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Sixteenth century female sexuality and their impact on Shakespeare's tragedy - Research Paper Example

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Name: Instructor: Course: Date: Sixteenth century views of female sexuality and their impacts on Shakespeare’s tragedies In most of his plays Shakespeare gives women or female protagonists power. This can to some extent be attributed to his interaction in the courts between the monarch Elizabeth Tudor’s reigns in 1558-1603 (Waddington 18)…
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Sixteenth century female sexuality and their impact on Shakespeares tragedy
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Definitely, one would assume to see gender contemplations exposed in Shakespeare’s works as distresses about the female gender, forming one of the crucial social considerations of Shakespeare’s normal life. Shakespeare, a popular and political writer, can hardly refrain himself from the common societal worries. In two of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Hamlet and Macbeth, he openly suggests the danger of female participation in sovereign level politics. He dramatizes real political concerns that came out during queen Elizabeth Tudors’ reign through the marriage of Gertrude to Hamlet’s uncle because of Lady Macbeth’s ambitious political career (Waddington 42).

The sixteenth century leadership was invoked mostly by tensions aptly captured by Shakespeare, where Hamlet and Macbeth who do not make open political remarks about Elizabeth Tudor’s monarchy. In their book Shakespeare’s politics Allan Bloom and Harry V. Jaffa disparage and emphasize the drawbacks of construing Shakespeare within historical terms (Archer, Culpeper, and Rayson 7). However, they agree that Shakespeare’s works produced a precise thematic image of current social concerns. This is highly agreeable to many other different authors who also contend that historical portrayal cannot be disregarded as it is quite weighty.

Leonard’s book, Tennee house; power on display; the politics of Shakespeare’s genres, projects that Shakespeare’s literary works cannot be separated from the aspect of him being a Renaissance individual and dramatist where female discrimination was on the zenith (Archer, Culpeper, and Rayson 11). Shakespeare also portrays that female role did not have steadiness and thus confined an intrinsic danger as the Tudor monarchy is regularly clouded by shakiness and problems, for example, the failed marriage of Mary and Tudor’s uncertainty sentiment to matrimony (Waddington 67).

This instability caused hyped anxiety among the Englishmen who are able relate negatively to the fitness of the Elizabethan rule. To some extent, the gender or the queen herself as a female leader was illustrated as insolvent to stable rule of the state. The literary works of Shakespeare also to some extent question the queen’s ability to lead the state through war and even her authority over her male subjects. This aspect also paints how male chauvinism had clouded the sixteenth century societies (Waddington 68).

Even the queen to pass over the mantle to the next heir or her husband was questioned widely. Through the plays, Hamlet and Macbeth’s political ambitions lead to political instability of the state and disruption of the natural harmony. Lady Macbeth’s lethal political ambitions eventually constrain the state’s political culture and further diffuse the role of females in the sixteenth century societies as she is rendered as someone who can go to extreme limits just for self-want and enrichment (Waddington 104).

Her subversive attempts finally convince her husband to assassinate the current monarch, and through this plot, she assumes power as the queen and her husband, the king, and acts as she did not know of what transpired. Therefore, Lady Macbeth’s female ambitions depict a negative connection of the females within the sixteenth century. All these female characteristics can also be alluded to the biblical writing where females like Delilah were shown as symbols of treachery and slyness. Herod’

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