Ankita Singh

Abstract – Rabindranath Tagore, arguably India’s greatest poet and philosopher, has authored several stories, dramas and novels over the course of his life. In his works, Tagore often highlighted the plight of women in the 19th and 20th centuries. A majority of it has featured assertive female protagonists expressive of their emotions and desires and yet cast in conventional roles such as a wife or a lover. Tagore believed that motherhood and wifehood were just small segments of a woman’s being and that there were more important roles to play in the household. However Shakespeare depicts a different illustration. His works have shown women challenge the traditional gender roles, in a society where women did not enjoy political, economic or social status. A simple instance to strengthen the argument is stage time. Female characters have lesser than half the number of lines as their male counterparts. Rosalind from As You Like It has the longest female role, yet only speaks 721 lines. Hamlet on the other hand plays the longest male role speaking over 1500 lines. In the subsequent sections of the paper, I have analysed the most influential female characters and drawn direct comparisons between the same.