{"id":209,"date":"2018-04-17T07:02:28","date_gmt":"2018-04-17T06:02:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/sel3392-agnes-de-castro\/?page_id=209"},"modified":"2018-06-21T16:23:04","modified_gmt":"2018-06-21T15:23:04","slug":"girl-power-the-women-of-agnes-de-castro","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/sel3392-agnes-de-castro\/girl-power-the-women-of-agnes-de-castro\/","title":{"rendered":"Girl Power – The Women of Agnes de Castro"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Shannon Cowgill<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

Agnes de Castro<\/i> is a play in which women hold all the power. Without women, none of the major events of the play would even happen. Okay\u2026To put it another way, the plot is all set in motion because of Elvira\u2019s inner green-eyed goddess, but with great power doesn\u2019t necessarily come great morality!<\/p>\n

As well as driving the plot, Elvira is able to manipulate the men around her into doing and thinking what she wants. Elvira\u2019s power comes from identifying the weakness in others: she uses Constantia\u2019s insecurity to convince her of Agnes\u2019s back-stabbery, she uses the king\u2019s love for his daughter to convince him of Agnes\u2019s guilt, and she uses Alvaro\u2019s love for Agnes to convince him to get revenge on the prince.<\/p>\n

All in all, she\u2019s pretty powerful.<\/p>\n

The power imbalance in the play is obvious in the amount of stage time and dialogue given to characters. The fairer sex are given more than half the dialogue in the play between just four female characters: God knows we love to chat! Even when the male characters do occasionally grace us with their presence, all they want to talk about is the girls anyway, thus maintaining a female presence on stage even when there isn\u2019t a woman physically there. If there was a Bechdel test<\/span> for men, Trotter\u2019s play definitely wouldn\u2019t pass it!<\/p>\n

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\"Pie<\/p>\n

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O.T.T: Sterotypes in the Play<\/b><\/p>\n

The one disappointing thing about Trotter\u2019s women is that they are so stereotypical. Trotter\u2019s characters are laid out in extremes with \u2018virtue, temperance and tenderness at one extreme [\u2026] power and violence at the other.’[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

These extremes take the form of Elvira and Agnes, our chalk and cheese. Agnes and Elvira are the Jekyll and Hyde of the play:<\/p>\n