Powerful Shakespeare Female Characters

Powerful Shakespeare Female Characters

Powerful female characters have a significant role to play in the second half of Shakespeare’s career.  Select either Regan and Goneril form King Lear, Lady Macbeth from Macbeth, Desdemona from Othello, or Cleopatra from Antony and Cleopatra.

Female characters have a significant role to play in the second half

Powerful female characters have a significant role to play in the second half of Shakespeare’s career.

Select either:

Regan and Goneril form King Lear,

Lady Macbeth from Macbeth,

Desdemona from Othello,

or Cleopatra from Antony and Cleopatra.

Discuss the way in which femininity is represented, and complicated, in the play.  How do these strong female characters exercise power in ways that are different from their male counterparts? What do the ways in which these female characters lose power make a statement about the status of women in Renaissance society?

Use in-cite quotations.

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The Most Powerful Shakespeare Female Characters

This article discusses the most powerful Shakespeare female characters across all of his plays. Social and political power was entirely in the hands of the men in Elizabethan England and particularly, well-born men.

Both women and men in the lower classes were powerless but women in the upper classes were in a particularly unenviable position as their value was generally reckon to be a rich or powerful man’s path to more riches or more power:

daughters were consider to be possessions

Further, they were pass from father to husband to forge alliances between the rich and powerful.

The father had the sole right to make the decision about his daughter’s marriage. Once she was marry her function was to produce an heir, and daughters who could be used for the family’s further advancement.

One cannot, therefore, talk about Shakespeare’s powerful women in the social or political sense, but there are a number of very powerful women in Shakespeare, in the personal sense.

They sometimes have political influence behind the scenes, working on their husbands to bring about some political result. Also, using the Elizabethan theatre convention of women disguising themselves as men, Shakespeare is able to present some women in a way that allows them to be taken seriously.

Nevertheless, all the men in those cultures are surround by women, some ineffectual but many very strong. Every male has either a grandmother or a mother, a sister, or a daughter who he knows to be strong, even though she may be wearing clothes that signify her submissive condition, such as head and face covers, whole-body coverings, etc.

One of the most interesting things in Shakespeare is his presentation of strong women. Here is a list of ten of the strongest Shakespeare female characters: