IndexIntroductionThe theme of social class in Shakespearean dramaConclusionReferencesIntroductionWilliam Shakespeare was an English poet, playwright and actor. He had one of the greatest influences in the world, not only in English-speaking countries but in the entire world. He had his own vision and perspective of society and the world. In his works, Shakespeare demonstrates the reality of his time. Reading and analyzing his works provides an in-depth understanding of 16th-17th century England, its culture, language, people, theater and society, especially the issue of social class. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The term social class is familiar to most people because it is most often used as a lens through which we view other cultures and our own culture. Shakespeare, on the other hand, uses concepts of social class largely according to a strict hierarchical demarcation. The reason for this is that the characters in Shakespeare's play come from different social classes. In his works, Shakespeare has kings, nobles, workers, gentlemen, beggars and small landowners. He combines upper and lower classes because he is passionate about social differentiation. This social differentiation shows the social position in which the characters in Shakespeare's work live. This article will consider social constructions and class dynamics in Shakespearean drama based on his works. The Theme of Social Class in Shakespearean Drama Historians believe that the verbal communication of social class connections applied to the social formations of early modern England. . Indeed, “class” in a nineteenth-century analytical category was theoretically unavailable to English, Stuart, and Tudor citizens. But their community vocabularies, which consisted of educational qualifications or classes based on social status while insisting on income and employment, indicate a system that implies social inequality and the idea of ​​class would be eloquent. In their economic classification, classes can be assumed to have existed because of the welfare states of the bourgeoisie, but their conceptual social intellect can be traced back to social organization based on unequal distribution of power, property and privilege. Shakespeare's concern with the structure of society is evident through various tragedies and even novels. An important topic related to social class has emphasized over aristocrats and underclasses, the frequency with which Shakespeare reverses class hierarchies for dramatic effect. Some other areas of interest on the topic of social class concern the origins of social divisions, middle classes, social rank and language in Shakespeare's work. While most scholars have studied origins and class relations, other literary scholars provide insights into the topics as perceived by Shakespeare. Honor is always redefined in whatever context it appears. Ideas about honor often arise from a universal need among social beings to regulate connections between the individual and the group. Such regulations are equally appropriate, as they not only ensure group cohesion but also protect the individual from ostracism or victimization. While in most cases animals deal with these problems through relatively direct impulses, our closest primate relatives appear to have elementary social rules or expectations about the behavior of other people, the violation of which fundamentally leads to hostility within the group. Indetail, John Alvis Shakespeare's Understanding Honor provides a profound analysis of the idea of ​​honor in plays. He particularly discusses the characters in Shakespeare's text making them the driving force of the plays. In his text, Alvis considers characters such as Hal, Hamlet, Hal, Macbeth and Prospero as a reflection of a broader experience of human beings and as an edramatic repository of fundamental ethical conflicts. Alvis says his intention is to stimulate American youth to "recover their founder's sense of choosing the merit of honor" (Alvis 37). Analyzing Roman plays, along with Hamlet, Lucretia, and the Histories, he proposes that Shakespeare made a negotiation between Roman republican honor and the Christian celebration of passive virtue. Evidently, Alvis's personal emotional investment is much more in Roman republican honor than in the celebration of Christian virtue, but he attempts to trace the way in which Shakespeare in his Roman sequences traces the rise and fall of the republican ideal , and offers a more ambiguous vision. reading of Henry V that one might expect. It is symptomatic of the politics of the book that, even though Lucrece is the most unambiguously praised figure in the text, the disparity between male and female honor is barely considered. David Berkeley's Blood Will Tell in Shakespeare's Plays is a specific link to Alvis's text because it provides a theoretical division between these characters, where he classifies the noble and the lowly based on hereditary ideas. According to Berkeley's interpretation, the characters in Shakespeare's play focus on a theory that various rations of blood, phlegm, and other natural substances of the body determine the disposition of people (Berkeley 12). For Berkeley, Shakespeare uses this pattern on his characters based on aristocratic birth. Titus Andronicus is undoubtedly one of the works in Shakespeare's canon that arouses much curiosity. The show reveals murder, rape, mutilation and even cannibalism. The violence is so extreme that most people have attempted to make sense of its intentions. Of importance in this play, however, is George Peele's use of language in the first scene. In the first 482 lines, he uses the different root of the word "honor": honor, honor, honorable, honored, dishonor, disgrace, which is explicitly referenced in nearly thirteen lines. Furthermore, there is no character in the same scene who does not refer to honor at least once, and none of them express doubts about the significance of its validity. The way honor is represented therefore echoes the Elizabethan perception of Rome as a city of culture in which honor was one of the most important determining factors in human life. Consequently, honor was evidently an integral part of life in modern England. Honor not only denoted strictly interpersonal or social attributes such as social rank, status, fame, esteem, good name, among others, but also personality attributes such as mental elevation or virtue. It was used not only to recognize a person's status in society, but also to characterize his personality in a positive way, particularly among the noble classes that Shakespeare often portrays in his works. In Shakespeare's time, noble and gentle were almost interchangeable words and defined a dominant upper class made up of nearly four or five percent of the population in what social historian Peter Laslett has described as a single-class society. Laslett in The World We Have Lost offers an important chapter on social classes by analyzing the England that Shakespeare knew. What he considered, however, is a culture in which social status or "place" wasfirmly established and where one's place governed one's interaction with other