Rediscovering Shakespeare’s women

Oscar nominee Margot Robbie is rethinking Shakespeare’s women and will be producing a new TV series. It’s about time, says Danuta Kean in a Guardian article. From Ophelia to Desdemona, female characters obey tired stereotypes. This TV series will bring a new perspective, she adds.

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In the quest for gender equality on stage and screen, Shakespeare has not been an obvious starting point. Find a Shakespearean woman who is clever, strong and powerful and invariably she will end up mad (Ophelia in Hamlet), silenced (Silvia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona) or dead (Goneril and Regan in King Lear). Even when she is shown to have integrity, more often than not she is killed off by the final act (Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, Desdemona in Othello).

So bad is the Bard’s treatment of women, it could earn him a whole MeToo hashtag on Twitter. In 2013 the Royal Shakespeare Company turned to Jacobean dramatists for roles that would not leave the heroine as secondary characters drowned in a pool of blood or water by the final act.

Which makes the prospect of I, Tonya star and Oscar nominee Margot Robbie producing a TV series with the Australian Broadcasting Company focused on Shakespeare’s women a difficult call.

For instance, how can the physical and psychological abuse endured by Katherine at the hands of her suitor Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew be played for laughs, as originally intended? What might have produced belly laughs in Elizabethan England should have modern women running to their nearest refuges as fast as they can shout “coercive control”.

Even when his women are not victims of male caprice, Shakespeare only allows them freedom to express their true character if they slip into something more comfortable, ditching the stomacher and farthingale for a pair of breeches. But women being women diminishes them in his work. Thus, the lively intellects of Viola in Twelfth Night, Rosalind in As You Like It and Portia in The Merchant of Venice are only taken seriously when they are mistaken for men. It is the 16th-century equivalent of Margaret Thatcher lowering her voice to be taken seriously.

And woe to the Shakespearean woman who defies this convention. To say and do things that “nice girls” should not while being dressed as a woman is a fast route to a thrashing or the grave. In a production like those planned by Robbie, which will include Australian women across all class, racial and sexual divides, one wonders how it will be possible to remain true to the spirit of the plays without pandering to outdated stereotypes.