Shakespeare's Females

The significance of female characters is a rich area for debate and further reading in Shakespeare and this exploration only but touches the surface of it. For me, at a time when acting was exclusively a male profession, when female characters were played either by adolescent boys or effeminate men, it would have been very easy for Shakespeare simply to construct popularist, conventional stereotypes of women – the shrew, the seductress, the daughter – but he doesn’t; he pushes boundaries of what women were seen as at the time, in Sarah Allen’s words making them ‘complex and three-dimensional’, and there is a definite originality in what he does with female characters. A feminist playwright? Probably not because the Sixteenth Century was not yet ready for feminism. Radical, subversive, revolutionary, avantgarde? Always, and his female characters are just an extension of Shakespeare’s two-fingered salute to the establishment and convention. Why are rules there, if not to be broken?