Women-writes in english literature

W.Shakespeare wrote his works for writing of women .

Shakespeare, along with Cervantes, is, of course, the largest Western European writer of the late Renaissance, in his works he brilliantly reflected this era with all its contradictions. The renaissance, which Engels called "the greatest progressive upheaval that mankind has experienced before," was the era of the flourishing of human thought, freed from the millennia-old blinders and shackles of the medieval, feudal-religious worldview, and at the same time - unprecedented predation and oppression of man by man, the era of the greatest hopes and at the same time the most bitter disappointments. Both of these polar moments were reflected with exceptional force in the works of Shakespeare: the first - mainly in his comedies, the second - in his tragedies; but often they are peculiarly combined or crossed in one and the same of his works, in one and the same of his images. This is because in the process of historical development experienced by the Western European peoples in the period from about the middle of the 15th to the beginning of the 17th century, all these moments were closely and inevitably interconnected.¹

The basis for the flourishing of the arts and sciences, the development of the human personality in its most diverse creative manifestations, the birth of a secular culture that replaced medieval religious scholasticism and mysticism - for all those phenomena that primarily characterize the Renaissance - was a huge upheaval that occurred in the economy , politics and the entire social life of that time. This is the so-called "initial accumulation", which led to the replacement of the feudal system by bourgeois, capitalist relations. In land economy, instead of the old serf labor, monetary relations are established. As a result of the impoverishment of the peasant masses and the resulting appearance of a huge number of cheap labor hands, the first manufactories arose. In connection with the discovery of new countries and new sea routes, foreign trade is gaining the widest scope. At this time, for the first time, national states are created, where the absolute monarchy replacing feudal anarchy, according to Marx, "acts as a civilized center, as the founder of national unity."
Everywhere private initiative triumphs, bold enterprise bordering on unbridled adventurism. As this process develops, the growing bourgeoisie, which at first acted, as it were, in the interests of all those oppressed by the feudal system, begins to reveal its predatory nature more and more, bringing in place of feudal forms of exploitation other, in many respects even more cruel forms of exploitation of man by man. As Marx says, “Where the bourgeoisie has achieved domination, it has destroyed all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has mercilessly severed the motley feudal ties that attached man to his “natural masters”, and left only one connection between people - naked interest, heartless She drowned in the icy water of selfish calculation the sacred impulse of pious dreaminess, chivalrous enthusiasm, petty-bourgeois sentimentality ... In a word, exploitation, covered with religious and political illusions, she replaced with open, shameless, direct, dry exploitation.
In England, this process proceeded in a particularly vivid and distinct form. According to Marx, the history of the expropriation of peasants that took place here in the 15th-16th centuries "is inscribed in the annals of mankind in the language of sword and fire." In an effort to increase the production of wool for the production of cloth, which was the most important item for English export, the landlords drove the peasants from their plots in droves and seized the communal peasant lands, turning them into pastures for sheep. This is what Thomas More had in mind when he wrote in his Utopia at the beginning of the 16th century that in England "sheep eat people." The peasants expropriated in this way were forced to work for a penny for manufacturers, and those who tried to escape from this bondage were declared "tramps", branded with red-hot iron, shackled, etc. She was especially zealous in persecuting these poor people and in establishing a cruel " labor legislation" Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603), whom Marx calls "ultra-bloody".
An essential feature of the capitalist development of England was, despite the age-old antagonism between the nobility and the bourgeoisie, the partial rallying of these two classes in the cause of establishing capitalism and the economic exploitation of the masses. One of the reasons for this was that as a result of the mass extermination of the old feudal nobility during the War of the Scarlet and White Roses (in the second half of the 15th century), a new nobility formed from the inherited possessions of these aristocrats of their distant relatives. As Engels notes, these new aristocrats "descended from such distant relatives that they constituted an entirely new corporation" because "their skills and aspirations were far more bourgeois than feudal." To this we can add that wealthy merchants willingly bought land (especially after the introduction of the Reformation in England around 1535, when requisitioned church lands were put on sale) in order to decorate their money bags with noble coats of arms and acquire noble privileges. Marx summarizes the situation thus created: "The old feudal nobility was swallowed up by the great feudal wars, and the new one was a child of its time, for which money was the power of all forces."²
Hence the partial entanglement of noble and bourgeois elements, characteristic of England at that time, uniting to maintain the absolutist regime in order to exploit the broad masses.
