Anyone who knows me even a little bit knows that I am a big fan of Shakespeare. His plays, words, and general mythos have been an obsession of mine since age 10. Despite being a 21st-century American girl, I felt Shakespeare had something relevant, interesting and at the very least entertaining, to say to me.
Where there is slightly less wisdom is the 300-plus years worth of commentary on Shakespeare. My love of Shakespeare naturally led me to scholarly texts and historical records on the subject. When I was little, I quoted my favorite scholars as if I knew them personally. However, looking back, I’ve come to notice that the vast majority of commentators on Shakespeare are men. More generally, the field of Shakespeare—theatre, scholarship and education—has been dominated by the male gaze.
This problem is far from exclusive to Shakespeare. Academia, literary criticism and theatre (particularly directing and playwriting) have been dominated by men and the male gaze for a long time. However, Shakespeare’s outsize role in our popular culture, as well as my more specialized knowledge in his works, mean he is a useful vehicle for me to explore the legacy of the male gaze, and how it impacts women in academia and the arts today.
The male gaze asserts itself in many ways in Shakespeare, but for the sake of this article I am going to focus on three: genre, casting and character analysis.
The first of these categories, genre, is perhaps the most egregious. Shakespeare’s plays are generally divided into (roughly) three genres: tragedies that end in death, comedies that end in marriage and histories that recount the lives of English monarchs. All three of these genres span a wide range of quality. However, tragedy has slowly but steadily overtaken comedy as the “high” genre. Victorian critic (and blatant misogynist—more on that later) A.C. Bradley suggested a “big four” of tragedies—“Hamlet,” “Othello,” “Macbeth” and “King Lear”—and that analysis has dominated Shakespearean scholarship ever since. Comedies do well at the box office, but it’s tragedies like the Big Four, “Romeo and Juliet” and “Julius Caesar” that garner the most name recognition.
The reason for this disparity is, in my opinion, the lot of women in Shakespeare’s genres. Comedy is generally a good genre for women. They take on lead roles (Rosalind in “As You Like It,” Viola and Olivia in “Twelfth Night,” Imogen in “Cymbeline”), drive the plot forward, are witty and self-assured and get the happy endings. Meanwhile, in tragedies, women rarely fare well. They rarely drive the plot forward, and find themselves murdered or mutilated (usually as a way to forward the arc of the main male protagonist). Because tragedies center on the male experience, and tragedy is a male-dominated genre, it garnered more popularity with (you guessed it) male critics. As such, the male gaze on Shakespeare has subtly but persistently taught us that comedies, which make up a solid third of Shakespeare’s work, are inherently worth less than tragedies. Even more notably, the one comedy that has gained quite a cultural foothold in Western society is “The Taming of the Shrew”—the one comedy in which a man drives the plot and a woman is hurt.
The next manifestation of the male gaze in Shakespeare is casting. Now, sexism in casting is far from exclusive to Shakespeare. During my youth theater days, I always felt as though gender-blind casting was the norm in Shakespeare. This shifted when I was exposed to the British philosophy of Shakespeare for the first time. On my first day at a British conservatory program, a girl mentioned that she had fallen in love with Shakespeare’s work when she performed a monologue from “Julius Caesar.” Our teacher raised his eyebrows. “Not many good monologues for you in ‘Julius Caesar,’” he said. “So, what was it? Portia?”
The girl shook her head. “No,” she said. “It was Mark Antony.” The teacher scoffed loudly, shook his head and moved on with the lesson. Later on in this same program, another (this time female) teacher mentioned that women would always have a harder time with Shakespeare because we didn’t have as many monologues. Despite a tradition of women playing male Shakespearean roles that dates back to the 19th century, 21st-century Shakespeareans are often oddly resistant to the idea of women taking on any role in the canon. Projects like the Globe’s experiment in all-male productions gained more traction than the Donmar Warehouse’s all-female Shakespeare project.
Because women were forbidden to act during Shakespeare’s time, his works feature few female parts (generally, a company would only have a couple of young apprentices, whose voices were still high enough to play women). Today, a disparity still exists between jobs for male actors and jobs for female actors. And in the realm of classics, a theater space that is generally fairly open to diverse casting, women are still constantly ushered away from 90% of roles in Shakespeare. This is done by directors and casting directors—a field that is still predominantly male.
The last subject this article will discuss is character analysis. This goes hand in hand with genre—as the genre where women’s parts were the richest was ignored, the most interesting female characters in Shakespeare fell by the scholarly wayside. However, it’s interesting to note the breadth of literature that has built up around male characters—Hamlet, Othello, Prince Hal, Mark Antony, just to name a few—compared to the more paltry literature on female characters. Not only that, but analysis of female characters often comes from a place of heavy judgement, even scorn. In his book “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human,” celebrated Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom mentions Ophelia only a few times, and barely mentions Gertrude at all. In comedy, the theme of male friendship is constantly emphasized over anything that happens to women. And the most celebrated female characters in Shakespeare were, for a long time, women who conformed to a certain ideal of femininity (Juliet, Imogen, Desdemona).
This lack of interest in women’s roles in Shakespeare, coupled with a system of casting that prevents women from playing non-female roles, means that women often find themselves subtly pushed out of the Shakespeare world. However, this is slowly changing. More and more young women are learning about Shakespeare, interacting with Shakespeare and coming to their own conclusions about his work. The most recent generation of great Shakespeareans has much more gender diversity than previous ones. I am currently taking a class on Shakespeare here at Brandeis, and the class is predominantly women.
And as more women join the Shakespeare world, the more the traditional male gaze on his work can be challenged. Previously neglected feminist comedies (I’m looking at you, “Merry Wives of Windsor”), histories where women take center stage (Yay for the “War of the Roses” saga!) and new analyses for Shakespeare’s women, particularly in tragedies (Gertrude and Lear’s elder daughters) can all grow in prominence.
And, of course, this challenge to the male gaze should not just be limited to the Shakepseare world. The male gaze is pervasive across art, literature and history. And it’s certainly worth fighting against.
