FEMALES
SHAKESPEARE William Shakespeare wrote 37 plays in his lifetime, but only four have a female character in their title; that said, in Romeo and Juliet, Antony and
Cleopatra and Troilus and Cressida the female characters are presented as part of a pair only, and the wives in The Merry Wives of Windsor are anonymised by the play’s title. Often being accused of writing weak and poor female characters, in this edition of Scribble, Head of English, Mr Aldridge, makes the case for Shakespeare being regarded as one of literature’s proto-feminists. It would be highly simplistic and arguably wrong to examine Shakespeare as a feminist in his lifetime, given that the first real stirrings
of
first-wave
feminism
didn’t begin until the end of the 19th century, a good 250 years after his death. But in Elizabethan England, anyone who could imagine a woman outside of her role as wife and mother was a pretty radical thinker, and this is undeniably what Shakespeare
Martin Droeshout, Shakespeare 1623
attempted in many of his plays. There are around seven times more male than female roles in Shakespeare’s plays – a huge disparity between
