Discussing Gender and Identity in William Shakespeare's Writings: MACBETH, AS YOU LIKE IT, TITUS ANDRONICUS

                                                image source: Wikicommons

Question: 

Discuss how gender and identity are explored in TWO Shakespearean writings. (MACBETH, AS YOU LIKE IT, TITUS ANDRONICUS.)

Part 4. The Final Paper

The Final Paper will have the following parts:

1.    An introduction where you provide relevant background for your presentation. This may be on Shakespeare, his plays, the theme you are considering, or any relevant historical information. The introduction should indicate why this topic is important for your chosen audience. At the end of the introduction, you will state a thesis that makes an assertion about the plays and their common theme.

2.      An examination of the way your chosen theme operates in each of the three texts. Consider such issues as race, gender, justice, and/or other themes from our class readings and discussions.

3.      Well-organized body paragraphs containing a close reading of specific examples from the plays, including brief quotations. (Do not quote extensive passages.)

4.      A conclusion that sums up the value of your research and analysis and shows how understanding Shakespeare is important for your particular audience.

5.      A works cited page (using MLA 8^th edition documentation style)

Documentation Style: The paper is to be formatted and documented in the Modern Language Association (MLA) 8^th edition style. For assistance with MLA style, see the UMGC library MLA guide with MLA Citation Examples: http://sites.umgc.edu/library/libhow/mla_examples.cfm

Deliverable for Part 4: The paper will consist of parts 1-5 above. Please format the transcript in MLA style. The paper should be carefully edited and proofread for standard use of English.

 

Purpose: The purpose of the project is to allow you an opportunity to explore and develop a presentation to demonstrate why Shakespeare’s plays are relevant in the contemporary world. In this project, you will address the importance of Shakespeare’s literary contributions to contemporary culture by creating a presentation that addresses the following situation:

Imagine that you are addressing a group about the importance and relevance of Shakespeare to our own time. Your job is to convince the group of Shakespeare’s ongoing importance by providing a close reading of three plays, with special focus on one theme they all share. MACBETH, AS YOU LIKE IT, TITUS ANDRONICUS You must choose two of these plays from our syllabus; the third does not have to be. Your job is to examine each play in detail, providing a close reading and interpretation that demonstrates (1) the theme and (2) the importance of the theme to your specific contemporary audience.

Audience: Choose the audience for your presentation from among the following. (You may suggest another group, but it must be approved by the instructor.)

·         A college English department that is considering creating a new themed Shakespeare course

You must use a minimum of five scholarly sources. At least four sources must be from the UMUC databases. Please see the sources below

Length: The paper will be from six to eight pages double-spaced in Times Roman 12 (1,500 to 2,000 words).

Theme: Gender and Identity

You will examine the way this theme operates in each of the three plays you will consider, using specific scenes and incidents to support your view of how the theme operates in each work. Your overarching goal in discussing the theme in these plays is to demonstrate the importance of Shakespeare’s work to your audience. For example, if you are addressing a school board, you will use the plays and their shared theme to show how important Shakespeare's work is for students’ learning. If you are addressing the potential theater donors, you will use the plays and their theme to show why Shakespeare is relevant to contemporary audiences.

Answer

Shakespeare's Female Characters as Models for University Courses

One prime task of university education is to open people's minds and increase their problem-solving abilities. Indeed, most of the problems that humans face today exist due to closed mindsets. For instance, significant environmental damages occur because humans emphasize making profits and ignore conservation. Similarly, radical religion, a facilitator of terrorism, war, and death, is merely a human creation. Another critical area of this blindness manifests in the gender imbalance, which itself threatens social stability. Shakespeare's books provide a means to analyze older societies, real and fictitious, through their characters and create a stage for cultural comparisons between these societies and our own. Shakespearean plays explore the intricate relationship between women and the broader society. In analyzing the female characters of Shakespeare's plays Macbeth, As You Like It, and Titus Andronicus, students will be exposed to concepts of gender that do not conform to traditional societal norms.

Shakespeare Exposes Women's Mistreatment

These plays help institutions to expand the discourse about female mistreatment and identify the baselessness of these norms. It has become normal to treat females as second class humans across the world. For instance,  the number of women holding political posts across the world is conspicuously low. It is time that students critically assessed the sources of these attitudes that normalize discriminating women (Kimbrough 175). Shakespeare's plays provide an excellent foundation for beginning such a discussion because, just like in modern societies, women in these plays are victims of baseless traditional notions.

