A historian had a really great, in-depth response to this fan who claimed that Shakespeare was trying to say “men ruin everything” with his work. The claim was that because women have more power and agency in his comedies than his tragedies this means that when men are in charge everyone dies, and when women are in charge everyone lives happily ever after. Admittedly, I haven’t read a ton of Shakespeare, but I never really got that vibe from his work. This was a bit of a reach. But anyway the response was really well thought out and well said. “In the immortal words of the bard himself: f*cking annihilated“, haha:
Do you think Shakespeare was saying that “men ruin everything” and if not, what do you think Shakespeare was saying with his work? Let us know in the comments below!
Regarding Shrew, it’s often staged with the genders swapped (I saw one such gender swapped performance at the RSC a few years ago, the programme had a long essay from a gender studies academic on how that was now the only way to get modern audiences to watch it). It lands very differently when Kate is male (as in played as a man not a man playing a woman). In the RSC production I saw Bianca was played much more licentiously than any female Bianca I’ve seen performed.