Description

"Shakespeare's Comic Heroines: Disrupting Male Hegemony" is a reading of how Shakespeare viewed women and raised issues related to women's plight and predicament. He displayed women who could disrupt male hegemony and turned out to be exemplary to all feminists fighting for the cause of women's welfare. Shakespeare presumed a world which was free from all sorts of gender discrimination and it is the world of which, centuries after Shakespeare, Feminists like Woolf advocated for women's freedom. Shakespeare accords his women characters a kind of "Life Force" which he denied to men. The present work shows how Shakespeare's male ego did not come in his delineation of women's right and female superiority. When Shakespeare wrote a woman's dialogue, it looked as if he was bearing the fate of womanhood, and when he wrote for men, he spoke with full authority of patriarchy. The present work explores many issues which led female subordination in Shakespeare's time; and how Shakespeare criticized social institutions like Law, Religion etc which contributed to women's secondary position.