In As You like It, society disregards women for no other reason but that they are women. For example, Duke Frederik, while expelling Rosalind away from his court, claims that he is doing so because Rosalind is too "smooth" (Shakespeare, "As You Like It," I.iii.20). This instance implies that considering someone as "too feminine" is enough reason to deny them comfort. Moreover, Touchstone reveals how society applies a reductionist approach to women's personalities. According to the character, having knowledge of poetry and being pretentious are the only metrics for determining the perfect woman. Moreover, Touchstone views women as lairs by default, and for him, to have an honest woman is like "to have honey a sauce to sugar" (Shakespeare, "As You Like It," III.iii.62).

In Titus Andronicus, Tamora experiences an injustice from Titus when the latter kills her eldest son. Being a woman, she cannot do anything but cry. Moreover, the casualness with which Chiron and Demetrius plan to rape Lavinia or "to pluck a dainty doe to ground" (Shakespeare, "Titus Andronicus," II.ii.96), and the ease with which they execute their plan before cutting off the victim's tongue and hands, mirror both the literal and figurative aspects of day-to-day situations that women experience across the world. In the literal aspect, cases of women undergoing rape and gruesome murders are common in news outlets. Figuratively, society silences rape victims through victim shaming, thereby essentially cutting out victims' tongues. Moreover, just like Lavinia's assailants taunt her, many rapists do not face punishment or imprisonment and continue to threaten and taunt their victims. 

As evident in the plays and modern examples, societies mistreat women, and it is time universities spearheaded discussions through Shakespearean plays to expose this mistreatment. Shakespeare demonstrates how people use customs with no logical bases to oppress and despise women; there are no logical foundations for such customs. Only by acknowledging this baselessness of can more students support women's rights and champion equality.

Women as Influencers of Humanism and Reason

Shakespeare provides a platform to demonstrate the influential role that women play in the world and demonstrate their indelibility in society.  The perception of women as unnecessary and an inconvenience is prevalent today (Mehdi & Khoshkham 2), and there is a need to reemphasize the role of women in society; one only has to look at the small number of women getting respectable employments occupying top-level posts in governments and corporates as compared to men. Also, in parts of the world, women have no female-friendly facilities in institutions, and accessing basic things like sanitary pads and birth-control services is difficult in some countries.  This female sidelining is not coincidental; it occurs because people think women are useless; hence, they do not deserve positions, services, items, or laws that specifically address their needs (Sorge 323). Shakespearean plays provide a useful reference point from which universities can explore and challenge these negative notions. Shakespeare provides a platform for female characters from which people can analyze women's role in society. By no means does Shakespeare attempt to over-romanticize the female character (Kimbrough 175). Instead, the author places the female character in the play's familiar environment, and other than giving some women prominence based on their positions as lead characters, neither does he undervalue the female character nor portray her as a superhuman. Therefore, in a way, Shakespeare's plays provide a "natural environment" for understanding women.

In As You Like It, women like Rosalind, Celia, and Audrey provide examples from which students can draw lessons about objectivity, romance, self-esteem, and integrity.  In the society that Shakespeare creates in this play, people tend to gravitate towards the extreme, and women serve as adjustments that return people to reason. For instance, when Jacques, who claims that' tis good to be sad and say nothing" (Shakespeare, "As You Like It," IV.i.73), adopts overly reductionist thinking that makes him see nothing good about life and immerses him in perpetual sadness, Rosalind reminds him that one is not better than a "post" if they can do nothing but be sad (Shakespeare, "As You Like It," Iv.i.73).  Rosalind shows the same objectivity when she tries to prove to Orlando, herself, and other people that predeterminism does not apply to romance. In other words, the character hypothesizes that the universe does not, by default, assign love to particular pairs of people and that someone can develop or lose romantic attraction to another person at any time. The play also uses female characters to explore the meaning of true friendship: Celia, whose connection with Rosalind is "dearer than the natural bond of sisters" (Shakespeare, "As You Like It," I.ii.26), embodies true friendship when she abandons her comfortable court life to follow her cousin, whom Duke Frederick has expelled from his household.

The lessons that these characters espouse in the examples above are crucial to university students, especially regarding managing their expectations, finding value in living, and being sensitive. Notably, romance-related suicides and homicides are common among university students (Karbeyaz et al. 111). People have hung themselves or murdered their lovers just because they have been "heartbroken." Perhaps by studying Rosalind's hypothesis about love, people can become more realistic in understanding that love sometimes ends. Also, through Celia and Rosalind's relationship, students can learn and extend the debate about true friendship. For instance, during lessons on conflict theories, one can create a lively class debate by telling students to dissect Rosalind and Celia's relationship and find the common interest that sustains this friendship. Therefore, female characters in Shakespearean plays expose a vast cache of potential topics of debate, theories, and lessons and provide new standpoints from which people can analyze, criticize, or support popular theories.

