Shakespeare Was a Feminist👑. Really.
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
And Why His Heroines Keep Proving It
You may have heard that William Shakespeare had a “mistrustful,” “doubtful,” or “conflicted” relationship with women.
The evidence?
Usually Lady Macbeth. Gertrude. Maybe Goneril and Regan. One ambitious murderer, one conflicted mother, and a pair of grasping sisters. As if, out of more than 1700 characters, those alone define the author’s relationship with half the human race.
That’s not literary analysis. That’s cherry-picking with a grudge.
In other words, that argument’s thin. (Not to mention sexist).
If you spend some time with Shakespeare’s female characters, especially his heroines, you will get to know intelligent, brave, wounded, strategic, furious, loyal, morally complex and often, funny women. They solve problems men cannot solve. They speak truth when silence would be safer. They fall in love, resist authority, disguise themselves, negotiate successfully, and risk everything to control their own lives.
Shakespeare’s women are outrageously courageous. They don’t read like museum pieces, they read like us on our best days. And 400 years after he created them, we still love them because we recognize ourselves in them. We would like to think we would do what they did in their (very bad) circumstances.
I believe that Shakespeare not only recognized, but admired female courage because he highlights it over and over in his plays.
⚖️ To Be a Woman Was Already Hard Enough
Long before Shakespeare put pen to paper, the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto observed in Orlando Furioso:
“To be a woman is a hard enough lot at the best of times.”
In Elizabethan England, even with a woman on the throne, that was no poetic exaggeration.
By law and custom:
- unmarried daughters were largely controlled by their fathers
- a child of seven could technically consent to marriage
- twelve was considered old enough for consummation
- disobedience to parents was a sin and obedience was a commandment.
Once married, women became legal non-entities.
They were described as “covert,” meaning veiled. They could not own property independently, sign contracts in their own names, or control income from their own lands without their husbands’ permission. Marriage passed control of a woman from her father to her husband and erased her legal identity, until she became a widow.
So when Hermia is threatened with death or a nunnery if she refuses her father’s choice of a husband in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare is not endorsing that brutality.
He is exposing it.
When Juliet, at 13, is commanded by her father to marry Paris in Romeo and Juliet, then punished for resisting, Shakespeare is not defending patriarchal authority.
He is criticizing it.
His female characters know exactly what they are up against. So did the real women of his world.
📣 Shakespeare’s Women Were Not Silent
Shakespeare’s women rage against injustice. Several disguise themselves as men in order to act in ways that Elizabethan society forbade.
In Much Ado About Nothing, Beatrice demands revenge against Claudio for wrongly and publicly shaming her cousin Hero. When Benedick hesitates, Beatrice loses her temper and declares she wishes she were a man so that she could “Eat his heart in the marketplace”. Benedick promises action.
Who doesn’t love Shylock’s daughter Jessica in The Merchant of Venice? She disobeys her father, pitches a casket of ducats, the family jewels, then herself, out of the window to her lover below and runs away with him to sit on a moonlit river bank.
(Honestly? That’s not disobedience. That’s a calculated jailbreak with jewelry.)
Juliet summon the courage to swallow a sleep potion so powerful that she appears dead. Her best option is to wake up locked inside a tomb.
As You Like It’s Rosalind heads into the wilds and reinvents herself as a swaggering young man to survive exile. She teaches the man she secretly loves how to court her by pretending to be herself.
Portia masters Venetian law, disguises herself as a young male law clerk, walks into a courtroom, recommends mercy, and delivers justice.
In Twelfth Night, Viola lands shipwrecked on a foreign shore, protects herself with a male disguise and, to support herself, finds employment with a stranger.
These women improvise under threat. They joke. They spar. They grieve. And even when they blanch at the thought of actual swordplay, they persevere.
Dead or alive, they triumph.
Shakespeare knew about female guts. When he put a female character on the stage, chances are he was squarely in her corner.
👀 Shakespeare Didn’t Imagine Courageous Women. He Observed Them.
Here’s a couple of Elizabethan Secrets that neither history nor literature advertises:
First: Shakespearian heroines didn’t spring fully formed from his imagination.
He based them on women who were his contemporaries, women who navigated treacherous court politics, endured or resisted arranged marriages, and although multi-lingual, well-read, and opinionated, had to remain publicly silent (and seethed about it). He exposed their injustices and dramatized how they constructed workarounds.
Here’s another Elizabethan Secret: Shakespeare’s court audience recognized the real-life inspirations for his characters. Some of them were sitting right there, watching their own lives onstage.
He even left us clues about their identities. Here are a few:
We’ll explore many more of the real life inspirations for Shakespeare’s female characters in later essays.
📖 Shakespeare’s Guidebook: The Book of the Courtier
The Renaissance handbook The Book of the Courtier, by an Italian named Baldassare Castiglione, is a known Shakespearean source. It argues that women possess the same intellectual virtues as men:
- wisdom
- nobility
- courage.
Castiglione observes that women do not wish to become men to perfect themselves. They wish to gain freedom and throw off male tyranny. Those ideas mattered to Shakespeare. He assumed women’s equal intelligence and granted his female characters agency, even when it unsettled male authority.
By that definition, Shakespeare qualifies as one of the most effective feminists of all time. No hashtags required. We are still reading and watching his plays to cheer on his heroines and to be inspired by them.
✨ Who Were Shakespeare’s Women?
Not to ignore unforgettable characters like Mistress Quickly and the Merry Wives, most of Shakespeare’s heroines (and female villains) are women of substance and rank: queens, princesses, noblewomen, and daughters of powerful families, raised inside court culture, diplomacy, inheritance, and power.
These female superstars form an unmistakable constellation. In an age when fewer than ten percent of men, and perhaps five percent of women, could read, Shakespeare overwhelmingly creates female characters who are elite, educated and politically embedded. They are trained to read rooms and letters, manage kingdoms and transverse wildernesses, challenge and navigate male authority, survive natural disasters and dynastic pressure. Shakespeare’s heroines belong to the world of palace chambers, arranged marriages, wealthy homes, military campaigns, and fragile successions.
That’s not accidental. These are the women he knew and admired.
🕵️♀️ Seeking Shakespeare Means Seeing His Women
I post under Seeking Shakespeare on Instagram. If you follow along there, you won’t find a man uneasy around women, or intimidated by their rank, wealth, education, or anger.
You will find a man who gravitated toward intelligent, educated, outspoken, and above all courageous women. Someone who learned (perhaps the hard way) to listen to them. Someone who watched the women around him closely, loved them for themselves, and transformed their lived experience into art.
Once you start following Shakespeare’s women, his plays and Elizabethan history look different.
If you don’t believe me, ask Cleopatra, Gertrude, Hermione, Titania, Hippolyta, Hermia, Helena, Imogen, Cordelia, Marina, Perdita, Miranda, Rosalind, Viola, Desdemona, Beatrice, Paulina, Isabel, Lavinia, Portia, Jessica, Ophelia, Juliet, Lucrece, Katerina . . . .
🎭 Follow the Women
If this way of seeing Shakespeare feels different, that’s because it is.
If hidden histories, Tudor women and fearless heroines are your thing, I invite you to join this blog's mailing list. Join here.
Subscribers receive exclusive Elizabethan Secrets: glimpses into Tudor households, historical mishaps and coverups, court scandals and backstories on the courageous women in Shakespeare’s orbit, all delivered straight to their inboxes; plus a thank-you gift box 🎁 of unpublished Elizabethan Secrets!
