Mirzayeva ozoda course work theme: Female characters in Shakespeare's comedies (Portia ("The Merchant of Venice"), Rosalind

1.1. The plays of Shakespeare’s

The role of Shakespeare in English literature. William Shakespeare is considered by many to be the father of modern English Literature. It is not just his popularity and influence on modern writers that allows for this title to be attributed to him but because of the massive contributions he made to the development of the English language. William Shakespeare's contributions to English literature is indispensable. He contributed significantly to the growth of English vocabulary and phrases which have enriched the language making it more colorful and expressive³. Shakespeare’s plays are a canon of approximately 39 dramatic works written by English poet, playwright, and actor William Shakespeare. The exact number of plays—as well as their classifications as tragedy, history, comedy, or otherwise—is a matter of scholarly debate. Shakespeare’s plays are widely regarded as being among the greatest in the English language and are continually performed around the world. The plays have been translated into every major living language. Many of his plays appeared in print as a series of quartos, but approximately half of them remained unpublished until 1623, when the posthumous First Folia was published. The traditional division of his plays into tragedies, comedies, and histories follows the categories used in the First Folio. However, modern criticism has labeled some of these plays "problem plays" that elude easy categorization, or perhaps purposely break generic conventions, and has introduced the term romances for what scholars believe to be his later comedies.

Shakespeare is such an important figure in British culture because of his ability


⁴to connect with all his audiences, he broke boundaries in his literature, he influenced and altered the English language and British culture, and because of the time period that Shakespeare lived in.
Between 1590 and 1613 the people of London and Queen Elizabeth I herself went to Shakespeare’s plays not just because of their action and betrayal elements. Shakespeare had the gift of connecting with the audience; he pulled at their heartstrings with powerful stories as well as made parallels to what was happening in England and around the world in that time period. He was able to make his stories seem like they could be happening anywhere at any time; they weren’t farfetched. Shakespeare lived in a time of wars, wars between royal families and between whole nations and countries, when he put those features into his plays people at the time could relate, and they can still relate today. In Hamlet, King Claudius sends and hires spies as well as hitmen to carry out his dirty work throughout the play, parallel to how in that time Queen Elizabeth and her advisors would hire people to do the same sort of jobs. Another example is in Coriolanus when the people in the play riot over high prices, this is a parallel to how real people in Shakespeare’s time, and even today, would riot and protest over high prices, unfair taxes, equal rights, and other similar circumstances.
Romeo and Juliet is another great example of how Shakespeare became such an important figure in British culture by connecting with his audiences. In Act 3, scene
5 Juliet tells her mother that she refuses to marry Paris, when Lord Capulet, her father, enters he is enraged that Juliet is disobeying him, he violently strikes her, insults her then threatens to disown her if she doesn’t marry Paris. Although not to this extreme many people in the audience can connect and relate to Juliet. Their parents may not be forcing them into a marriage however many people know what
_{it is like to have a large argument with their parents because they believe something}


⁴ Graves Robert (1991). The Greek Myths[M]. Baltimore: Penguin Books, p.17-18.
is unfair⁵. We connect to Juliet on an emotional level when she is fighting⁶ with her father. Another example comes from Act 1, scene 3 when the audience first meets Juliet. In this scene, Lady Capulet, Juliet’s mother, explains to Juliet that her father has decided that it is time for her to marry. We previously just heard the Nurse telling a comical story about when Juliet was younger to her mother and now Lady Capulet has to tell her daughter her childhood is over, it’s now time for her to get married.
It is interesting to note that another way Shakespeare became a famous figure in British culture was his way of raising questions about prejudice, discrimination, tolerance, and what it meant to be an Englishman. Shakespeare focused on the way people were treated, for example, the play Othello raised difficult questions for the audience about how people in society are treated differently based on if they look different, note that Othello was a play written almost 40 years before the slave trade. The play The Taming of the Shrew also pokes fun at masculinity but at the same time ironically scrutinizes gender roles. His view on women was also groundbreaking; the women in his plays weren’t bumbling idiots, used like objects, or only in the literature for their sexuality. The women from his plays were smart, cunning, articulate, bold, and overall strength. A common theme being a strong woman standing up to male authority or figurehead, like a father, and being assertive and determined to stick by the man she loves instead of marring someone else. This is seen in Romeo and Juliet when Juliet stands up to her father when she won’t marry Paris and when she will go as far as take a drug to make her seem dead so that Romeo will come and carry her away to run off, she is terrified of waking in a tomb filled with corpses but nevertheless takes the drug. Viola from Twelfth Night is another powerful woman, when she shipwrecks on a beach on Illyria she loses her twin brother but her first instinct isn’t to cry for help or appeal to others as a helpless woman for support; she dresses s a man to disguise herself then finds a job as a servant in the home of a Duke. Throughout the play she feels free, she can move
_{around without a man always in her shadow chaperoning her, she gets used to}


