“Women of Will” Author’s Note

Posted by Gail M. Burns - May 2010

By studying the female characters in Shakespeare’s plays in the order in which he wrote them, I have been tracing their development and maturation over the span of the canon. Through his relationship with the women he creates, Shakespeare reveals much about his own character and spirit as an artist. Because the women usually survive outside the power structure of society, the look at, maneuver, and reflect upon the workings of that society, not unlike an artist. The feminine sensibilities of intuition, feeling, and relationship parallel those of the artist. So, if you want to know what Shakespeare thinks, listen to the women. Because there are fewer women than men in the plays, the women often have a clear definition of being the ‘other.’ And often they manifest the very souls or spirit of the story.

The women have a specific progression from the fighting warrior women and virgins on the pedestal of the early plays; to the heroines who struggle to find themselves in the middle plays; to the daughters who, through their wholeness, are able to guide their father’s back to life in the late plays. I believe the women reflect the development of Shakespeare’s own psyche. Shakespeare, being one of the greatest artists who ever lived, is able to reveal over a 25-year span his mind to us, and this in turn actually exposes on an archetypal level the development of a universal human psyche.

I have come to understand myself through this study. I too have been immersed in the plays for 35 years, both as a director and as an actress and have an intimate relationship with most of Shakespeare’s writing. In, many ways, my own development as an artist is reflected in the development of his women. First there is the battle, then the negotiation. In order to survive, I personally went underground and now I am coming back from the underground to a new birth – the maiden phoenix if you will. And whole, in a way I never was before.

- Tina Packer

• 
• 
• 
•