Shakespeare’s Portrayal Of Women

2 Pages 462 Words

Shakespeare tends to portray women very much alike in both Othello and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In both stories one can clearly see that Shakespeare sees women as very dependant people. He portrays them to be nothing without their male counter-part in both plays.
In Shakespeare’s play Othello, the three women play a vital role. Only one of the women in the play survives, and all the women have no separate identity within the play. Bianca is the mistress of Cassio, Emilia is married to Iago, and Desdemona is married to Othello. This same type of scenario is present in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Hermia and Helena are chasing Lysander and Demetrius throughout the entire play. Right away you can see how Shakespeare must have viewed women. He obviously viewed them as people of society whose existence was only relevant to that of a man.
In both plays the women are almost laughed at as well. There is a cruel sense of insecurity that lies in Helena throughout A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that even when Lysander falls for her because of the love potion, she won’t believe it. She feels as though Lysander and Demetrius are mocking her and she becomes even more embarrassed about the situation. In Othello, Iago easily persuades Desdemona when she retrieves the handkerchief for him. It is also interesting that she does not even question him when she gives it to him, this may also be an example of the females ability to trust in the play. However she also remains ignorant of the entire plot until the end, when her life comes to an abrupt ending, at the hands of her husband, Iago. This is also a situation that we see in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, during the play-within-a-play, when Pyramus commits suicide because he thinks he has lost Thysbe. As a result, Thysbe finds her Pyramus dead and wastes no time at all committing suicide herself. These are all signs that the women are very dependant on the men, and some may argue...