Theatre

Female Characters in Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth William Shakespeare is generally considered an avant-garde writer with progressive ideas about gender. Because of the era in which he wrote, the women in his plays generally had to be wives, servants, or a woman of some type of ill repute. But an examination of the female characters of three of his major tragedies shows that though these women may have been secondary to the men in their lives, they were still complex, round characters and deserving of as much attention and analysis as their male counterparts.