A Midsummer Night's Dream Gender Roles Essay
Throughout many of his works, Shakespeare demonstrated the issues relevant to his time in regards to gender roles and tensions. During the period of the fifteenth century, women of upper class were inferior figures known as the “Elizabethan women” and were dominated by the men in their families. Women were subservient to the men in the family and were expected to obey men in all aspects of their life, no matter what their opinion was. Marriages were arranged to suit the family and disobedience towards men was seen as a crime against their religion, and women were likely to die or suffer banishment for doing so. Likewise, the role of men was to be the head of the marriage and men were allowed to discipline their wife as they pleased. Men were also granted utmost respect and rights. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, written by Shakespeare in the year 1600, illustrates the plight of women in a patriarchal society. As a custom for Elizabethan women, traditionally the upper class, in the world of the play, fathers own their daughters and have the right to choose their husbands, with the daughters being killed or banished if they don’t comply. The women of the play, who are lacking physical expertise and political power, are relegated to subhuman status; being treated more like property and less like people. Take into account Egeus’s view of his
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Women were treated like property, handed over because they were won by war, forced into a union with a man they did not choose but rather by their father, and punished if they disobeyed their husband. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream does a great job in showing these issues. Life for upper class, Elizabethan women was not really a fulfilling one thus leaving the question, which other authors wrote works illustrating their difficult
Women were treated like property, handed over because they were won by war, forced into a union with a man they did not choose but rather by their father, and punished if they disobeyed their husband. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream does a great job in showing these issues. Life for upper class, Elizabethan women was not really a fulfilling one thus leaving the question, which other authors wrote works illustrating their difficult