During the Elizabethan era, women were considered to be inferior to men. All women had the same job: to entirely submit themselves to a man. In William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, he displays the women in Hamlet’s life as objects that are submissive to the men in their lives, whether it is their husband, father, or brother. Shakespeare presents women as dependent, simple-minded, sexual, feeble creatures in his works and that representation displays how he and society viewed women during a period in time where men were the elite of mankind. Gertrude and Ophelia, the main and only women in Hamlet, are the perfect example of how Shakespeare viewed women. Because Gertrude is so dependent on men, she married her brother-in-law immediately after her…show more content… Everything women were/were not allowed to do was determined by men because they were men’s possessions. According to men, women did not have a purpose other than to tend to the household. So they should know how to keep their home in order and know their way around the kitchen. No woman, no matter the social class, could to college because if she did she would have to much education. That would be a problem because being smart and knowledgeable was considered masculine during this time period. “The wealthy women were allowed to have an education, but only in the things women should learn about such as ancient languages and ancient literature, classical and biblical. Men were also afraid that the “chaste young women would compromise their virtue by reading the racy tales of Ovid or equally risqué medieval romances”” (Papp 2-3). The only thing that was worse than being an unchaste women was being a single women. “Single women might spend their life in a convent or nunnery and the only other choice for lower class women was domestic service. Being married was a lower class Elizabethan woman’s biggest dream” (Alchin 1). With having to do what men said, say what me wanted them to say, or look how men wanted them to look, those women knew that their appearance was