Gender and Genre in Shakespeare's Plays - Essay Example

? Gender And Genre in Shakespeare’s Plays GENDER AND GENRE IN SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS William Shakespeare explored a wide array of aspects on human relationships, passion, and nature in his work. Like most human issues, gender is well represented. However, while covering gender in depth and breadth, Shakespeare does not treat this issue in a stereotypical manner. He takes to reviewing and studying gender relations, undertaking gender role reversals, and assessing gender struggles unveiling in the process a fresh outlook. He also manages to incorporate genre into the discussion of gender to put across his intentions. This paper seeks to analyse three Shakespeare plays, King Lear, the winter’s tale, and Richard ІІІ by considering the incorporation of genre into gender using the plays’ lead characters. One way that Richard ІІІ incorporates genre into gender is through gender stereotyping. Richard’s disagreeable nature and deformities at the end of the War of the Roses turn him into an outsider within a palace devoted to seduction and romance. From the opening lines of his soliloquy, he expresses his disgust in gendered terms. In the first act, of scene one, a man with a stooped shoulder is condemning the transition of the court from masculine aggressiveness of wartime to the feminine activities of carousing and dancing. While Richard does not have a mistress or a wife, Edward ІV before him entertained a bevy of mistresses at the same time in his reign. Richard suggests that his discontentment with England in peacetime is in part attributable to this, claiming that since he could not prove to be a lover to the well-spoken and fair days, he was determined to prove a villain and hate the idle pleasures of the days (McEvoy, 2006 p48). Throughout the play, he targets in his enemies these identified qualities. Lady Anne emerges from the war on the wrong side with her father in law and husband killed for which she lays the blame on Richard. Stricken by grief and anger, Anne is the embodiment of the female who is over-emotional, a stereotype which Richard considers a weakness. However, he still intends to marry into her family, which is still wealthy and powerful and singles out Lady Anne who is still in mourning after being recently widowed. He brings with him his masculine traits of cold practicality and dispassionate logic while trying to woo her. After she accepts his marriage offer and the ring, he asks rhetorically whether any other woman had ever been wooed with such humor and expresses surprise that a woman could actually accept a marriage proposal from a man who had killed her father in law and husband. Congratulating himself, he attributes the success of his proposal to the female heart’s forgetful fickleness. After casually distancing himself from Anne as he had foretold when he admitted that he was not keeping her for long, he attempts to woo the eldest daughter of Edward IV in order to solidify the throne. In stark contrast to his wooing of Anne, Richard is forced to use proxy by first wooing Elizabeth Woodville who is an enemy. In his eyes, Elizabeth Woodville discredited by her birth as a commoner and as a woman (McEvoy, 2006 p49). He does not recognize the character strengths that she must have had to refuse King Edward IV’s advances unless he proposed marriage. While she does accept his proposal, he misjudges her character. He calls her a relenting fool of a woman who was shallow, changing and falls for his advances, while her acceptance was based, on the necessity, to keep the peace at any cost. He attributes the actions of the queen to feminine qualities of domestic concerns rather than the subtly masculine ones of high politics, pragmatism, and logic. While Elizabeth Woodville was only one of the persons that Richard misread her significance is in revealing one of the king’s character flaws. This flaw is his underestimation of characters based on what he considered as female weakness. Shakespeare also incorporates genre into gender in The Winter’s Tale by weaving misogyny into his play. In the first scene of act one, Leontes enquires why Hermione has been so silent and asks her to join the conversation. Leontes also asks his wife to talk, he is complaining about the fact that Hermione apparently is not doing enough to convince Polixenes to continue being a guest at the house. When he refers to Hermione’s silence as being tongue tied, he implies that Hermione, as with all females, talk too much (Stone, 2010 p65). The play actually displays the opposite, as she is full of grace and eloquence in speech. This is especially clear when she talks in her defence at the trial. Another example is Leontes’ consideration as to whether Mammilius resembles him, which reveals a side of misogyny about him. According to him, females will speak anything, which means that they all lie. This distrust of all things women may help explain the reason for his quick judgement of the otherwise faithful Hermione’s dishonesty. According to the patrilineal society during which Shakespeare worked, men were required to possess legitimate heirs, but it is difficult to know whether a child was actually his. This paternity anxiety explains the fears of being cheated on pervading the play. When Polixenes is describing his and Leontes friendship as children, he is keen to emphasize their innocence and purity via suggestions that they were exempt from original sin. He seems to be implying that they were innocent lambs up until the moment they matured and gained an interest in sex and women. Hermione laughs finding the idea amusing and jokes that she and the queen were devils. Polixenes’s implication, which states that women are to blame for loss of innocence by men echoes in the first three acts of the play. Leontes punishes his wife unjustly for a crime of sex, which she is innocent. Once Leontes convinces himself that Hermione is creeping around with Polixenes and carrying his child, he claims that in history wives with cheating in their blood is a common feature. He goes as far as to compare the vagina of a woman to a private pond where any man can fish with a pole (Greenblatt et al, 2008 p45). Leontes also suggests that his wife is like a beast that a man can mount and ride, calling her a hobbyhorse (McEvoy, 2006 p13). He goes on to compare her to a flax work girl from the lower class suggesting that he believes in the fact that promiscuity can turn a queen into a lowly commoner. This allows him to feel justified hen he locks the queen in prison, stripping her of her dignity further. In the first scene of act two, Leontes seizes Mammilius away from mother and declares his pleasure that the child had a wet nurse since he already had too much of his mother in him. He cannot bear the thought of the child being close to her mother or even similar to her in any way. According to him, character traits were passed from mother to her child through breast milk. Further, in the third scene of the second act, Leontes is angry at Paulina who stands up to him and insists his acknowledgement of the new-born child. He calls her a whore and accuses her of mistreating her husband. Leontes later refers to her as a man-witch and accuses her of dominating Antigonus (Laurie & Michelle, 2008 p21). The abuse, which Leontes hurls at Paulina, is keeping in step with his notion that women are too talkative, abuse their husbands, and invert correct gender relations. In King Lear, the king looks at human sexuality as a terrifying and horrific thing and is of the belief that the majority of women are prone to promiscuity. He is also convinced that a majority of them are actual monsters. In the 4th scene of the first act, he is so angry at his daughter’s betrayal that he curses her with sterility (Garner & Maderlon, 1996 p34). He goes on to say that even if the gods grant her children, he wishes that she undergoes painful labour and that the child is thankless, making her a miserable mother for the remainder of her life. In the 4th scene of act one, Lear accuses Goneril of shaking his manhood after he reduces the retinue of knights available to him. Without the authority and power, he enjoyed once under his earlier rule he feels that he has been reduced to a woman. Reference Garner N, and Madelon S. Shakespearean tragedy and gender. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1996. Laurie H, Michele L. Shakespearean criticism : volume 44, excerpts from the criticism of William Shakespeare's plays and poetry, from the first published appraisals to current evaluations. Detroit, MI: Gale Research Co, 2008. McEvoy S. Shakespeare: The Basics. London: Taylor & Francis,, 2006. Shakespeare W, Stephen G, Walter C, Jean H. The Norton Shakespeare, based on the Oxford edition. New York : W.W. Norton, 2008. Stone W. Crossing gender in Shakespeare : feminist psychoanalysis and the difference within. New York: Routledge, 2010. Read More