Shakespeare's Role Of Women And Women, By William Shakespeare

Shakespeare is not just a person who lived 500 years ago, he is the kind that has written about 37 plays and 156 sonnets. His plays were played by only male actors on stage, even the female parts. Phyllis Rackin main point in his book Woman and Shakespeare, in titled chapter ‘Boys Will Be Girls’, has said that women actors play an important role on stage. The women perform the female parts as adequately as the male actors, it arises concern about masculine sexual identity and males on stage speculate a male delusion of a world without women. There is a contrast between women and men that is physical and emotional. While men could be physically stronger, a woman has a tendency to be more emotional. In Shakespeare's time, all the performances on stage were performed by male actors. Women were not allowed to act, in fact, it was considered to be illegal, so all the women parts were played by the men. The men acts differently, therefore, it cannot perform as close as a woman would. For example, in Shakespeare in Love, the play wasn’t performed well enough because the boy actor was just “naturally” unable to play the woman; this has resulted in the fail of the production. Moreover, “Thomas Coryate described his visit to a Venetian playhouse where women performed the female parts: ‘I saw women act, a thing that I never saw before...they performed it with as good a grace, action, gesture, and whatsoever convenient for a player, as ever I saw any masculine actor.’ (Rackin, 74). It is easier for male actors to play an actual male and for ladies to play as a women. A boy that is trying to represent a women character would act in a different way as if the boy who was trying to represent an actual boy. The double-cross is harder to perform then straight representation of a woman. In addition, Phyllis Rackin said, “Instead of disturbing the gender identity of the cross-dressed heroines, these performances insisted on its stability by emphasizing the femininity of the female characters, unchanged by their male attire. In the context of a sex/gender system increasingly grounded in biology, the spectacle”(78). Because having the women playing on stage was so controversial, that after it was accepted, the woman played in the "Breeches parts" where they showed their bodies on the show for the pleasure of the male viewers . Instead of focusing on their individuality, women with no shame showed their parts of the body for males for pleasure and as an attraction for male desire. This has change how people view …show more content…
Because many Shakespeare’s plays could not hide the fact that it was a male playing a female, it “regarded as convincing and taken seriously. In our own theatres, by contrast, male cross-dressing invariably threatens to provoke the nervous laughter that arises from contemporary anxieties about masculine sexual identity” (Rackin, 74). When people see two boys acting on stage holding hands and pretending or actually kissing, it creates an idea of homosexuality or bisexual desire. When a man has to act like a women on stage, he has to imagine and show the real tears that are unsuitable for men. Also, their physical appearance had to promise that it would not misunderstand their social identity and status. Therefore, the double-cross of the garments in the theater was considered to be a change of sexual