셰익스피어 극에 나타난 아웃사이더와 인사이더로서의 여성

Abstract

This essay explores women as outsiders and insiders in Shakespeare’s plays, related to the views of women during the English Renaissance. Were women outsiders or insiders in Shakespeare’s time? In Shakespeare’s plays, a woman can be the kind of outsider that provides a fresh perspective and protests about their exclusion from a male-centered society, or she can be an insider, to a greater or lesser extent. Under the strict patriarchal ideology, women were excluded from the universities, the learned professions, the right to choose a marriage partner, and so on. However, owing to Queen Elizabeth’s powerful reign, the emphasis on women education by humanists, and Puritanism, women gradually began to get social approval and enabled them to express their thoughts. Shakespeare must be influenced by the change of Elizabethan age, in describing his woman characters. For example, in The Taming of the Shrew, Katherine becomes an outsider at the beginning by her protest against male dominance, but eventually, she gets a sort of insider status at the end through her public capitulation. In some comedies, women move back and forth between the role of an outsider and insider. In some tragedies, Shakespeare often set women as moral outsiders. In tragic women’s plots, Lady Macbeth is the prime example of woman as a moral outsider. She seems to be a social insider at the beginning, she does not recover the status of social insider and dies alone as a moral outsiders at the end. Shakespeare encourages us to see his women characters as outsiders and insiders in his plays, and gives us a fresh view on his women.