Demonstrating the Dangers of Oppressing the Female

Men and women need to work together to contribute to the world's progress. However, the female's opinion has been sidelined in almost all critical sectors. In STEM professions, for instance, women are conspicuously few, and this means that many research and development facilities lack significant female contributions that could produce more advanced, affordable, and effective processes, services, and goods. For instance, studies hint that females better photographic memory than men (Wang 991), which means that investigative and research facilities might be missing a lot by failing to employ women. However, apart from the loss that the world is experiencing by underutilizing women, another danger in the form of women's destructive power presents itself when society continues to oppress the female, and Shakespeare explores this danger in characters like Lady Macbeth in Macbeth and Tamora in Titus Andronicus. Seeing no benefit in a social structure that does not recognize them, these two women decide to facilitate anarchy.

In Macbeth, the Victorian society dictates that women remain unrecognized and that if they need to succeed, they have to do so through their husbands' progress. This situation leaves Lady Macbeth with no other option but to pursue her success through her husband's success (Mehdi & Khoshkham 2). Lady Macbeth dispises the powerlessness, poverty, and mediocre life that society assigns to people based on their social class and gender, as evident in this excerpt:

To be the same in thine own art and valour,

As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that

Which thou esteem' st the ornament of life,

And live like a coward in thine own esteem

Letting "I dare not" wait upon "I would,"

Like the poor eat I' th' adage (Shakespeare, 'Macbeth," I.II.26)

Consequently, Lady Macbeth adopts an unorthodox means to extricate herself from this oppression and achieve her power and wealth goals: she convinces her husband to destroy the establishment by killing the king. However, rather than getting the comfort she wanted, Lady Macbeth exposes herself and other people to more instability and suffering, especially when the dead king's ghost starts to haunt her family. Therefore, by sidelining Lady Macbeth, society triggers the woman's appetite for power and destruction (Zohreh 57).

Titus Andronicus's Tamora also starts a deadly mission after society denies her rights as a woman. By forcefully bringing Tamora to a foreign land and killing Tamora's son, Titus leaves the woman hopeless. From then onwards, Tamora has no other interests but to cause further destruction to the already "headless Rome" (Shakespeare, "Titus of Andronicus," I.i.79).  This example indicates how a culture of hatred emerges when society disregards and oppresses women.

Conclusion

If the world is to have any hopes for stability, universities need to acknowledge that society's discrimination of women is a threat to world balance and underutilization of the feminine power. Thus, universities must create courses that specifically target to expose this imbalance and cure people's ignorance. Shakespearean plays provide great examples from fictitious and real societies that can drive the discourse on gender. Female characters in Titus Andronicus, As You Like It, and Macbeth demonstrate women's power; in these plays, women are sources of reason, integrity, and humanism. However, women could also destroy the world if they continue to feel oppressed. Therefore, these plays provide rich material for universities on gender studies.

 

Works Cited

Karbeyaz, Kenan, Mehmet Toygar, and Adnan Çelikel. "Completed suicide among University Students in Eskisehir, Turkey." Journal of forensic and legal medicine 44 (2016): 111-115.

Kimbrough, Robert. "Macbeth: The Prisoner of Gender." Shakespeare Studies (0582-9399), vol. 16, Jan. 1983, p. 175. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=7166190&site=eds-live&scope=site.

Mehdi Amiri, and Sara Khoshkam. "Gender Identity and Gender Performativity in Shakespeare's Selected Plays: Macbeth, Hamlet and Merry Wives of Windsor." Advances in Language and Literary Studies, vol. 8, no. 4, Aug. 2017, pp. 1–7. EBSCOhost, doi:10.7575/aiac.alls.v.8n.4p.1.

Shakespeare, William. As you Like it, edited by Wilbur Cross, Tucker Brooke, and Willard Durhan. 1919.

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth, edited by Richard Grant. Houghton, Mifflin & Company. 1897.

Shakespeare, William. Titus Andronicus, edited by John Wilson. Cambridge University Press. 1948.

Sorge, Kelly. Masking Femininity: Women and Power in Shakespeare's Macbeth, As You Like It, and Titus Andronicus. 2017, https://scholars.unh.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1327&context=honors. 

Wang, Bo. "Gender difference in recognition memory for neutral and emotional faces." Memory 21.8 (2013): 991-1003.

Zohreh Ramin. "Shakespeare's Richard III and Macbeth: A Foucauldian Reading." K@ta: A Biannual Publication on the Study of Language and Literature, vol. 15, no. 2, Jan. 2013, pp. 57–66. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsdoj&AN=edsdoj.4c7085710f442318f956f3c73e2178d&site=edslive&scope=site.