How did the Elizabethan era influence Shakespeares work?
Shakespeare was a man of his time, as a man who made his living as a playwright he was naturally viewing the era he lived in as his audience. He wrote plays in order to sell seats in the theatres, true, he wrote well and is still appreciated, but his inspiration was, at least in part, commercial. Shakespeare’s women are not all weak characters nor are they inferior, see Portia, Titania, Lady Macbeth – but they are complex characters (part of the appeal of Shakespeare to the ages that followed him is that his characters developed and had depth through the play).
