The merchant of venice

II. FEMALE CHARACTERS IN SHAKESPEARE'S COMEDIES (PORTIA ("THE MERCHANT OF VENICE"), ROSALIND ("AS YOU LIKE IT").
2.1. Female characters in Shakespeare's comedies
(Portia ("The Merchant of Venice")
The role of Rosalind is for actresses what Hamlet is for actors, compared with her, all the other figures in the play seem to be just stock dramatic types. She plays a dominant role, though here Celia, Touchstone and Jaques are less flat in comparison to Rosalind. Celia and Rosalind both show indomitable tongues (when mocking Le Beau and confusing him utterly when asking him the colour of his sport), and though Rosalind takes over the action when they reach Arden, Celia shares the stage at Court with her in equal degree, acting as a sister when poking fun at Rosalind's melancholy. Even in Arden Celia ends up as being less vibrant than Rosalind. She is important not only because of her double role but also because of her witness, her wisdom and charm. She is a complicated character, a genius, and she has long monologues in the play. The epilogue of the play is a monologue of her: 
It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue; but it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord the prologue. If it be true that good wine needs no bush, 'tis true that a good play needs no epilogue; yet to good wine they do use good bushes, and good plays prove the better by the help of good epilogues. What a case am I in then, that am neither a good epilogue, nor cannot insinuate with you in the behalf of a good play! ¹³I am not furnished like a beggar, therefore to beg will not become me: my way is, to conjure you; and I'll begin with the women. I charge you, O women! for the love you bear to men, to like as much of this play as please you: and I charge you, O men! for the love you bear to women, 'as I perceive by your simpering none of you hate them ,'that between you and the women, the play may please. If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me, and breaths that I defied not; and, I am sure, as many as have good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths, will, for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell. (Act 5, Scene 4: The forest. - of the complete text. http://www-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/asyoulikeit/index.html)
Twelfth nigh, or What you will, written for Shakespeare’s all-male company, plays brilliantly with these conventions. The comedy depends on an actor’s ability to transform himself through costume, voice, and gesture, into a young man, Cesario. The play’s delicious complications follow the emotional crosscurrents that Viola’s transformation engenders. Shipwrecked on a strange coast and bereft of her twin brother, the disguised Viola finds a place in the service of Duke Orsino with whom she promptly falls in love. When Orsino send Cesario to help him with the Lady Olivia, Olivia not only rejects the Duke’s suit but falls in love with his messenger. Discomforted to learn that she is the object of Olivia’s love, Viola reflects on the plot’s impassioned triangle (Twelfth Night.The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997.):
In Twelfth Night, clothes do not simply reveal or disguise her identity; they partly constitute identity- or so Viola playfully imagines- making her a strange hybrid creature. She understands perfectly well the narrow biological definition of her sex (though in the characteristically male-centered language of Shakespeare’s culture, she phrases the definition in terms of what she lacks) (3.4.269. Twelfth Night.The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997.) ¹⁴
It would have been simple for Shakespeare to devise a concluding scene in which Viola appears in women’s clothes, but he goes out of his way to leave her in men’s clothes and hence to disrupt with a delicate comic touch the return to the normal. The transforming power of costume unsettles fixed categories of gender and social class and allows characters to explore emotional territory that a culture officially hostile to same-sex desire and class marriage would ordinarily have ruled out of bounds. In Twelfth Nigh, conventional expectations repeatedly give way to a different way of perceiving the world. Thus, Viola, dresses up as her brother whom she presumes to be dead, so as to pass safely through this strange land. Inevitably, she becomes caught up in a bizarre love triangle between the duke she serves and loves and the countess she is wooing on his behalf, who naturally enough falls in love with her. A shipwrecked Viola disguises herself as the boy Cesario and falls in love with her employer, Orsino, the duke of Illyria, who in turn is smitten with Olivia, who suddenly finds herself inexplicably attracted to Cesario /Viola. Olivia is so vulnerable, yearning and aware of her folly that the audience can't wait for her every appearance (William Shakespeare ,Twelfth Night. ). Consequently, we find a double mirror between male and female characters.These misunderstandings, of course, are largely her creation, in the sense that they mainly derive from a disguise that confounds the distinction between male and female. ¹⁵“They shall yet belie thy happy years/ That say thou art a man” Orsino says to Caerario (l.4.29-30.Twelfth Night. