Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare | Lynda E. Boose (essay date 1982)
Lynda E. Boose (essay date 1982)
SOURCE: 'The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare," in PMLA, Vol. 97, No. 3, May, 1982, pp. 325-47.
[Here, Boose explores the phases of the marriage ceremony—separation, transition, and reincorporation—as a pattern for the father-daughter relationship.]
The aristocratic family of Shakespeare's England was, according to social historian Lawrence Stone, "patrilinear, primogenitural, and patriarchal." Parent-child relations were in general remote and formal, singularly lacking in affective bonds and governed solely by a paternal authoritarianism through which the "husband and father lorded it over his wife and children with the quasi-authority of a despot" (Crisis 271). Stone characterizes the society of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as one in which "a majority of individuals . . . found it very difficult to establish close emotional ties to any other person"...
[The entire page is 18166 words long]
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