– Women disguised as men
Sunday December 12th 2010, 22:07
Filed under: Shakespeare

We can find women disguised as men in Shakespeare’s plays such as As You Like it, The Merchant of Venice, Twelth Night and Midsummer Night’s Dream. I am explaining some of those examples.

In the first of them, As You Like It, Rosalind is one of the most powerful of all the women characters we can find in any of Shakepeare’s comedies. The reason why she is able to express herself is that she remains disguised as a male for a long part of the plot, what allows her to experience her emotions and thoughts outside of the more constrained world.


Much of the fun in these comedies come because some sexual tensions between the characters and their confusions as disguised women. Rosalind is Celia’s cousin and daughter of Duke Senior, who has been banished and has gone to the Forest of Arden. Rosalind lives with Celia until the Duke Frederick also banishes her. That’s why she adops a male disguise what gives her a kind of freedom she had never felt before. She adopts the name “Ganymede”, and she is decided to go the garden of Arden, keeping her male disguise. She enters there in search of freedom but we have to remember that the costume she is wearing gives her freedom already. In that way she escapes from the limitations women had in the Renaissance society. Wearing that costume Rosalind learns a lot about herself, but also about Orlando, and with him, about love. Orlando is in love with Rosalind, and he meets her disguised as Ganymede in the forest, but he does not recognize her, so Oralando treats him as a male and tells him about his love Rosalind. The funny part here it is when Ganymede makes Orlando to pretend that she is Rosalind in order he knows many methods to attract Rosalind. Sometimes in that scene, she behaves as a woman, and when she pretends to be Ganymede, she tries to teach him the proper way to treat her, eduacting his heart.

The conventions of sex confusion are related in the play through the main female characters. Decisions as the chose of costumes by Celia or Rosalind (this last one chose the male costume breaking the constraints of her gender, while Celia is the femenine figure and does not want to enter in this game) demonstrate that gender roles are able to be manipulated and understanding through their use.

As second example we can point out the character Viola in the Twelfth Night , who dress up as a man, as she were her brother Sebastian, when her ship sinks. Like that she tries to approach to Orsino, the boy who she is in love with, to get closer to him and try to win his love. The comical part in the plot comes when Orsino tells Viola, desguised as Sebastian, to approach his love Olivia in his benefit, but what he did not know is that the lady will fall in love with Viola thinking that she is a true man. But it was not lost, as the true Sebastian appeared just when they were close to marriage. In this play, clothes do not only reveal or disguise her identity, they also constitute identity,when Shakespeare decides to leave her in men’s clothes and hence to disrupt with a delicate comic touch the return to the normal. What were the conventional rules give way to a different view of perceiving the world.


This disguise was a popular device in Shakespeare’s comedies where a heroine dressed up as a man has to make her way in a world of men, as happens with Viola.

– Disguise and deceit are also noticeable in The Merchant of Venice. In this case we have the character called Portia, who follows the view of women in the Renaissance, as inferior to men. But this concept has been too exagerated through history, and in this play we can see Portia a character with originaliry, sharpness and smartness whose vocabulary reveals a high level of education. So Portia does not fit well into the conception we have explained as a submissive woman. But despite all these things, women continued being inferior when they had for example to choose a husband. With this educated woman, using a rich vocabulary, and metaphors too, we can say that Shakespeare had no doubt about the equality of the intelligence of men and women. That is why Portia can be seen as a superior woman than a wide range of noble men.

Portia is disguised as a men representing a law doctor who saves Antonio from being killed. She has a power in court which would not be possible being as a real woman, but yes being dressed up as a man.





     
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