Strong Witches and Tragic Chorus: Women in the Shakespeare’s Henry VI Trilogy and Richard III
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Shakespeare shows different types and individual characters of women who make his historical plays more affluent and multi-layered beyond male-dominated boundary. Moreover, he presents various identities of characters, testing the limits of their desire of foreigners, usurpers, outcasts, outlaws, shrews, witches, rebellions, and cross-dressers. In this context, I think he is a experimentalist of all human beings and close to a postmodernist who has a deep insight into taking a position of relativism, ahead of his time, with keen humanistic point of view. Shakespeare tried to show subjective and unique women in history plays even if they are still within the male-dominated historical world. In this context, Clare said, “Shakespearean performance is an arena for exploring desire, sexuality and gender roles and for challenging audience expectations, especially when it comes to the female performer” (1). In the aspect of visual performance, strong women like Joan and Elinor in Henry VI show occult ceremony, forming a unique female world which looks rather emotional and psychological but definitely different from men’s one. Moreover, there are other types of women who have a desire to overthrow and take the men’s place but fail to do it. They are also strong-spirit women and energetic but eventually compromise with men’s world like the Countess of Auvergne. The other types of women like Ann and Elizabeth in Richard III are sorrowful tragic chorus who lost everything, fooled around by Richard’s vicious plan. Even though these women all go through the tragic ups and downs with great pain, they show their own unique identities and strong desire for surviving. Some of them are even meta-gendered and replace the men’s position and this is, I think, the very postmodernistic gender free idea of Shakespeare. In this paper, I examined the all types of women in the Henry VI Trilogy and Richard III because these plays show more various women than other historical plays of Shakespeare.
Abstract
Shakespeare shows different types and individual characters of women who make his historical plays more affluent and multi-layered beyond male-dominated boundary. Moreover, he presents various identities of characters, testing the limits of their desire of foreigners, usurpers, outcasts, outlaws, shrews, witches, rebellions, and cross-dressers. In this context, I think he is a experimentalist of all human beings and close to a postmodernist who has a deep insight into taking a position of relativism, ahead of his time, with keen humanistic point of view. Shakespeare tried to show subjective and unique women in history plays even if they are still within the male-dominated historical world. In this context, Clare said, “Shakespearean performance is an arena for exploring desire, sexuality and gender roles and for challenging audience expectations, especially when it comes to the female performer” (1). In the aspect of visual performance, strong women like Joan and Elinor in Henry VI show occult ceremony, forming a unique female world which looks rather emotional and psychological but definitely different from men’s one. Moreover, there are other types of women who have a desire to overthrow and take the men’s place but fail to do it. They are also strong-spirit women and energetic but eventually compromise with men’s world like the Countess of Auvergne. The other types of women like Ann and Elizabeth in Richard III are sorrowful tragic chorus who lost everything, fooled around by Richard’s vicious plan. Even though these women all go through the tragic ups and downs with great pain, they show their own unique identities and strong desire for surviving. Some of them are even meta-gendered and replace the men’s position and this is, I think, the very postmodernistic gender free idea of Shakespeare. In this paper, I examined the all types of women in the Henry VI Trilogy and Richard III because these plays show more various women than other historical plays of Shakespeare.
참고문헌 (13)
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