Shakespeare’s Women

by John Bell

AO OBE FRSN

Oh, these men, these men! ... Let husbands know Their wives have sense like them. They see and smell And have their palates both for sweet and sour, As husbands have. What is it that they do When they change us for others? Is it sport? I think it is; and doth affection breed it? I think it doth. Is’t frailty that thus errs? It is so too. And have not we affections, Desires for sport, and frailty, as men have? Then let them use us well; else let them know, The ills we do, their ills instruct us so.

Nowthat sounds like something out of a #MeToo manifesto. In fact, it was written by a man 400 years ago. It’s from William Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Othello and is spoken by the worldly-wise Emilia to her young mistress Desdemona. What makes it even more remarkable is the fact that these two women were being acted by men – a sixteen-year old boy playing Desdemona and a man about ten years older as Emilia. This was because, at the time, women were not allowed to appear on the public stage.

So, Shakespeare’s company (The Queen’s Men under Elizabeth I and The King’s Men under King James) included a troupe of young male actors adept at playing female roles; and they must have been superlative actors. You just don’t write roles as great as Rosalind, Juliet, Portia or Cleopatra for actors who can’t deliver the goods. Older men played the mature female roles and your older “character” actors played gems like Mistress Quickly and Juliet’s Nurse. It is amazing that many of the greatest roles in the theatre (roles coveted by female actors ever since) were originally written to be played by men and display such insight and empathy.

I want to trace Shakespeare’s development of his female characters and guess at how that reflects his development as a person as well as an artist. It should be noted that no other dramatist of that time comes anywhere near Shakespeare in creating convincing, original female characters. Those of Webster and Ford are fairly stock-in-trade; Ben Jonson’s females are stereotypes, or caricatures, and Christopher Marlowe never wrote a good female role in his life.

Admittedly Shakespeare’s earliest female characters are pretty butch, and it’s easy to imagine male actors swaggering around in them. In Henry VI Joan of Arc (or Joan la Pucelle) is a feisty tomboy and Queen Margaret a merciless she-wolf like Tamora, Queen of the Goths in Titus Andronicus. Others like Lady Anne in Richard III are helpless victims of male brutality. They have no choice. They inhabit a man’s world – a world of warfare and savage political upheaval, but they have little redress.

In the earliest comedies there is a trace of the harridan in Adriana in The Comedy of Errors and Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew. Both are rebels against the status quo and need to be brought into line to conform to society’s expectations of how a wife should behave. Kate the shrew is the more contentious of the two in a play that can still evoke outrage and accusations of misogyny.

Putting the gender politics aside for a moment, it has to be acknowledged that The Taming of the Shrew is a very funny and brilliantly constructed Comedy, and the roles of Kate and Petruchio much soughtafter and enjoyed by generations of actors. I have twice played Petruchio, directed the play for the Bell Shakespeare Company and seen various other productions, noting how the tone of the play can shift dramatically according to the zeitgeist and the director’s personal philosophy. Michael Bogdanov’s production for the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1970s reduced Katharina to a washed-out zombie mechanically mouthing her final speech as one who has been brainwashed. It sure killed the comedy and was, I think, a far cry from Shakespeare’s intention.

In Katherine, he shows us a sprightly original young woman driven to distraction by the patriarchal mercenary world she is born into: a world where a daughter can be sold off to the highest bidder. She is branded as a wildcat, a shrew, for refusing to conform, and it takes an equally independent spirit in the form of Petruchio to recognise her qualities and put them both through a boot-camp of a courtship in order to thrash out a contract that can accommodate them both in a marriage that is a true mingling of kindred spirits, one more original and satisfying than the conventional marriages around them.

Now that he has entered the realm of Comedy, Shakespeare’s women begin to assume a more beguiling femininity and we have to wonder how much his personal situation was impacting on his writing. He was married at eighteen to Ann Hathaway who was eight years older and with her he had two daughters, Judith and Susannah. This must have had some impact on a soul as lively and sensitive as Shakespeare’s and given him fresh insights into women, as well as an increased empathy with them. The women of the comedies are, on the whole, smarter than the men, outwit them and teach them some valuable life lessons.

In Love’s Labour’s Lost four young French women are wooed by the King of Navarre and three of his young male courtiers. The men moon about, adopt silly disguises and write rather bad love poems to their mistresses, but the young ladies take a delight in exploring their lovers’ pretentions and telling them to go away and grow up! If in twelve months’ time they show more maturity, the women will take them seriously. The severest stricture is put on Berowne, the wittiest and most audacious of the young men. His mistress, Rosaline, admonishes him thus:

Oft have I heard of you, my Lord Berowne, Before I saw you; and the world’s large tongue

Proclaims you for a man replete with mocks, Full of comparisons and wounding flouts, Which you on all estates will execute That lie within the mercy of your wit. To weed this wormwood from your fruitful brain, And therewithal to win me, if you please, (Without the which I am not to be won,) You shall this twelvemonth term from day to day Visit the speechless sick and still converse With groaning wretches; and your tank shall be, With all the fierce endeavour of your wit, To enforce the pained impotent to smile.

