Gender in Shakespeare's plays "The Winter's Tale" and "The Taming of the Shrew" and their modern re-writings

The way individuals position themselves within the social life correlates with the social codes of cultures they were born or reside in. There is a parallelism between the sex inequality in societies in which the patriarchal ideology is dominant and the way individuals behave in line with the attributed gender roles. In broad strokes, women and men are exercised control to make them behave in a specific way and this very control is defined by patriarchy. People who do not possess the expected qualities are marginalized. In this study, the plays The Taming of the Shrew and The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare and their modern re-writings, namely, Vinegar Girl and The Gap of Time have been analyzed comparatively with a perspective on gender in order to show the importance of feminist re-writings in eliminating the passivity imposed on women by patriarchy in literature. In this sense, analyzing the characters in the plays and comparing them with the ones in re-writings composed the essence of this study while the historical frame of the source texts was also taken into account. While concepts such as ideology, deconstruction, re-writing were emphasized, their relations with gender roles were dwelt upon via the comparative analysis of the afore-mentioned literary works. These plays have been chosen because not only do they reflect the gender perception of their time but also their re-writings include the inequality between men and women together with various other forms of inequality like economical, racial and sexual identity with a feminist awareness; gender issue is the main focus of the study. Keywords: Ideology, Patriarchy, Gender, Inequality, Re-writing, Literature