Shakespeare's Representation of Women | John W. Draper (essay date 1965)
John W. Draper (essay date 1965)
SOURCE: "Shakespeare's Ladies-in-Waiting," in Neophilologus, Vol. XX, No. 285, July, 1965, pp. 255-61.
[In the following essay, Draper examines the dramatic functions fulfilled by ladies-in-waiting—high-born women attendants of noblewomen—in Shakespeare's plays.]
From the feudal Middle Ages, the Elizabethans inherited a supposedly fixed scheme of society in which each generation of the noble, and even of the bourgeois, classes was trained in a sort of apprenticeschip to occupy its special niche in the immutable order of things. The knight's or nobleman's son became a page usually at seven, and about fourteen, a servingman, generally in the household of his father's suzerain, where he was supposed to be perfected in courtesy and arms: Chaucer's Squire shows how well this sometimes worked; and Havelok the Dane, how badly. The nobleman's daughter, likewise, became in due course a...
[The entire page is 3407 words long]
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