Conclusions

When I began the semester, I didn't know very much about themes over Shakespeare's body of work as a whole. I wasn't a huge fan of the plays which I had read, and it still takes a while for me to make sense of Elizabethan prose sometimes. What I really found interesting though was how this era has shaped our approach to gender identity even now. While certainly people during the Middle Ages weren't very enlightened when it came to sex and gender, the hefty labeling that started during this time helped lead to our society's current hysteria about subjects like gay marriage and transgendered people. Although it seems he often feeds into his culture's need for clear definitions and resolutions (like the partnering at the end of Twelfth Night or the return to Belmont in Merchant of Venice), Shakespeare seems willing to play with gender roles in a way that signals he was aware of how gender was being constructed in his society. He does much the same thing with racial and religious constructs in Merchant of Venice as well (and I presume other works, although I'm not that widely read and I wasn't paying as much attention to these issues in the other works we looked at). The fact that he was willing to subversively address this issues made me call into question my ideas about the time period. Doing research on hermaphrodites and transvestites made me realize that these aren't new issues just coming into the forefront in the twentieth century and now, but rather they've been a matter of intrigue since the Early Modern Era and before. I think particularly in regards to gender issues that the Victorian Era acted as a sort of buffer in conversation. Interesting that such a time of conservative values and rigid definition of roles should once more occur during the time of an English female monarch. What I mean to say though is that it seems like some of the issues that we're seeing in Shakespeare now have really always been there, it's just we weren't able as a society to talk about them until shifting away once more from rigid mindsets.