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HOW DO SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS DEPICT WOMEN?

This paper shows that Shakespeare’s plays use unusual strategies to

allow women characters to speak more than they otherwise would by
presenting them as members of a royal family or cross-dressing them as
men, so that their speech can exploit the advantages of male status and
gender.

Women’s Presence in the Plays

The Shakespearean plays fall a long way short of the approximate 50;50
sex ratio found in everyday life. What however would be normal for the
stage? Lady Mary Wroth’s play Love’s Victory (1620) for instance, is close
to that ratio since it has 7 female roles and only 6 shepherds. Lady
Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Miriam, the Fair Queen of Jewry (1613)
has 5 named female roles and 8 male. However neither of these plays
was designed for a theatrical company so they were not constrained by
the realities of casting. Similarly out of John Lyly’s eight plays, 5 have
over 33% female roles and 2 have over 50% female roles, making an
average of 35%.i But because all the roles in Lyly’s plays were to be played
by the boys of St Paul’s he could have as many women characters as he
liked! He was not constrained by a shortage of boy actors.

(a) Quantity; Numbers of Women Characters

In Shakespeare’s plays however, the ratio of women characters is notably
very much lower than in everyday life. In her sample of six plays, Roberts
found that that the proportion of female characters ranged from 6% to
23% and averaged 14%’..ii Enumerating women as a proportion of total
characters is misleading however, because Shakespeare uses many male
characters for crowd scenes, sometimes giving them small speaking
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parts. Female characters on the other hand, are rarely used in this
fashion. With a few rare exceptions such as the mute maidservants in
Twelfth Night, if a female character appears, she has a speaking part, so
the sheer number of female characters does not assess their quality.

However, the number of female characters reflects the economic realities

of theatrical operations. Shakespeare was writing for a company of
players in the public playhouse that may have had a limited number of
boy actors and wanted to avoid the financial costs of hiring and training
additional ones.

(b) Quality; Amount that Women Characters Speak

A more specific way of evaluating women’s wordiness is the amount that
their characters speak—assessed by their numbers of lines. The male
stereotypes about women’s wordiness as ‘shrews’ suggest that the
women characters are verbose. Indeed in at least three plays the woman
lead speaks more than the male, namely Rosalind (686 lines) in As You
Like It, Imogen (580 lines) in Cymbeline, and Helena (451 lines) in All’s
Well That Ends Well.

But even the largest woman’s role, Cleopatra’s (693 lines), would not
quite make the top third of the men’s parts. No male lead has as few
words as the average female lead—who has only 10% of the lines in
Shakespeare’s plays. The average female lead is comparable to the
bottom half of the men’s parts, according to my sample. Overall, the
average male lead of 584 lines speaks nearly twice as much as the
average female lead of 303 lines.

Turning now to the generality of women characters, in some of the late

romances the overall female presence is relatively high, accounting for
29% of the lines in Two Noble Kinsmen and 24% in Anthony & Cleopatra.
However, the typical woman character –leads and non-leads---speaks
much less than the average man. For instance, the average male part in
The Winter’s Tale has 159 lines, similar to the 185 lines in Pericles. In
both these cases the men talk roughly twice as much as the average
woman character, whose parts represented only 91 and 67 lines
respectively. Overall, my analysis of a sample of 9 of the late plays
suggests that the totality of all the named women’s parts represent 15%
of all the lines in the average play.iii

Why is women’s speech low?

There are various kinds of explanations for this low level of women’s
speech. Firstly, Shakespeare’s plays reflect the fact that (as modern
sociolinguists have found) in public situations men talk more than women
which is reflected in men having a greater proportion of the total
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speech.iv Shakespeare’s men explicitly expect that their peers will

publicly regulate their wives’ speech. Leontes in A Winter’s Tale tells
Antigonus that he is “worthy to be hang’d” because, unlike Petruchio in
the Shrew plays, he did not “stay” his wife’s “boundless tongue” (II,
iii,109-110, 91). Compatible with the finding by sociolinguists that in
private conversations women speak more than men,v the plays set in
public —notably war-time —have the lowest amount of women’s speech,
whereas the domestic plays have the highest.

Secondly, Shakespeare mostly used historic sources and followed them

scrupulously. The scarcity of domestic interiors and significant female
figures to some extent reflects the playwright’s sources. The impact of
these sources can be shown by considering the plays that are not based
on historical sources—Love’s Labour’s Lost, Merry Wives of Windsor, The
Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. All of these were arguably
written originally for private performance not for the public playhouse.
The former has a significant proportion (29%) of named female roles,
which is twice the average for all the plays in the canon and women have
22% of the lines. In Merry Wives women have 18% of the roles and 29% of
the lines, and the play unusually makes ordinary housewives key central
characters. The other two plays are harder to classify, since it requires
attributing gender to fairies and spirits. If we ignore the minor characters
in the cast list, and assume all fairies are female then Dream could be
said to be 40% female. If we assume that Ariel and the spirits playing the
goddesses are female, then they have approximately 28% of the roles in
The Tempest.

