Myriad-minded Shakespeare pp 130-146 | Cite as
All’s Well That Ends Well: a ‘feminist’ play
Chapter
Abstract
Shakespeare is sometimes blamed because he expected woman to be beautiful and biddable in a male-dominated world. How unreasonable of him! His heroines, we are told, perpetuate the male myth of woman, as sanctified by the Bible and the marriage-vows of the Church of England; in so far as his feminine ideal was imprinted upon the consciousness of Europe, and later of the world, he was at least as guilty of the enslavement of woman as St Paul, who wrote that ‘the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church’ (Ephesians 5:23).
Keywords
Feminine Ideal Final Scene Sexual Imagery Moral Strength Traditional Female Role
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Reference
- 2.See Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare’s Audience (ed. 1961) pp. 76–7.Google Scholar
- 3.See A. L. Rowse, Sex and Society in Shakespeare’s Age: Simon Forman (1974).Google Scholar
- 5.Quoted from Joseph G. Price, The Unfortunate Comedy: a study of ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’and its critics (Liverpool, 1968) p. 41.Google Scholar
Copyright information
© E. A. J. Honigmann 1989