In the ruling circles of society, the features of bourgeois practice and bourgeois views are grafted onto the old feudal basis, which, without changing its nature, has partially transformed itself, adapting itself to new conditions. In other major countries of Western Europe, on the contrary, we observe a greater disunity between the nobility and the bourgeoisie and a much sharper antagonism between them, as a result of which the bourgeoisie at an early stage of "primitive accumulation" often still acts in alliance with the people against the aristocracy and only later fully reveals its predatory, anti-people essence.
How should the progressive minds of different European countries, who led the fight against feudal oppression and medieval obscurantism, react to these phenomena - artists, poets, thinkers, called g_u_m_a_n_i_s_t_a_m_i? Undoubtedly, the humanists were both the product and spokesmen of this great upheaval. They initially acted as the ideologists of the bourgeoisie, which rebelled against the feudal-church, mystical and ascetic way of life of the Middle Ages under the slogan of the free development of the human personality and the protection of its natural rights and needs. Hence - the cheerful and utopian nature of the work of the early humanists, who dreamed of the rapid onset of a just, harmonious, joyful life for all. The most striking examples of this: in Italy (where the process began in the XIV century) - Boccaccio, in France - Rabelais, in England - Thomas More.
However, the illusions of the humanists were bound to dissipate. Bourgeois "freedom", on which they placed such hopes, turned into a new, even more cruel form of exploitation of man by man. And as this became more and more obvious, the humanists began to criticize not so much the vices of feudalism as the cruelty of the new, capitalist system. In practice, however, both of these forms of social evil merged in the minds of the humanists (as they partly merged in reality itself), as a result of which the humanists, unable to understand the new “mysticism” of social relations, lashed out with anger at the “cruel time” who failed to deliver on their promises. Hence the crisis of humanism that is observed in England at the end of the 16th century, and in other countries, like Italy or France, several decades earlier, and which consists, on the one hand, in the rejection of recent illusions, on the other hand, in tragedy. .chesky awareness of the enormity and invincibility of social evil.
Such were the social contradictions and the state of humanistic thought in England at the time when Shakespeare's dramaturgy was conceived and created.
The reign of Henry VIII (1509-1547) can be considered the beginning of absolutism in England and, at the same time, its transition to a new socio-economic system. The introduction of Anglicanism by Henry VIII (circa 1535) freed the country from the heavy and ruinous tutelage of Rome.
The reign of Henry VIII's daughter Elizabeth (1558-1603) was a time of extraordinary rise of the bourgeoisie and the new nobility associated with it, which was expressed in the intensive economic development of the country through the exploitation of the working masses. Under Elizabeth, manufactories rapidly developed, the London Stock Exchange arose, powerful merchant companies were created for trade with the northern European and Mediterranean countries, with the Middle East, with America and India.
The defeat in 1588 of the "invincible Armada" (a huge fleet sent by the Spanish king Philip II to punish "heretical" England) provided England with freedom of navigation and colonial expansion.
However, the end of Elizabeth's reign, marked by extraordinary favoritism and the wide distribution of all kinds of commercial and industrial privileges and monopolies to royal favorites, already marks the beginning of feudal reaction. English absolutism as a form of noble dictatorship ceases to correspond to the state of the country's productive forces, and royal policy begins to evoke ever sharper opposition in a bourgeois-minded parliament, which led half a century later to a bourgeois revolution.³
With even greater force, the feudal reaction manifested itself under the heir of Elizabeth - James I Stuart (1603-1625). An obscurant imbued with the idea of the divine origin of his power, imagining himself a great scientist (he wrote a "treatise" on demonology and was passionately interested in the "trials of witches"), who did not tolerate any objections, he surrounded himself with favorites - mainly nobles brought with them from Scotland which he endowed
all sorts of feudal privileges.
