Title: ‘Vanity (Frailty), Thy Name Is Woman’ - How Women Look For Power In All The Wrong Places|Uncle Guido's Facts
Headings: ‘Vanity (Frailty), Thy Name Is Woman’ - How Women Look For Power In All The Wrong Places
Sunday, July 5, 2015
‘Vanity (Frailty), Thy Name Is Woman’ - How Women Look For Power In All The Wrong Places

Content: www.doctormacro.com
The question of how Shakespeare’s ‘frailty’ got transposed into ‘vanity’ is an unanswered question. Some have suggested that Dante Gabriel Rossetti is responsible: Shakespeare never wrote the line "Vanity, thy name is woman." Hamlet's line reads, "Frailty, thy name is woman," in relation to his mother's hasty marriage to Claudius after the King's death. But upon looking at Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Lady Lilith, it is impossible not to conjure up Shakespeare's misquoted line. Lady Lilith sensuously reclines in a luxuriant, though decidedly ambiguous, environment. Rossetti's placement of a mirror behind Lilith, reflecting a lush tree in the exterior, complicates the scene both visually and symbolically as the viewer struggles to discern between interiority and exteriority. Yet the focus of the painting is most certainly Lady Lilith herself. She is the consummate image of sensuality and beauty. With heavy-lidded eyes she gazes at herself in the mirror, completely absorbed in her own image ( www.victorianweb.org)
Why Lilith so many centuries after Shakespeare?