As we celebrate International Women’s Day on Saturday 8 March, Professor Charlotte Scott, Academic Advisor at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust explores Shakespeare’s fascinating female characters and how they are portrayed on stage.
This comes as the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust begins work on a new exhibition at Shakespeare’s New Place to mark the second year of its multi-year project, The Women Who Made Shakespeare. Focusing on four female characters, Titania, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth and Beatrice, the exhibition will explore the archetypes of femininity and the construction of gender on the stage.
In Much Ado about Nothing, Beatrice, having witnessed her best friend and cousin’s
wedding swing to humiliation and apparent death, she declares to Benedick:
O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart
in the market-place.
Here, Beatrice, one of Shakespeare’s most spirited and independent female characters, expresses her frustration and calls on her lover to behave in ways that she can’t because she is a woman. Like Lady Macbeth, Beatrice’s agency and power is compromised by her gender, and she feels hopeless.
Both Lady Macbeth and Beatrice want to kill: one for love, the other for power. Yet both women cannot escape the social, cultural and apparently biological conditions of their gender.
More famously, Lady Macbeth, in urging herself to kill a King and fulfil her role as her husband’s ‘partner of greatness’, calls on supernatural forces to ‘unsex her’.
Pleading with the ‘murderous ministers’ in their ‘sightless substance’, Lady Macbeth desperately seeks to escape her female body: to ‘stop up the passage and access to remorse’, which she locates in her breasts and womb. Shakespeare only uses the term ‘unsex’ once and in Macbeth: he leans on the negative prefix to negate rather than affirm.
This is a woman who wants to undo herself to become more than ‘thou art’, just as she urged her husband to do when she challenges him to be more than a man. Gender stands as both a barrier and an opportunity: it is a construction that limits and enables both men and women in Shakespeare’s plays. Above all, it carries a set of social and civic expectations that determine the ethical codes in which these characters operate, seemingly devoid of independent agency.
Despite, or in spite of, living in a society where gender defined one’s opportunities and agency, Shakespeare wrote for a stage in which roles were fluid. Men played women, the young played the old, and the powerless portrayed kings.
Everything on Shakespeare’s stage is a social construct: so, what does it mean to ‘play the woman’s part’: who is she?
Through our new exhibition at Shakespeare’s New Place, we delve into these questions by examining four of Shakespeare’s most compelling female figures. Through the Queen of the Fairies, Egypt and Scotland as well as the very ‘ordinary’ Beatrice, we will examine what it means to be a woman in all her capacities on the Shakespearean stage. Those with power and those without, those who are denuded of their agency and those who seek, however desperately, to assert it.
When Cleopatra anticipates how her legacy will be dramatised and scoffs at the idea of being played by a “squeaking boy,” Shakespeare acknowledges that a woman’s part is always a performance but constructed and compromised by the narratives that surround her.
What Does it Mean Today?
Shakespeare’s portrayal of women continues to resonate with audiences worldwide today, reflecting contemporary and ongoing conversations about gender, power, and identity. By exploring these iconic female characters in the new exhibition, we invite audiences to consider how Shakespeare’s women continue to speak to contemporary issues of gender and of society.
View more information on the Women Who Made Shakespeare, including the exhibition.