Hamlet, Thy Name is Woman!

I mean , if you were to present me with a character who ____________________ their father , has a complicated relationship with their mother , needs to talk through every problem , struggles with ____________________ ____________________ , and takes the bulk of a three and a half hour play to do one thing , I'd guess you were talking about a woman .
But in searching for a real answer to that implied question , why does it matter now to see Hamlet played by a woman as a woman ? We first have to go back a bit in time . In Shakespeare's England , the very concept of ____________________ between the sexes would have been unthinkable to most people . England at the dawn of the ____________________ century is a world that exists on the ____________________ . You're noble or you're common . You're Protestant or you're Catholic . You're a man or you're a woman .

And in Shakespeare's England , a woman cannot vote in an election . Her income , her possessions , her property are all legally her husband's . She can be ____________________ or ____________________ with impunity by her husband as long as he does not actually kill her . And it almost goes without saying , she cannot perform on stage .
So in a world in which no two men are born equal , how could we possibly conceive that a woman might possess the intelligence or ____________________ of thought equal to that of a man ? Yet , ____________________ the latter half of the century , a woman occupied the throne of England . By the time she died in ____________________ , Elizabeth I had ruled for over ____________________ years . And it is in this world , ruled by a powerful and rhetorically skilled female ____________________ , that young William Shakespeare begins to write plays .

And the beautiful thing about the ____________________ ____________________ is that it is for everyone . Everybody goes to the theatre . Young , old , rich , poor , noble , common , men and women . And young Will Shakespeare is no ____________________ . He knows that half his audience will be comprised of the fairer ____________________ .
And so , as he matures as a ____________________ , he begins not only to write some of the most ____________________ , ____________________ , ____________________ - ____________________ and intelligent heroines in the Western canon , but to continually blur the lines between the masculine and the feminine , thereby creating characters , both male and female , that refuse to be defined by their ____________________ . They're no longer a king , a soldier , a lover , a ____________________ . They are wonderfully , infuriatingly , bafflingly , undeniably human .
Fast forward 400 years . Multiple waves of ____________________ have washed over us . Voting rights , ____________________ rights , ____________________ rights , female ____________________ , family ____________________ , workplace inequality , sexual harassment , ____________________ , ____________________ - ____________________ , the Bechtel test , the female gaze . Me too . And yet , if life worked like the modern ____________________ theatre , four out of five things you would ever heard would have been spoken by a man .

We tell ourselves that we live in a modern world , and we do , and we don't . Because we still live in a world in which our language , our emotions , our professions , and our ____________________ ____________________ are ____________________ . Despite all our strides forward , women are still grossly underrepresented in ____________________ across business , technology , politics , arts , and ____________________ . We might be able to conceive that a woman could possess the intelligence or complexity of thought equal to that of a man , but our reality doesn't yet reflect that thinking .
So , how do we move from conception to reality ? We have to be able to imagine it , and there is no better place to exercise our imagination than in the theatre . In the ____________________ to ____________________ ____________________ , Shakespeare implores his audience , let us ciphers to this great a comp on your imaginary forces' work , for it is your thoughts that now must deck our kings .

So , why does it matter now to see Hamlet played by a woman as a woman ? It matters for the generation before me , who for most of their formative years , a woman could not sit on a jury , apply for a credit card in her own name , expect equal pay for equal work , get an Ivy League education , or report sexual ____________________ in the workplace . So , what might it mean to them to imagine Hamlet as a woman , to watch her embark on vigilante justice , share an alma mater with Martin Luther , and be both the ____________________ and the ____________________ ?
It matters for the generation after me , who for most of their formative years , have lived in a world where their ____________________ is virtually non - existent , rates of depression and ____________________ have skyrockete d