On the other hand, under James I, the party of the Puritans reached its greatest strength, this quintessence of the bourgeois spirit, with their principles of bargaining and accumulation, commercial "honesty", merciless moral strictness towards themselves and others, as well as with their hatred of all luxury and fun - for national holidays, dresses, performances, etc.
These two antagonistic forces turned out to be almost equally hostile to the healthy development of art. The king's painful guardianship over the theater led to the dominance of the courtly-aristocratic direction in it - plays that are elegant in style and outwardly spectacular, but empty in ideological terms. Such are the semi-salon comedies or the ideologically drained tragicomedies of Beaumont and Fletcher, the "demonic" dramas of Webster, Ford and Turner. And next to them we have the petty-bourgeois, moralistic dramaturgy of Heywood and Dekker, replacing the heroic, deeply problematic dramaturgy of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and early Ben-Johnson. The same is observed in the field of poetry, which loses its brilliance and depth, acquiring an entertaining or pretentious character: such, for example, is the "metaphysical" lyrics of Donn, which has now replaced the poetry of the "Elizabethites" rich in creative thoughts - Spencer, Philip Sidney, etc. In all areas of mental creativity under the first Stuarts, humanism, which nourished the art of Shakespeare, quickly comes
into decline.
In such historical conditions, Shakespeare's work developed, reflecting with great force the bright aspirations of the Renaissance, and the crisis of humanism that replaced it - all the highest points of ascent and all the diseases of his age.
Shakespeare's comedies, written in the first period of his work, amaze with their liveliness, sparkling wit, tenderness and subtlety of colors. “In the first act of The Windsor Gossips alone,” Engels wrote to Marx in 1875, “there is more life and movement than in all German literature; only Launs with his dog Kreb (in the comedy “Two Veronians” - A.S. .) is worth more than all the German comedies put together."
Under the cover of seemingly thoughtless fun, which is an expression of the cheerfulness characteristic of the Renaissance, Shakespeare here and there touches upon great social problems and conflicts.
One of Shakespeare's earliest comedies, The Taming of the Shrew, as far as its "morality" is concerned, has more than once confused commentators. Some tried to see in the play a defense of the medieval principle of unconditional subordination of a woman to a man, others considered it simply as a joke, devoid of ideological content. Both points of view separate Shakespeare's work from the epoch that found its vivid reflection in it. The hero of the comedy Petruchio is a typical man of modern times, brave, free from prejudices, full of youthful vigor. He longs for struggle, success, wealth, female love - and meets a worthy opponent. Characteristically, Shakespeare, while reproducing in the image of Katharina the traditional type of a grumpy woman from medieval stories, nevertheless freed him from all repulsive traits, portraying the "obstinacy" of his heroine as a desire to protect her human rights and dignity. By forcing Katharina to finally humble herself before Petruchio, Shakespeare shares the generally accepted opinion in his era that the husband should be the head of the family. But at the same time, by showing the wealth of Katarina's full-blooded, gifted nature, he seems to emphasize the humanistic idea of the inner equivalence of women and men.⁴
The comedy "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is a defense of the rights of free, self-determined love, which defeats despotic paternal power. The action unfolds in the bosom of nature, the spell of which favors lovers. Developing in this play the court genre of "masks" ( decorative fantasy plays), Shakespeare democratizes it, replacing the cold figures of ancient deities with living images of English folk beliefs (fairies and elves, naughty Peck), personifying the good forces of nature.
In The Merchant of Venice, two worlds are opposed to one another: the world of joy, beauty, friendship, spiritual generosity (Antonio, Bassanio and Portia with their entourage) and the world of money-grubbing, avarice, malice (Shylock and his friends). The generous merchant Antonio, always ready to help his friends and lending money without interest, embodies Shakespeare's dream of an ideal of an active and at the same time humanist, receptive to the "music of the heavenly spheres" (V act), which is inaccessible to the dark soul of Shylock.