چکیده (انگلیسی):

Yoruba belief system has conceptualized the place and power of women, long before Feminist fervour swept through
the European world and beyond. In his oeuvre, Shakespeare also inadvertently alluded to this “power” of the feminine
by recognizing that the combination of womanhood, motherhood and the female principle can, and do have significant
influence on the individual’s destiny. In conceptualizing this female power, descriptive phrases such as “aje”,
“atunnida” “iyami osoronga”, “iyami ajubaba” are used by the Yoruba, who fear, respect and loathe these powers one
and the same time. By creating unforgettable characters who are “not modified by the customs of particular places, or
by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions” (Johnson,1931), Shakespeare’s “women” are, through oral
texts from Ifa, the Yoruba “system of divination, whichalso offers humans the possibility of knowing”(Fatunmbi,1994)
examined, in order to show the relationship between literature and religion, how drama can effectively be utilized as a
cultural material of universal appeal and how beliefs separated by time and clime interconnect, particularly inrelation to
the Yoruba world and Shakespeare’sElizabethan/Jacobean society.