Berowne protests:

To move wild laughter in the throat of death?

It cannot be; it is impossible: Mirth cannot move a soul in agony.

Rosaline replies:

Why, that’s the way to choke a gibing spirit...

A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear

Of him that hears it, never in the tongue

Of him that makes it; then, if sickly ears, ... Will hear your idle scorns, continue then, And I will have you and that fault withal; But if they will not, throw away that spirit, And I shall find you empty of that fault, Right joyful of your reformation.

Berowne glumly replies:

A twelvthmonth! Well, befall what will befall, I’ll jest this twelvthmonth in a hospital. Our wooing doth not end like an old play; Jack hath not Jill: these ladies’ courtesy Might well have made our sport a comedy.

In other comedies too – The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Merchant of Venice, and The Winter’s Tale, the women are a lot smarter and more inventive than the men and turn the tables on them. In a number of the comedies women disguise themselves as men. This was a neat way of sidestepping the challenge for a male actor having to sustain a full-on female impersonation. But one also senses that Shakespeare is struggling to give women a voice in a male-dominated society; and the only way they can have one is by adopting a male persona and beating the men at their own game – the prime example being Portia in The Merchant of Venice.

In some cases the male disguise is adopted because it’s safer for a woman travelling on her own – as with Rosalind in As You Like It. Elsewhere the reason for such a disguise is less apparent – for instance Viola in Twelfth Night. She dresses in the same clothes as her missing twin brother, which of course generates a lot of comedy out of mistaken identity. Perhaps her disguise has a semi-mystical urge, echoing that of Antipholus in Comedy of Errors, who, seeking his twin brother, says:

I to the world am like a drop of water

That in the ocean seeks another drop, Who, failing there to find his fellow forth, Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself.

A twin cannot feel complete until he finds his or her other half to make up a whole person.

Whatever her reason, Viola’s disguise unleashes romantic desire and she becomes a figure of Eros, like Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro – an androgynous being desired by men and women alike. Shakespeare’s audience obviously savoured the erotic frisson created by cross-dressing and ambivalent sexuality.

This is echoed by Rosalind in As You Like It, who adopts the disguise of Ganymede, the shepherd boy abducted by Jove, a symbol of pederasty and the unofficial patron saint of Renaissance Florence, that hotbed of artistic homoeroticism. Rosalind too finds herself the love-object of both men and women, but in her adopted persona she is able to teach the various lovers in the play the real meaning of the word “love”. It is not, as Orlando thinks, mooning around in the forest and hanging love poems on the trees. No – it’s about being punctual, reliable; it is to be made of all faith and service, duty and observance, humbleness and patience. When Orlando swears he will die for love, Rosalind sadly utters one of my favourite lines in Shakespeare:

No, no, Orlando; men have died from time to time – and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

Like the French Princess and her ladies in Love’s Labour’s Lost and Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well, Rosalind’s purpose is to educate foolish young men as to the real nature of love. It certainly isn’t about mooning around writing sonnets. And this is ironic coming from the author of the greatest sonnet sequence in the English language. But Shakespeare’s real target is not the sonnet itself but the affectation of those who rattle off poems according to convention and worn-out formulas.

Over the last fifty years feminist studies have had a huge impact on our reading of Shakespeare and on theatre practice. Female academics have given us new perspectives on the plays, realised in the work of female artistic directors, directors and designers. New generations of female actors have been empowered not only by reinterpreting the great women’s roles, but the men’s roles too. Recent years have given us female actors in roles including Hamlet, Richard II, Richard III, Prospero and King Lear as well as an all-female Taming of the Shrew

All of these ventures, some more successful than others, have reinforced Shakespeare’s capacity to move with the times and hold the mirror up to Nature. Taken all in all, I think we must conclude that here was a man who appreciated women, and over a lifetime developed a profound empathy and understanding of them, creating the greatest female roles in English theatre. There is always a danger in taking any lines from one of Shakespeare’s characters and saying, “this is what Shakespeare himself believed... “. But occasionally one can take a chance on it; and if I were asked which lines in Shakespeare best sum up his attitude to women, I’d probably offer these lines of Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost:

From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive: They sparkle still the right Promethean Fire: They are the books, the arts, the academes That show, contain and nourish all the world •

Several articles in this issue grapple with contemporary questions about how to engage with our literary tradition. It was a great pleasure to resume our annual Balmoral Lecture series in May with a talk from the inimitable John Bell on Shakespeare’s Women, which was predictably well attended. We are, by now, familiar with the accusations of sexism levelled against the Bard. It is easy to construct the argument against him – from the entire plot of The Taming of the Shrew to these gems from Cymbeline :

[T]here’s no motion that tends to vice in man, but I affirm it is the woman’s part…All faults that…hell knows/

Why, hers, in part or all; but rather, all.