⁵ Albert Robert (1991). The Greek Myths[M]. Baltimore: Penguin Books, p.17-18.
⁶ Bassett Susan (1998). Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction [M]. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, p.238-240
protecting herself, and makes her own decisions. She even gains the ability to manipulate her circumstances to ensnare the Duke into marrying her Nevertheless, Shakespeare didn’t become an icon in British culture just because he could connect with audiences then, and now, and bring up controversial scenarios in his plays, it was also because of how he changed British culture by changing the English language. The Oxford dictionary defines culture as “The arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively” and “The ideas, customs, and social behavior of a particular people ⁷or society”. In summary, these definitions mean that art, literature, customs and traditions, food, language, and other philosophies and beliefs are what make up the culture and are what effects and sway culture over time.⁸ Culture is influenced greatly by the language we speak and the diction we use. This is further supported by American cultural anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber who stated “culture began when speech was present, and from then on, the enrichment of either means the further development of the other” As stated, language and diction over time will influence and change a culture, and vice versa. It is said that Shakespeare created over 1,000 common words and phrases in the English Language not only by creating words on his own but by changing nouns into verbs for example “to torture”, he also turned verbs into adjectives, and he linked words together that had never been used before like “pomp and circumstance” from Othello or “full circle” from Macbeth. A reason why Shakespeare Is such an important figure in British culture is because he changed the way we communicate in the English language; we almost quote him every day. A few of these words and phrases was used include⁹ “Dead as a Doornail” which was first used in Henry VI Part 2, “Best foot forward”, the word bedazzled, and the phrase “Break the ice” were both used in The Taming of the Shrew, “cold-blooded” can be found in King John, the word scuffle is in Antony and Cleopatra, and many more. He even created and
_{popularized various female names like Jessica (which is from The Merchant of}
⁷ Bassett Susan (1998). Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction [M]. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, p.238-240
⁸ Bassett Susan (1998). Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction [M]. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, p.238-240
⁹ Hamilton Edith (1999). Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes[M]. Grand Central Publishing, p.5-6
Venice), Miranda (from The Tempest), and Olivia (from Twelfth Night) Another way Shakespeare influenced British culture was how for years after his death he would be influencing the work of many artists, writers, creators, and others around the world and in Great Britain. An example from around the world was the writer Herman Melville who famously created the novel Moby-Dick, which is based on Macbeth and King Lear. In addition, in 1961 American directors Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise filmed West Side Story, which is inspired by Romeo and Juliet. In British culture, however, there are numerous writers that created work based on Shakespeare. Aldous Huxley, an English writer, and philosopher, created the novel Brave New World, published in 1932, which was influenced by Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Josephine Toy, a Scottish author, in 1951 created the novel The Daughter of Time in which the idea of the book was influenced by Shakespeare’s Richard III. And finally, the book Bell, Book, and Candle created by English playwright John van Durden was influenced by King John.
As practiced in Renaissance England and in classical Greece and Rome, tragedy is an intense exploration of suffering and evil focused on the experience of an exceptional individual, distinguished by rank or character or both. Typically, it presents a steep fall from prosperity to misery and untimely death, a great change occasioned or accompanied by conflict between the tragic character and some superior power. It might be said, therefore, that conflict and change – the first intense if not violent, the second extreme – together constitute the essence of tragedy. In his seminal account of the subject, Aristotle (fourth century b c) said that the success of a tragedy depends on its capacity to excite pity and fear, thereby effecting a catharsis of these emotions.
