Catherine Hu

  

Volume 9 | Issue IV | December 2025

Harrow International School Hong Kong ’26

Hong Kong SAR, China

  

My fascination with Shakespeare’s gender politics began with Goblin: Macbeth at Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach, where the director chose to retell the great Scottish tragedy with three androgynous goblins, simultaneously tackling issues like actor anonymity while addressing gender roles in Renaissance plays. This sparked an interest in Renaissance hierarchies. When I started my A-Level studies, my interest in this area was further nurtured by my teacher introducing me to the “Proto-feminism” debate surrounding Shakespeare’s works: could his works, shaped by Elizabethan thought, genuinely prefigure modern feminist thought? Though initially skeptical—my prior research on Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar for my EPQ (an independent graded research project) had steeped me in 20th-century feminism—further reading struck me with how the gender tensions in Shakespeare’s works mirrored contemporary struggles. My paper holds a microscope to two comedies that are critical to the debate: Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It. I argue that marriage becomes a subversive tool. In the Renaissance, it was seen as the patriarchy’s bedrock, yet it codifies and subverts Renaissance gender roles at the same time. Contextualising these comedies within Renaissance marriage laws and Pyrrhonian skepticism, I demonstrate how the theatrical subversion of marriage not only upturned gender dynamics but also the social order of Renaissance society. When not dissecting early modern paradoxes, I find joy listening to and playing jazz, searching for the best food spots around my city, and writing poetry for my blog, The Magpie Blog.