Was Shakespeare a Feminist?: Language, Deception, and Identity Between the Bounds of Feminine Liberation and Patriarchal Subjugation
- Shahrez Chauhan
- Jan 21
- 2 min read
Author Bio:
Shahrez Chauhan is a final-year undergraduate student from Pakistan pursuing a degree in History of Art and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests range from global modernisms and postcolonial theory to queer narratives from across the literary canon, with a specific focus on fin-de-siècle aestheticism and early twentieth-century literature. He is particularly interested in queer modernist aesthetics, identity and textual politics, spatio-temporalities in stream-of-consciousness narratives, as well as the intersections between visual culture and literary texts. In the past, he has worked for cultural heritage institutions across Pakistan and the UK, and hopes to continue pursuing a career in this line of work.
Abstract:
This essay evaluates Linda Bamber’s claim that William Shakespeare’s comedies are feminist portrayals ‘tak[ing] the woman’s part’ in their explorations of gender, romance, and identity. Here, the focus is primarily on the central female characters from Shakespeare’s famously anti-feminist play, The Taming of the Shrew, which is then used as a case study in comparison to the more liberated depictions of womanhood found in Twelfth Night and As You Like It. The subsequent emphasis on Shakespeare's interplays between language, feminine identity, the comedic dramatic form and its innovative plot structures, as well as characters’ manipulation of the female body then elucidates how Kate, Viola, and Rosalind simultaneously embody female empowerment and patriarchal subjugation within the power structures governing each respective play. This essay thus contends that the comedies offer an ambiguous and nuanced approach to the question of Shakespearean feminism by refusing to adhere to a single continuous narrative rendering female characters as either wholly liberated or entirely oppressed. Instead, the treatment of language, genre, and gendered bodies and identities in Shakespearean comedies then underscores the dualities problematising his feminist legacy-- revealing a playwright both subversive and complicit in perpetuating the very systems he is credited with critiquing.
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