Twentieth-century commentators have interpreted this as referring to the contrary responses of attraction and repulsion: pity draws us sympathetically to the protagonist, regretting his or her suffering as unjust or disproportionate; fear denotes an attitude to the protagonist of dissociation and judgement and acknowledges the rightness of what has happened. What Aristotle meant by catharsis has been the subject of much disagreement, but in contemporary usage the term usually implies
a state of mind in which the powerful and conflicting emotions generated by the spectacle of great suffering are reconciled and transcended through artistic representation, so that a condition of exultant but grave understanding remains.
This rephrasing of Aristotle in conflictual terms may be ascribed to the fact that since the nineteenth century, when the nature of tragedy began to be studied as never before, the overriding emphasis has been on conflict, and the concomitant notions of contradiction, ambivalence, and paradox, as the characteristic. It is an emphasis which has been due entirely to the philosophers G.W. Hegel (1770–1831) and F. Nietzsche (1844–1900).
According to Hegel, the characteristic conflict in tragedy is not between ethical right and wrong but between the personal embodiments of a universal ethical power, both of whom push their rightful claim to the point where it encroaches on the other’s right and so becomes wrongful. The (usually violent) resolution of this conflict restores a condition of natural justice and confirms the existence of a just and divine world order.4 Nietzsche rejected the idea of such an order, but he too saw
‘contrariety at the center of the universe’ and tragedy as a process involving the conflict and reconciliation of opposites: for him, these opposites are Apollo and Dionysus, the first symbolizing reason, control, and art, the second, passionate destructive energy, orgiastic abandon, and the self-renewing force of life itself.5
Both thinkers were inspired by the pre-Socratic philosophers (sixth to fifth centuries be) who held that the natural world is a system of ‘concordant discord’ animated by sympathetic and antipathetic forces personified as Love and Strife (War).6 Despite substantial differences between their theories of tragedy, both Hegel and Nietzsche were prompted by their attraction to pre-Socratic cosmology to locate tragic events in a natural dialectic of destruction and renewal, and so to emphasize an ultimately positive dimension to tragedy. Perhaps, however, because they were so obsessed with Greek tragedy and Greek culture generally, both philosophers failed to discover that the essentially paradoxical view of nature fathered by the pre-Socratics was
embedded in all Shakespeare’s tragedies and was central ¹⁰ to the intellectual inheritance of his contemporaries. A.C. Bradley (1851–1935) rightly criticized Hegel for underestimating the action of moral evil and the final sense of waste evident in most tragedies; but he concurred with him by making conflict a major theme in his own hugely in-fluently account of Shakespearean tragedy .He contended, however, that the distinguishing feature of Shakespearean tragedy is not conflict between the tragic hero and someone else, or even between contending groups, but rather conflict within the hero, who is a man divided against himself. Bradley also adapted Hegel’s dualist metaphysics, arguing that Shakespearean tragedy demonstrates the existence of an ultimate power which reacts violently against evil but in the process contradictorily and mysteriously destroys much that is good as well. In later versions of the conflict theory, tragedy (both Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean) has been identified as a genre which projects mutually incompatible world views or value systems; and then again as one which exposes
‘the eternal contradiction between man’s weakness and his courage, his stupidity and his magnificence, his frailty and his strength’. Shakespeare’s tragedies have been seen as characterized by a disturbing conjunction of the lofty and the comic– grotesque, something which emphasizes the coexistence in the hero of nobility and pettiness and reinforces a largely pessimistic view of the way in which nature produces and destroys greatness. The tragedies of both Shakespeare and his contemporaries have also been read in the light of Marx’s materialist Hegelianism as embodying the contradictions and incipient collapse of feudalism and heralding the bourgeois revolution of the seventeenth century.