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997.) This perception of ambiguity, rooted in early modern ideas about sexuality and gender, is one of the elements that enabled a boy actor to convincingly mime “a woman’s part”. It is a perception upon which Twelfth Night continually plays and that helps to account for the emotional tangle that the disguised Viola inspires (Twelfth Night. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997.). Having women dress up as men was a popular device in Shakespeare comedies, in part because all women's roles were played by boys in the first place. That extra level, of a boy playing a woman playing a man, is something seen nowadays, but the gender-bender comedies take on a different level of complexity altogether when performed by Woman's Will[1],which turns the Elizabethan convention of all-male casts on its head. Now a heroine dressed up as a man has to make her way in a world of men, who also happen to be played by women, and it becomes doubly important to draw a distinction onstage between the women playing men and the women playing women dressed as men ю In love the heavens themselves do guide the state;
Money buys lands, and wives are sold by fate.Elizabethan women were not only considered inferior to men, but they were regarded as a male possession: initially by their fathers, who decide over their daughter’s future and marriage, and later by their husbands, to whom women should serve and obey. Regarding females in this way meant that males used to treat them as an item to bargain and at the same time, women were also considered a symbol to reflect to outsiders their family’s status, power and reputation. A good example is what the protestant leader John Knox wrote: "Women in her greatest perfection was made to serve and obey man." The church supported this belief and made sure the continuity of this principle. ¹⁶
Female disobedience towards the male members of their family was seen as a crime. They were severely punished, in some cases beaten into submission. They did not have the right to be heirs to their father’s titles, everything was inherited from male to male. The role of women in the sixteenth century was, in short, voiceless, a case of being seen and not heard. The intention of the following sections is to present how women, through different types of roles, were considered inside Shakespeare’s comedies. In order to convey the former ideas, female characters have been analysed from the following comedies: ‘Much Ado About Nothing’, ‘Comedy of Errors’, and ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’.
The play starts with the end of a war: men returning from battle, taking an active role, and women waiting for men, acquiring then a passive role. It seems that with this beginning, Shakespeare will deal with the traditional patriarcal society usual of his times. However, as the first act begins, Beatrice interrupts the conversation between Leonato and the Messenger. In some way she already reveals her active role in this story by the interruption of a male conversation, an attitude that could be considered inappropiate for women at Elizabethan times.¹⁷
Instead of leaving a secondary role for women, women are the centre of the main plot and taking part in the action. The major events, to a large extent, revolve around the female characters: Hero is the Claudio’s object of love and later of hate, Beatrice is the woman who express freely in a male’s world and the woman who turns Benedict into a “tamed man”; and finally, Margaret and Ursula also contribute, albeit on a smaller scale, to deceive Claudio into thinking that Hero is unfaithful and helping to win the heart of Beatrice towards Benedict respectively. 
Woman are no longer voiceless in this play, as was usual in a patriarchal society ruled by men, Beatrice breaks the conventions through her freedom of expression. Furthermore, women are represented as equal to men. This is the case again of Beatrice, who argues with Benedict regardless of his position as a man. Definitely, although to a limited degree, women represented in “Much Ado About Nothing” reach a high social value and great importance compared with the conventional man’s superiority ideology of that time. In spite of giving them roles as wife and mother, here Benedict expresses his gratitude to his mother who brought him to life.¹⁸
Beatrice and Hero are the representatives of opposite roles: Beatrice is a rebellious woman that could be represented as the active role or the protest against the conventional submissive attitude of women at Elizabethan times. She is the woman who dares to argue and to be as equal as men. Beatrice is also considered, to some degree, a woman whom men cannot control.