POWER AND MONARCHY: SHAKESPEARES PORTRAYAL OF WOMEN IN MACBETH AND HAMLET.

William Shakespeare began writing and performing plays in the latter quarter of the fifteen hundreds. Elizabeth Tudor began her reign as Queen in 1558, and died on March 23, 1603. Thus, two of the most prominent individuals from sixteenth and seventeenth century English history lived as contemporaries. They interacted with each other at Court. Both walked the streets of London. Shakespeare?s company performed for the Queen. Did such level of interaction between the monarch and the playwright lead to Elizabethan influence on Shakespeare?s writing? Shakespeare does give female protagonists power within many of his plays. In his comedies, the female protagonists act in authoritative ways with success. Yet, these plays do not address the role of women royalty. As concern about the monarch?s gender formed one of the primary social considerations of Shakespeare?s day, one might expect to see these gender considerations revealed in Shakespeare?s writing. Indeed, the popular and politic writer can hardly dissociate himself from societal concerns. In two of Shakespeare?s tragedies, Hamlet and Macbeth, Shakespeare implicitly suggests the danger of women?s involvement in politics at the sovereign level. Through Gertrude?s marriage to Hamlet?s uncle and also through Lady Macbeth?s unbridled political ambition, Shakespeare dramatizes real political concerns that evolved from and during the reign of Elizabeth Tudor. In the characters, Shakespeare reflects political gender anxieties; in the themes, he develops a schema of conflict and chaos erupting from such anxiety, and in the plays? contextual resolutions, he fulfills the desire for a return to state stability through a solidification of the patriarchal system. Hamlet and Macbeth do not make an explicit political argument regarding Elizabeth?s monarchy, but in these plays Shakespeare does invoke the tensions of the day as related to female leadership.