William Shakespeare has many interesting female characters in all his different types of plays. Some of his women are protagonists while others are just secondary characters who help move the story forward. Regardless of the depth of the characters' roles, each woman imparts a type of unthinkable personality trait that would be unique to women in Shakespeare's time. Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear all have female characters that portray women who would not have been seen at the time William Shakespeare was writing. It took creativity and skill for Shakespeare to get his characters past the censors who controlled the plays. His female characters are strong, but not overtly so. She gives them the characteristics of her time, but she also gives them new traits that you wouldn't normally see in women of her time. In William Shakespeare's time, it was very immoral to court a woman on stage. This could become a problem for comedy writing, but this problem was solved with a simple solution: have men play women. When males play women on stage, the reader of a future generation may see some homosexual overtones. During this era, this would be completely normal. When plays were performed, there were rarely women in the audience. The Earthlings, those who couldn't pay for the top seats, were predominantly male. Sometimes, the women in the audience were whores and prostitutes. Women were rarely workers, they had to be housewives and mothers. Women were hypocritical when it came to the rules of who they could marry. In reality, men could marry whoever they wanted. Men could marry above their social class and, more controversially, below their social class. The same cannot be said of wo......middle of paper......One the other poisoned herself because of me and then killed herself” (5.3.214-216). His comments just show what kind of women these girls were simply based on the personality of the man they fell in love with. Being a woman in Shakespeare's time seems to be nothing to be proud of. Women were treated badly, almost like second-class citizens. William Shakespeare gave women a bit of a voice and shed a new light on them through his works. She proved that women can be strong, intelligent and also proved that they can be violent and cruel. This would have been a huge contrast to the quiet subordinate women he was used to seeing. Shakespeare contrasted the kind of women he knew with the kind of women he thought the world would never see. Works Cited Shakespeare, William. The tragedy of Macbeth. Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1915. Google Books. Network. 3 September. 2015.