeare.Part three serves as an illustration of part two, with Adriana in The Comedy of Errors and Portia in The Merchant of Venice as two examples. This part consists of two sections—the first gives an insight into how Shakespeare unearthed the inner gentleness of Adriana under her jealous appearance, the second challenges some critics' views of the much-vaunted and selfish Portia, and tries to justify her bold moves by recalling the unparalleled position of marriage in Shakespeare's love comedies.Part four makes a presentation of the social restriction to women in Shakespeare's comedies. Shakespeare responded to the contradiction between social customs and his free-thinking heroines in a compromising tendency. The most distinctive proof, in this case, is the sudden regress of women at the end of the comedies.In order to exemplify the argumentative points in the previous part, part five, through three sections, examines the situations and experiences of the women in three of Shakespeare's comedies. In these three sections, comic love stories are surveyed on how the women character involved is endowed with male-surpassing abilities, is forced to show obedience to their husbands, and is finally degraded to the stereotype of women in the sixteenth century: submissive and silent.Moreover, both part three and part five begin and end with commentary applicable to the traits of women surveyed under its heading; each of these traits is then discussed in dramatic examples, with particular attention to the social conventions involved. Following the five main parts is a conclusion, which reviews the points discussed in the five parts.