Women in Shakespeare

Anybody looking to research the women in Shakespeare's plays should check out these two books that I currently have: Soliloquy: the Shakespeare Monologues Edited by Michael Earley and Philippa Keil, and Shakespeare's Women: A Playscript for Performance and Analysis by Libby Appel and Michael Flachman. The first book, Soliloquy, is a compilation of all the long monolgues Shakespeare wrote for women characters. It also has some really insightful commentary following each soliloquy and a long introduction about Shakespearean women. This book is incredibly valuable for anybody trying to research how Shakespeare portrayed women since it has a section for almost all of his important female characters. The second book Shakespeare's Women is actually a play written by Appel and Flachman that uses characters and words from Shakespeare's play to act out a kind of analysis of the characters and the roles they perform in their respective plays. It's harder to read than the other one and isn't the original source material from his plays, but it still has some interesting things to say about Shakespeare's women. It deals a lot with the popular notion of Shakespeare's time of women as frail fickle beings and also the variety of characters in his plays.