i am writing an essay in my english class on the role of women in shakespearean england, and was wondering if anyone could help me regarding the roles that women would have played in drama of the time. i.e villains, heroes. not just with shakespeare but any other plays from the period in which shakespeare would have been living. any help whatsoever would be grand 
thank you
JohnI won’t do your homework for you, but I’ll steer you to a few specific female characters in a few speficic Shakespeare plays that you should be able to write something interesting about:
Portia (The Merchant of Venice)
Lady Macbeth (Macbeth)
Cordelia (King Lear)
Katarina (The Taming of the Shrew)
These characters have little or nothing in common, but they’re all Shakespeare heroines and strong characters. Read the plays, figure out what yout think of them, and start writing.
Or you could write about the “boys in drag” characters
Rosalind ( As you Like it)
Violet (Twelth Night)
And theres another woman forced to go into hiding and dresses as a boy. For some dumb ass reason I can’t remember her name or the play but her hubby was named Posthumous. Oddly enough I do believe that Helen Mirren played all three characters back in the early 80s in PBS productions.
I don’t know how old you are a_gherkin but I have always found the underlying theme of women=boys in Shakespeare’s works to be fascinating. Of course, at that time the women WERE played by boys and so it could all be an elaborate in joke that we don’t understand:D I plan to ask Willy first time I see him!
Maybe you should some capital letters in your English class.
As had been pointed out, women played no part in any Elizabethan thetare, it was illegal for them to appear on stage.
Imogen, in the play “Cymbeline”.
Imogen, in Cymbeline.
From the way the OP is phrased, I’m not sure whether a_gherkin is writing about the roles female characters played in drama, or about actual women who were active in the theater world. If it’s the latter, women’s roles in the public theater were limited, but here are a few women you might want to research:
– French and Italian actresses (women did act on the Continent)
– Aristocratic patrons such as Queen Elizabeth and Queen Anne
– Upper-class women who sometimes acted in court masques
– Actors’ wives, who were responsible for the care-and-feeding of apprentices and no doubt did a few other odd jobs for the theater companies
– Elizabeth Cary, the only known female playwright of the period, who wrote The Tragedy of Mariam
– Mary Firth, a London transvestite, petty criminal, and folk hero, who was the subject of a play called The Roaring Girl and made a personal appearance on stage at one performance of this play
On the other hand, if you’re writing about female characters, astorian and Krisfer the Cat have already made some good suggestions. You might also want to take a look at Othello, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, and a few plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries; The Duchess of Malfi and The Roaring Girl would be good choices. Bear in mind, though, that there was a huge variety of female characters on the Renaissance stage. You’re not going to be able to talk about all of them, so picking a particular theme (like Krisfer’s “boys in drag” idea) is probably the best way to go.
Like astorian said, I won’t do your homework for you, but I’ll be happy to point you in a direction. You’ve already gotten some good recommendations for “typical” subjects; analyzing Portia’s “quality of mercy” speech is a staple of English classes.
If you’d like to do something the instructor probably hasn’t seen before, take a look at the character of Volumnia in Coriolanus. I regard this as one of the unfairly overlooked plays; it isn’t the masterpiece that Othello and King Lear and so forth are, but there’s no reason it should be as forgotten as it is. And Volumnia is a great character, one of Shakespeare’s supreme political manipulators, cold and shrewd, with the twist that it’s viewed through the lens of motherhood, unique in his canon. The question for interpreting the play: Is she a villain, or not?
The upside to this is, again, the instructor isn’t likely to have seen it before, so you’ll get brownie points for doing something non-obvious. The downside is, specifically because it’s non-obvious, and because it’s an overlooked play, there isn’t as much scholarship out there from which you can crib — er, I mean, in which you can do research. 