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HOW DO SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS DEPICT WOMEN? This paper shows that Shakespeare’s plays use unusual strategies to allow women characters to speak more than they otherwise would by presenting them as members of a royal family or cross-dressing them as men, so that their speech can exploit the advantages of male status and gender. Women’s Presence in the Plays The Shakespearean plays fall a long way short of the approximate 50;50 sex ratio found in everyday life. What however would be normal for the stage? Lady Mary Wroth’s play Love’s Victory (1620) for instance, is close to that ratio since it has 7 female roles and only 6 shepherds. Lady Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Miriam, the Fair Queen of Jewry (1613) has 5 named female roles and 8 male. However neither of these plays was designed for a theatrical company so they were not constrained by the realities of casting. Similarly out of John Lyly’s eight plays, 5 have over 33% female roles and 2 have over 50% female roles, making an average of 35%.i But because all the roles in Lyly’s plays were to be played by the boys of St Paul’s he could have as many women characters as he liked! He was not constrained by a shortage of boy actors. (a) Quantity; Numbers of Women Characters In Shakespeare’s plays however, the ratio of women characters is notably very much lower than in everyday life. In her sample of six plays, Roberts found that that the proportion of female characters ranged from 6% to 23% and averaged 14%’..ii Enumerating women as a proportion of total characters is misleading however, because Shakespeare uses many male characters for crowd scenes, sometimes giving them small speaking

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parts. Female characters on the other hand, are rarely used in this fashion. With a few rare exceptions such as the mute maidservants in Twelfth Night, if a female character appears, she has a speaking part, so the sheer number of female characters does not assess their quality. However, the number of female characters reflects the economic realities of theatrical operations. Shakespeare was writing for a company of players in the public playhouse that may have had a limited number of boy actors and wanted to avoid the financial costs of hiring and training additional ones. (b) Quality; Amount that Women Characters Speak A more specific way of evaluating women’s wordiness is the amount that their characters speak—assessed by their numbers of lines. The male stereotypes about women’s wordiness as ‘shrews’ suggest that the women characters are verbose. Indeed in at least three plays the woman lead speaks more than the male, namely Rosalind (686 lines) in As You Like It, Imogen (580 lines) in Cymbeline, and Helena (451 lines) in All’s Well That Ends Well. But even the largest woman’s role, Cleopatra’s (693 lines), would not quite make the top third of the men’s parts. No male lead has as few words as the average female lead—who has only 10% of the lines in Shakespeare’s plays. The average female lead is comparable to the bottom half of the men’s parts, according to my sample. Overall, the average male lead of 584 lines speaks nearly twice as much as the average female lead of 303 lines. Turning now to the generality of women characters, in some of the late romances the overall female presence is relatively high, accounting for 29% of the lines in Two Noble Kinsmen and 24% in Anthony & Cleopatra. However, the typical woman character –leads and non-leads---speaks much less than the average man. For instance, the average male part in The Winter’s Tale has 159 lines, similar to the 185 lines in Pericles. In both these cases the men talk roughly twice as much as the average woman character, whose parts represented only 91 and 67 lines respectively. Overall, my analysis of a sample of 9 of the late plays suggests that the totality of all the named women’s parts represent 15% of all the lines in the average play.iii Why is women’s speech low? There are various kinds of explanations for this low level of women’s speech. Firstly, Shakespeare’s plays reflect the fact that (as modern sociolinguists have found) in public situations men talk more than women which is reflected in men having a greater proportion of the total