Yet while accusations of sexism (and other -isms) might have been ground-breaking some decades ago, they have been well studied since. Critics and theorists have had plenty to say but John Bell argues that, on this point at least, Shakespeare’s works can speak for themselves. For every time a man says, witheringly, ‘Frailty thy name is woman’, there is another time when women’s full dignity and humanity are affirmed, their ‘Promethean fire’ kindling the intellect and nourishing the world. While there are stereotypes of female manipulation or madness (Lady Macbeth or Ophelia), there are also strong and wise women, and quite a few (e.g. Rosalind or Viola) who escape societal constraints and, by dressing as men, enjoy the freedom to be playful or argumentative, to escape their parents or even rise into positions of power.

On this last point, it is clear that a modern lens would decode, or perhaps impose, an additional interpretive layer. What used to be seen simply as dressing up as the opposite sex is now – in a time of cultural obsession with blurring the boundaries of behaviour and biology – seen as a fundamental subversion of gender. Our Head of English, Mrs Kylie Holmes, writes of the rise of female writers, ‘the subversion of male-centred narratives’ and the push to ‘destabilise the dichotomy between the old and the new’.

This is very much the mission of the HSC English curriculum which requires that all prescribed texts are studied in pairs, with classic texts compared and contrasted with a specific modern work. For instance, Margaret Atwood’s Hagseed might be studied in relationship to The Winter’s Tale, or James Joyce’s Araby with The Merchant of Venice. This interplay between old and new naturally sheds intriguing patterns of light and shadow on classic works such as Shakespeare, but it also means that students are, for the most part, encountering Shakespeare only in relationship to modern themes and writers rather than on his own terms. That is, in my view, a loss.

The expansion of the curriculum has had other effects. It would be unacceptable in contemporary Australia to study only canonical English literature. For very good reason, students must now study a wider range of authors, including those of Indigenous and multi-cultural background. The study of English has also extended far beyond the poetry, plays and novels of former years. It now includes the study of film, advertising, creative or persuasive writing and students might be expected to produce not just essays and the odd poem, but short films, podcasts, newspaper articles and posters.

All of this is good stuff, but the school day is no longer than it used to be and that means that curriculum is a zero sum game. To accommodate all this additional content, students typically have far less time to engage with any one text and in many cases must make do with extracts rather than full works. This makes it harder than ever to engage with Shakespeare, for which a slow immersion in the language is often required.

Another difficult feature of studying Shakespeare is the distance between reading the script and seeing the play. His language was crafted for the stage, where his words – however complex or unfamiliar – spring to life. Studying his works only on the page tends to muffle the beauty and vitality of his language, and yet the power of his art in its natural habitat on stage is undimmed.

Here, too, we are seeing a major shift. When these plays were written, it was illegal for women to appear on stage. Now, as Alumna Anna Volska points out, ‘the pendulum is swinging so completely that it’s tough for men to get a gig’ as theatres are casting against type, colour and sex. We have no desire to deprive men of great roles, but for a little while at least, we can enjoy the opportunities afforded by these explorations. Flora Munro, Class of 2022, writes in this issue of both these features: the power of encountering Shakespeare on stage, and the insights gained when women are cast in male roles, and vice versa.

Even as our students are engaging with ideas that challenge the Western literary canon, they are participating in a process of critical reflection which rests in a long tradition. One of the most distinctive features of the Western intellectual tradition is its capacity for self-critique. This is rare: many great civilisations with a rich cultural and intellectual history have not shown much interest, let alone enthusiasm, for criticising themselves. Doing so can undoubtedly be a strength, but it takes both courage and wisdom to do it well: courage to face up to uncomfortable truths; and wisdom to distinguish between productive criticism and self-flagellation.

Yet it is an exhilarating process. Every one of these writers – John Bell, Anna Volska, Kylie Holmes and Flora Munro – is excited and profoundly moved by the ongoing revelation in these works of what it means to be human. These are high adventures and it is wonderful to see teachers, students, Old Girls and even one of Australia’s ‘Living Treasures’ embarking on it together. •