New Reading of Shakespeare’s Cross – Dressed Characters

This work concentrates on how Shakespeare represented his female characters in different historical contexts starting from the early modern period in England when they were created for the first time until the contemporary Western world where we ‘meet’ them as they staged over and over again. My research also tries to challenge some of the suppositions that immediately create our efforts to apprehend Shakespeare’s female characters historically. Many critics of Shakespeare have been dealing with his female characters, especially we witness that effective scholarly work in this last three decades, however, in my opinion it is time to reassess, reexamine and revaluate the stories that this work has created. In this paper I will try to show both the feminist and historicist prospect to these questions, in order to be able to demonstrate that even though femininity on the Renaissance stage was invariably a show to be played, the lack of women does not annihilate the positive comments his female characters evoked from women or deprive their opportunities as roles for feminist allocation. Finally, I would like to emphasize that our own understanding of Shakespeare’s female characters is modified not only by the expanded tradition of Shakespearean scholarship, but as well as by our experiences in our present history; the contemporary world where we live. These two facts model our appreciation of Shakespeare’s female characters regardless of the fact whether we study them in academy, read them privately, or see them at the theatre or at screen. Each of these traditions will need feminist intervention in the twenty-first century in order to get a contemporary understanding of Shakespeare’s female characters that were created a few centuries ago, as I have mentioned above are still subject of an intense debate