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speech.iv Shakespeare’s men explicitly expect that their peers will publicly regulate their wives’ speech. Leontes in A Winter’s Tale tells Antigonus that he is “worthy to be hang’d” because, unlike Petruchio in the Shrew plays, he did not “stay” his wife’s “boundless tongue” (II, iii,109-110, 91). Compatible with the finding by sociolinguists that in private conversations women speak more than men,v the plays set in public —notably war-time —have the lowest amount of women’s speech, whereas the domestic plays have the highest. Secondly, Shakespeare mostly used historic sources and followed them scrupulously. The scarcity of domestic interiors and significant female figures to some extent reflects the playwright’s sources. The impact of these sources can be shown by considering the plays that are not based on historical sources—Love’s Labour’s Lost, Merry Wives of Windsor, The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. All of these were arguably written originally for private performance not for the public playhouse. The former has a significant proportion (29%) of named female roles, which is twice the average for all the plays in the canon and women have 22% of the lines. In Merry Wives women have 18% of the roles and 29% of the lines, and the play unusually makes ordinary housewives key central characters. The other two plays are harder to classify, since it requires attributing gender to fairies and spirits. If we ignore the minor characters in the cast list, and assume all fairies are female then Dream could be said to be 40% female. If we assume that Ariel and the spirits playing the goddesses are female, then they have approximately 28% of the roles in The Tempest. Thus, it seems that the opportunity to write outside normal source constraints did lead the playwright to modify the sex ratio. The overall low representation of women is therefore largely a consequence of the playwright’s decision to write nearly 90% of the plays for the public playhouse---and an acting company that had few boys-- and base them on historic sources. That single decision was responsible for the number of female roles and the amount of female speech in the entire canon being roughly half what it otherwise might have been. Social Rank as Subversive Strategy Historic sources also determined the number of plays that are set at Court. Since courts are male dominated, this especially helps explain the low proportion of women in some of the history plays that have large casts. However this factor is not clear-cut since Courts also give women status privileges, which Shakespeare exploits in a most interesting way Shakespeare used social rank as a subversive strategy to enable at least a dozen heroines to speak freely because they enjoy the privileges of rank.

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For instance, Cleopatra and Tamora are both Empresses, and Imogen is a Princess. The impact of social rank on wordiness is clear but limited. In my sample the 13 lead women characters who were royalty spoke on average 338 lines, compared to 289 lines for the 12 women, like Mistress Quickly, who were not royalty. Ordinary women spoke nearly as much as royal women; noble blood only made them speak 16% more. However, by the dual strategies of setting so many plays at Courts, and making so many of the women characters have noble blood, Shakespeare entitled many women characters to speak in public. Some might enjoy the kind of privileged speech of say, Queen Elizabeth 1st —who herself was regarded as a fictive male “Prince” with the heart and stomach of a king. Thus Lady Macbeth refers to being unsexed and Cleopatra wears Antony’s sword (while dressing him in her “tires and mantles”). Neither character however, engages in actual cross-dressing. That was the strategy Shakespeare reserved for the younger women characters. Cross-dressing as Subversive Strategy Shakespeare’s other strategy for empowering women characters with substantial speech (without opening them to accusations of being shrews), is by cross-dressing them as male. Although 95% of Shakespeare’s women do not cross dress, the playwright uses this comic technique with 7 characters, of which 5 have lead roles. This is as much as the technique had been used in the whole of English drama before 1592, according to the surviving plays. vi Out of the 10 most vocal female leads in the canon, each having over 13% of the lines in their respective plays, half are the young women who cross-dress as men. If wearing male disguise had no impact on the character’s speech, one would expect these five examples—Rosalind, Portia, Imogen, Julia and Viola—to be distributed randomly throughout the canon. But since all the plays featuring female characters wearing male disguise appear ranked in the top quartile of the verbosity of female leads, evidently male disguise and verbosity are correlated. Another way of looking at the data is to observe that for women lead characters, wearing male disguise predicts that they will speak 80% more than the average female lead.vii Conclusion Shakespeare’s depiction of women was constrained by a set of interacting factors, which included a scrupulous adherence to sources, the staffing complements of all the public theatrical companies, audience expectations and by social prejudice against talkative women as ‘shrews’. All these factors limited the audience acceptability of women characters of any kind and restricted the utterances of those who did appear.

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Yet operating within those constraints, the playwright used two clever authorial strategies to enable women to talk without being negatively perceived. In about half the plays, women are depicted as royalty, enabling them to speak 16 % more than ordinary women. Shakespeare also cross-dressed half of the most vocal female leads, enabling them to speak 80 % more than ordinary female leads, in a mixture of male and female styles. Wearing men’s clothing enabled the average cross-dressing lead to speak over twice as much as Katherina Minola. Taken together in combination, Shakespeare’s subversive strategies by-passed the traditional negative English stereotypes of wordy shrews and allowed more women’s words to be spoken on the public stage.

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i My analysis. Full statistical analysis available on request ii Jeanne Addison Roberts, ‘Making a Woman and Other Institutionalized Diversions’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 37, 3, Autumn,(1986),366-369. iii Principal female parts as listed by Thomas J. King iv Deborah Tannen Gender & Discourse (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1996) p.36-7. v ibid. p..36-8. vi Victor O. Freeburg Disguise Plots in Elizabethan Drama; A Study in Stage Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1915). vii This data is taken from James Forse Art Imitates Business; Commercial and Political Influences on the Elizabethan Theatre (Bowling Green, OH : Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1993), p.72.