people. In view of the concept of nobility, Laslett notes that in Shakespeare, "it seems to have been true that the gap between those within and those outside the dominant group was great compared to any order of the dominant group (Laslett 45 )." Furthermore, at that time, there were almost fifty-five noble families in England. Wealth was often found among the nobles, but they lacked noble titles. Even so, they were educated and respected, most of them having never had a real job except knights and squires. The wake of the 17th century also saw the rise of a new social class known as the middle class. During this period the merchants and traders were mostly members of the society. These community members were considered not only wealthy but also educated and were also powerful. For example, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, there are two leaders: the Fords and the Pages of a middle-class family. Shakespeare connects the city of Windsor, which he chooses as the setting and presence of the monarchy and the middle class. Since Fenton and Falstaff are featured in the play, the middle class people of this town face a social class challenge. This aristocracy not only helps the city's middle class define and assert themselves, but also foreigners. It is unclear whether Shakespeare's play is set in Venice, Rome or elsewhere, but the way these characters are set reflects the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. England based on the classification of social classes. In his linguistic interpretation, Ralph Berry examines the social order of characters in Shakespeare's work. His focus is on the similarities between the social structures of Rome and Shakespeare's England, focusing primarily on the panoramic view of society evident in English stories and the connection between sex and class in Shakespeare's drama. Evidently, there is a rich source of information in Shakespeare's drama of social relations that tends to disrupt or reverse the social order. In terms of social constructions, Shakespeare's works raise questions about the model of male and female representation, based on the characteristics of each gender. and the way in which each gender possesses feminine and masculine qualities and behaviors inherent to the nature and power of hegemonic patriarchy. For Shakespeare and Renaissance society, the role of women represented virtues that had a relationship with men. Importantly, gender attributes had social constructions. Female roles are certainly written into Shakespeare's work, but male actors were used to play female roles instead. Women are prescribed but were not presented on stage; they were instead performed in the acting tradition of popular Elizabethan theatre. Talking about women in Shakespeare's work therefore means talking about women as a historical topic, but only for the representation of women offered by commercial theaters. In other words, there are no women but rather men playing the female role. Although kings and clowns met on the stage of the English Renaissance, kings and clowns were not there, but only actors playing their parts. For this reason the class position appears on the Shakespearean scene as women. Renaissance cross-dressing generally crossed class and gender lines. Just as the Renaissance defined female roles, it clearly delegated male behaviors (Watson 206). Society was constituted by patriarchy. This patriarchal society is shown in a glimpse in works such as Romeo and Juliet whileLord Capulet exercises his power. Evidently the male was given a role to play, just as the female was given a lesser role. The woman is shown to reside in her father's house like Juliet does or in her husband's house like Lady Macbeth. Evidently, in Macbeth, Lady Macbeth is only seen inside the fortress of Inverness, and she is responsible for the preparations for the arrival of the King. This female responsibility is underlined by Lord Capulet when, awaiting the wedding of Paris and Juliet , makes an announcement that the men's duty was to engage in public affairs such as leadership or politics, make decisions, and ensure that events move forward. Their life, according to Capulet's interpretation, was destined for the fulfillment of duties, aggression and self-satisfaction. Women, on the other hand, had to take on passive duties. For example, when the play begins with Romeo and Juliet, the boys wander the streets of Verona and make unhelpful comments about the girls while Sampson, a servant of Capulet, remarks that since the women are weaker, he will place the handmaids with their backs to wall. The passage is typical of the stereotype of Renaissance thought that women are the weakest entity. Specific characteristics had connections with the male and others with the female. Shakespeare reflects the difference of this Renaissance period and the connection between femininity and masculinity, a combination evident in the female monarchy of Shakespeare's time. Women have been particularly subjected to such limiting roles. Obviously, a very open dialogue about gender roles should be considered. The study of gender classification in Shakespeare's work serves as a driving vehicle towards this debate. Throughout Shakespeare's work, personality is a function of social status, and the emptiness of the aristocratic personality is a function of the lack of opposition the aristocracy experiences as a class, of the absence of difficulty in delineating social boundaries. The triumph over deception that marks the harmonious conclusions of Shakespeare's comedies is at the same time a trump card with respect to the challenge to the social order. Likewise, epistemology turns out to be thematically important in Shakespeare's tragedies as the protagonist's knowledge concerns his situation within society which is constantly challenged by social constructions. In Shakespeare's Much Ado the challenges of the social order are deliberately excluded as buffoonery and cardboard villainy. , when considering the dramatic action, because no social superior accepts Don John's "honor" in place of the honor of Leonato's deposed family, nor allows the perception of Dogberry as competent in place of his own failures. Don John and Dogberry lead the play, but their actions have no influence on the character qualities of the protagonists. The oppositions through which character is created are neither social order and its anthesis, nor mere appearance and reality, but rather, involve the distinct socially accepted aristocratic standards against which appearances are considered and whose recognition in marriage is the play's final statement based on aristocratic hegemony. Conclusion In this idealized version of what dramatic conflict entails, Shakespeare presents a clear dramatic statement of the challenges of a ruling class attempting to insulate itself from traditions built on scale of values ​​and loss of quality. Probably, this sense of loss is the "nothingness" of the title of this work. Overall, class difference affects every single relationship in Shakespeare's works. Even the apparent equality would never remain so because every Englishman knew his own, 24, 101-121.&)