4. Why does the author include the paragraph about widows (paragraph 6)?
To illustrate the differences between married and widowed women
To reinforce the idea that women did not usually live without a man
To prove that women were better off as widows
To show that women could not survive without a man
(Passage:
Society in Shakespeare’s time was quite strictly divided by class. The very richest people were the lords
and ladies – the nobility. The nobles were the ruling class, influencing what the monarch did, as well as
owning large areas of land themselves. Just below them were the gentry, who were rich enough to live off
their own land, but did not have titles. Most of Shakespeare’s plays deal with kings or the nobility, although
what affects them affects the lower classes too, like the fighting servants at the beginning of Romeo and
Juliet.
The middle classes included yeomen, merchants and craftsmen. They were relatively well off and their
sons would have gone to school and learnt to read and write. Shakespeare comes from this class – his
father was a glove-maker. The lower class worked as servants or as labourers on farms.
The poor were the responsibility of each parish. Parliament passed new Poor Laws which meant that
anyone who was poor but able to work would be sent to a poor house to earn their keep. The poor were
not allowed to leave their parish – if they did they were described as ‘vagabonds’ and punished. There is
rarely a character from this class in a Shakespeare play.
Some plays cover all the classes: in A Midsummer Night’s Dream we see the rulers (the Duke and his
bride), the nobility (the two couples lost in the woods) and the craftsmen (the rude mechanicals who put on
the play). The lower classes in the plays are often the butt of the jokes, or are shown as stupid or villains –
think of the Watch in Much Ado About Nothing who always use exactly the wrong word.

In Elizabethan times women belonged to their fathers (or their brothers if their father died), and then to their
husbands. Women could not own property of their own. This is one of the reasons Queen Elizabeth never
married – she did not want to give up her power to a man.
The only exceptions were widows – women whose husbands had died. A widow was in charge of her own
life and property, but would be likely to marry again to find someone to protect her and to be the legal
guardian to her children.
Women were allowed to marry from the age of 12 in Shakespeare’s time, but often only women from
wealthy families would marry so young. In the play Romeo and Juliet, Juliet is 13, but her mother says by
that age she was already married with a child. Many marriages were arranged for the good of the family
and small children might be ‘betrothed’ to each other in order to join the families together before they were
old enough to get married. Many women did not marry until their mid-20s. Men had to be able to support a
household when they married.
Women were not allowed on the stage. All the female parts in plays at the time were played by boys whose
voices hadn’t broken yet – the apprentices. In several of the plays the female characters disguise
themselves as men – so the audience would have seen a man pretending to be a woman pretending to be
a man. This happens in Twelfth Night, As You Like It and The Merchant of Venice.)