In the time `Hamlet' was performed, the Elizabethan audience would not have believed in equality for women, so the play seems far more sexist to us, the modern audience, than it ever would have to the Elizabethans. In our lifetimes women are viewed as equals to men, women can have a job and don't have to take orders from the men in their family. As Paul Thomas says in `Authority and Disorder in Tudor times', `It would seem that the least dignified, that of uncomplicated submission in a brutally male world, was a standard and sensible policy for most females for most of the time'. In Shakespearian times women were viewed only as one of two extremes, whores or virgins. Paul Thomas talks about a bishop in Elizabethan times named Aylmer, who said that one type of woman was `foolish, wanton, witless, without council, rash, proud, worse-minded', amongst...