Gender Roles in Much Ado About Nothing and Trifles

Introduction: Gender Roles in Historical Drama

Today, gender roles have become far more flexible than they were even fifty years ago. Women can enter management positions, pursue focused careers, and expect salaries comparable to those of men. Indeed, some women have proved themselves equally or more competent than men in leadership positions. At the same time, women are free to choose the lives they want — whether a career, homemaking, or a balance of both. Society today is far more tolerant of women who make any of these choices.

This is why it is so illuminating to examine plays from earlier times, when assigned gender roles were far more rigid. Authors such as William Shakespeare in Much Ado About Nothing and Susan Glaspell in Trifles offer significant commentary on the social values of their times with regard to gender roles. With the perspective of today, critics can also add their own interpretations of these roles when reading such plays. In both works, women and men occupy commonly accepted gender roles, yet some of the women break the norms imposed by those roles to striking dramatic effect.

Traditional Gender Roles in Much Ado About Nothing

In Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, Claudio and Hero are the most obvious examples of traditionally assigned gender roles. Claudio is the typical strapping young nobleman, well-respected and prince-like — the sort of figure meant to sweep the princess-like Hero off her feet. Hero, for her part, is sweet, sensitive, and kind. She plays the typical role of a young woman of her time, longing for marriage and delighted when it arrives in the form of Claudio. The two fall in love almost immediately upon meeting, and neither breaks from their traditional gender roles, even in the face of conflict.

When Claudio is deceived into believing that Hero has been unfaithful, he immediately accepts this as truth — a reaction consistent with the male gender role of the era. When he goes further by publicly humiliating Hero on their wedding day, she responds in a correspondingly typical female manner, suffering an emotional breakdown. She does nothing to defend herself, and neither she nor her family takes any active steps to uncover the truth. Instead, she submits to her father's decision to pretend that she has died from grief and shock. The credibility of this deception — accepted by nearly everyone, including Claudio himself — reinforces just how thoroughly Hero inhabits her assigned gender role.