How shakespeare used misogyny at the end of the play?

Answer 1

Since he left us no letters, diaries, or other personal papers to tell us what he thought, we really have almost no information on Shakespeare's personal life or feelings about different subjects other then what we can deduce from his plays and poems. And since they were works of fiction and drama, we can't really deduce his own beliefs simply based on the stories he wrote.

However, since the question is not about what he personally thought, but what he did in his plays, let's just look at the women he wrote about. Where the women in Shakespeare's stories have committed their affection, they are absolutely true and unswerving, with few exceptions. The men are fickle and prone to jealousy. Check it out: Imogen is true, Postumus is jealous; Desdemona is true, Othello is jealous; Hero is true, Claudio is jealous; Mrs. Ford is true, Mr. Ford is jealous; Helena is true, Demetrius is fickle; Hermione is true, Leontes is jealous; Julia is true, Proteus is fickle. There is only one jealous woman in all of Shakespeare, Adriana in the early comedy The Comedy of Errors. There are only two adultresses, and one of them (Queen Margaret in the Henry VI plays) is false to a political marriage with a man she loved before entering into that political marriage. And yet the popular wisdom of Shakespeare's day was that all women were fickle in love and would sleep with anyone.

Shakespeare's opposition to arranged marriages is portrayed over and over. Women whose parents or guardians try to arrange their marriages always get out of it one way or another, and we applaud this. Usually they have another fellow in mind. Take Hermia, for example, or Anne Page, or Juliet, or Sylvia, or Imogen. Portia in The Merchant of Venice has a marriage arranged for her, about which she complains bitterly, but she contrives to have the arrangement choose the man she wants. In one play and one play only is a man forced into an arranged marriage (All's Well that Ends Well). He tries to escape it, and everybody holds him in contempt for doing so until he sees reason and acquiesces to the arranged marriage.

How many female characters which Shakespeare wrote are unlikable? Lady Macbeth, Cymbeline's Queen, Regan and Goneril and . . . ? Queen Margaret, maybe, when she's taunting the Duke of York. Volumnia, maybe--she's a tough old bird and hard as nails. Not very many, really. Most of them we genuinely like.

As likeable as they are, they are still an amazingly diverse group of characters: innocent Miranda and streetwise Doll Tearsheet; patient Hermione and mercurial (but majestic) Cleopatra; idealistic Desdemona and pragmatic Cressida; Isabella the would-be nun; the antisocial Kate Minola; witty Beatrice; playful Princess Katherine, each one with her own foibles and strengths. They are real women, just as his men are real men--not perfect, but for the most part essentially good, dealing with the situations they find with great courage and intelligence.

Anyone who really knows Shakespeare's plays will know that his female characters are not stereotypes nor do they expose the female sex to ridicule or contempt. Quite the contrary.

The argument has, of course, been made that Shakespeare was mysogynistic but this argument usually proceeds by condemning all of Shakespeare's broad spectrum of female characters for some reason or other: they are too smart or too stupid, to bold or too timid, too tough or too empathetic, a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose argument. The real assumption underlying this thesis is that since Shakespeare was a 16th century male, he must have been misogynistic. There is no dealing with this kind of circular argument--if you buy the premise there is no further argument possible, but if you actually look at the evidence you will see it tells a different story.

Answer 2

Which play are we talking about here? Taming of the Shrew, perhaps, with its monologue about how women ought to be submissive to men.