I love exploring Shakespeare's portrayals of his women. Excerpt from Radical  SHakespeare

'SHAKESPEARE’S RAUNCHY WOMEN
The empowering of female transvestitism, lesbian erotic desire, wives demanding an end to the male sexual double standard, a condemnation of the rapist who says ‘she asked for it’, an angry denunciation of rape as a weapon of war, fifteen ways to tell a man he’s useless at f***ing…

We ‘don’t know what Shakespeare really thought about anything’? I don’t think so.

The original female F***-You fashion?
They were the subject of hysterical, puritanical rage by the moral police force of Shakespeare’s time who spent their time scribbling pamphlets in a paroxysm of indignation against women who refused to conform to how men wanted them to look and behave.

These were the women who dared to dress as they liked, in outfits that screamed ‘F***-You’.
But what they wore might surprise you.
They strutted the streets in men’s clothes. Not because they wanted to look like men, but because they saw cross-dressing as empowering, a bid for freedom from the rules laid down for them by men. It was a way of putting up two fingers to the establishment, and saying ‘I have the sexual freedom to do what I like’.

There is an astonishing description in Shakespeare’s time, by a man who was outraged at the sight of women dressed in male attire with their tops undone, flaunting their female attributes. They wore, he wrote, ‘the loose, lascivious civil embracement of a French doublet being all but unbuttoned to entice (i.e. to reveal their breasts), [with]…most ruffianly short hair, and [wearing] a sword’.

A notorious female transvestite of the time was Mary Frith, known as Moll Cutpurse and the subject of a play by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker called The Roaring Girl.'...
- Moll Cutpurse. Helen Mirren as Moll Cutpurse.