sonnet20:

me at 3pm: yea shakespeare was a progressive dude for his time period but like. he wasn’t THAT great u know?

me at 3am: shylock, despite being known today as an anti-semitic caricature, is used by shakespeare to suggest that if a jewish person is a monster, it is because the christian population surrounding him have treated him as such for his whole life, and it was likely written as a response to christopher marlowe’s jew of malta, which was written by christopher marlowe, and it capitalised on the notoriety of rodrigo lópez by using a jewish character with little to no redeeming qualities (barabas).

othello was the first sympathetic black character to ever be shown in an elizabethan play, and shakespeare made othello very conscious of his race. rather than making him cruel and devilish, like essentially every other prominent black character in theatre (even aaron in titus andronicus, shakespeare’s first tragedy, showing that shakespeare had actively looked into racial biases and worked against his).

when shakespeare’s plays include more women with more ambition and speaking parts, the plays tend to end up as comedies. in plays like julius caesar, titus andronicus, and romeo and juliet, the few women present have little to no power over the tragic situations at hand and, more often than not, end up dead. the few female characters in tragedies with power are usually presented as dark and mysterious figures rather than overbearing and pretentious ones like the dudes, such as lady macbeth and cleopatra. in plays like twelfth night and much ado about nothing, the main women are given higher social statuses among men and they have more lines and influence, so, whether or not shakespeare meant to do this, he definitely thought that women were rational, intelligent, and important to a thriving society.

shakespeare’s gay undertones definitely weren’t for comedic effect since there was no comedic effect that can be found in thise scenes just by making them gayer. shakespeare himself was almost undeniably bisexual and 100% undeniably attracted to men, which is obvious just by taking a quick glance at his sonnets. characters like the antonios (mov and 12n), mercutio, and horatio have had their characters enhanced by many productions by giving them explicitly romantic feelings towards the character(s) they’re implied to have them for, and no script changes need to be made to do so.

tl;dr i’m rambling off the top of my head but i can’t believe that shakespeare ended racism, respected, women, and said gay rights.