Thus, it seems that the opportunity to write outside normal source

constraints did lead the playwright to modify the sex ratio. The overall
low representation of women is therefore largely a consequence of the
playwright’s decision to write nearly 90% of the plays for the public
playhouse---and an acting company that had few boys-- and base them
on historic sources. That single decision was responsible for the number
of female roles and the amount of female speech in the entire canon
being roughly half what it otherwise might have been.

Social Rank as Subversive Strategy

Historic sources also determined the number of plays that are set at
Court. Since courts are male dominated, this especially helps explain the
low proportion of women in some of the history plays that have large
casts. However this factor is not clear-cut since Courts also give women
status privileges, which Shakespeare exploits in a most interesting way

Shakespeare used social rank as a subversive strategy to enable at least a

dozen heroines to speak freely because they enjoy the privileges of rank.
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For instance, Cleopatra and Tamora are both Empresses, and Imogen is a
Princess. The impact of social rank on wordiness is clear but limited. In
my sample the 13 lead women characters who were royalty spoke on
average 338 lines, compared to 289 lines for the 12 women, like Mistress
Quickly, who were not royalty. Ordinary women spoke nearly as much as
royal women; noble blood only made them speak 16% more.

However, by the dual strategies of setting so many plays at Courts, and

making so many of the women characters have noble blood, Shakespeare
entitled many women characters to speak in public. Some might enjoy
the kind of privileged speech of say, Queen Elizabeth 1st —who herself
was regarded as a fictive male “Prince” with the heart and stomach of a
king. Thus Lady Macbeth refers to being unsexed and Cleopatra wears
Antony’s sword (while dressing him in her “tires and mantles”). Neither
character however, engages in actual cross-dressing. That was the
strategy Shakespeare reserved for the younger women characters.

Cross-dressing as Subversive Strategy

Shakespeare’s other strategy for empowering women characters with
substantial speech (without opening them to accusations of being
shrews), is by cross-dressing them as male. Although 95% of
Shakespeare’s women do not cross dress, the playwright uses this comic
technique with 7 characters, of which 5 have lead roles. This is as much
as the technique had been used in the whole of English drama before
1592, according to the surviving plays. vi

Out of the 10 most vocal female leads in the canon, each having over 13%
of the lines in their respective plays, half are the young women who
cross-dress as men. If wearing male disguise had no impact on the
character’s speech, one would expect these five examples—Rosalind,
Portia, Imogen, Julia and Viola—to be distributed randomly throughout
the canon. But since all the plays featuring female characters wearing
male disguise appear ranked in the top quartile of the verbosity of female
leads, evidently male disguise and verbosity are correlated. Another way
of looking at the data is to observe that for women lead characters,
wearing male disguise predicts that they will speak 80% more than the
average female lead.vii

Conclusion
Shakespeare’s depiction of women was constrained by a set of interacting
factors, which included a scrupulous adherence to sources, the staffing
complements of all the public theatrical companies, audience
expectations and by social prejudice against talkative women as ‘shrews’.
All these factors limited the audience acceptability of women characters
of any kind and restricted the utterances of those who did appear.
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Yet operating within those constraints, the playwright used two clever
authorial strategies to enable women to talk without being negatively
perceived. In about half the plays, women are depicted as royalty,
enabling them to speak 16 % more than ordinary women. Shakespeare
also cross-dressed half of the most vocal female leads, enabling them to
speak 80 % more than ordinary female leads, in a mixture of male and
female styles. Wearing men’s clothing enabled the average cross-
dressing lead to speak over twice as much as Katherina Minola.

Taken together in combination, Shakespeare’s subversive strategies by-

passed the traditional negative English stereotypes of wordy shrews and
allowed more women’s words to be spoken on the public stage.

www.darkladyplayers.com

i
My analysis. Full statistical analysis available on request
ii
Jeanne Addison Roberts, ‘Making a Woman and Other Institutionalized
Diversions’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 37, 3, Autumn,(1986),366-369.
iii
Principal female parts as listed by Thomas J. King
iv
Deborah Tannen Gender & Discourse (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1996)
p.36-7.
v
ibid. p..36-8.
vi
Victor O. Freeburg Disguise Plots in Elizabethan Drama; A Study in Stage
Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1915).
vii
This data is taken from James Forse Art Imitates Business; Commercial and
Political Influences on the Elizabethan Theatre (Bowling Green, OH : Bowling
Green State University Popular Press, 1993), p.72.