Shakespeare's Representation of Women | Declan Kiberd (essay date 1985)
Declan Kiberd (essay date 1985)
SOURCE: "New Woman, New Man," in Men and Feminism in Modern Literature, Macmillan, 1985, pp. 1-33.
[In the following excerpt, Kiberd comments on the masculine and feminine qualities portrayed by Shakespeare in characters of both sexes.]
It was only with the advent of Shakespeare that a major writer offered a recognition of the male and female elements in all rich personalities. In Richard II the king unfit to rule his people paradoxically discovers the androgyny of the full self only when it is too late—after he has reverted to the status of ordinary citizen. Confined within his prison cell, the disgraced male rediscovers elements of his absent queen in himself:
I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world:
And for because the world is populous,
And here is not a creature but myself,
I cannot do it. Yet I'll...
[The entire page is 4291 words long]
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