The whens and whys of absent women performers on Elizabethan stages

¶ … saw the birth of a man who would forever be quoted in College assignments: William Shakespeare. Well, that date has been speculated, as "the actual date of Shakespeare's birth is not known, but, traditionally, April 23, St. George's Day, has been Shakespeare's accepted birthday, and a house on Henley Street in Stratford, owned by William's father, John, is accepted as Shakespeare's birth place. However, the reality is that no one really knows when the great dramatist was born. According to the Book of Common Prayer, it was required that a child be baptized on the nearest Sunday or holy day following the birth, unless the parents had a legitimate excuse. As Dennis Kay proposes in his book, Shakespeare:

If Shakespeare was indeed born on Sunday, April 23, the next feast day would have been

St. Mark's Day on Tuesday the twenty-fifth. There might well have been some

cause, both reasonable and great -- or perhaps, as has been suggested, St. Mark's Day

was still held to be unlucky, as it had been before the Reformation, when altars and crucifixes used to be draped in black cloth, and when some claimed to see in the churchyard the spirits of those doomed to die in that year. . . .but that does not help to explain the christening on the twenty-sixth" (Hammil, 2008).

Not to downplay him here by any means, Shakespeare is responsible for literature which would come about. That's right; during that time, authors, essayists, columnists, wordsmiths, novelists, or writers of any variety did not yet exist; that is, no employed or widely recognized professional of this favor. The idea of literature and the printing press did not come about until the time of Jonathan Swift, just over a century later. From there, "the invention and spread of the printing press are widely regarded as the most influential event in the second millennium AD, revolutionizing the way people conceive and describe the world they live in, and ushering in the period of modernity" (Eisenstein, 2005).

Though Shakespeare was only recognized as a playwright during his day, theater and theatrical productions gained a bit more esteemed popularity; theoretical and academic elements of human psychology came about, in which developments are taught to this day in both communal colleges and universities; even possibly scientific insight. Shakespeare opened the eyes and ears of many. What's funny, he did this through his observation of behavioral attributes just as well as behavioral problems, then publicly regurgitating this input back to those in attendance and allowing humanity to further progress and evolve from there. That said, Shakespeare was quite a keen observer of humanity.

In terms of the definition for prejudice being a preconceived idea, that was indeed the case. Men, in that day and age, were far more protective of their property, in this instance their brides, than U.S. citizens are today. That's exactly right; men considered their wives as property. Women more than willingly presumed the role. The occupants of the United States, as opposed to these has-been literary stars or playwrights, right along with any human alive advocating an activist pro-feminist stance, portray the odd-man-out or nonconformist in consideration to nearly every other nation in the world.

In regard to the females in Shakespeare's plays, however, in spite of the fact that Shakespeare sketched female characters into his plays (i.e., Lady Macbeth from Macbeth; Desdemona of Othello), male actors portrayed the female characters. Actresses were not in Shakespearean plays because they were protected by fathers or husbands. At this day and age, we do not comprehend this. In fact, we typically observe it as an unacceptable prejudice, discrimination, or bigotry. During that time, women were regarded as the pedestals as well as breeders. The first point concerns human biology; men are visual as well as guardians or protectors.