SOURCE: “Fathering Herself: A Source Study of Shakespeare's Feminism,” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 3, Fall, 1998, pp. 269-90.

[In the following essay, McEachern examines differences in Much Ado about Nothing and King Lear as compared to their original sources and contends that the changes Shakespeare made reflect his questioning of patriarchal authority and his desire to examine its root causes.]

The collaboration of critical methods suggested by the title of this essay might appear a rather unlikely, even forced, proposition. Source study and feminism are a strange pair: the first is largely interested in finding in Shakespeare verbal echoes of earlier texts, the second committed to discovering in Shakespeare a foreshadowing of particular political identities. Certainly, in considering “Shakespeare's feminism” (a debatable, and surely anachronistic, construction), the prospect of looking to Shakespeare's sources for the origins of any political understanding of “the woman's part” seems to offer little promise; behind the critical assertion that finds Shakespeare's portrayals of women remarkable lies the unarticulated suspicion of the rare if not unprecedented quality of his cultural voice. In other words, the assumption of Shakespeare's uniqueness presupposes a differentiating context, and it is in relationship to the conception of source as cultural context that I would like to consider Shakespeare. Traditionally the relationship between Shakespeare and his literary sources, which source study examines, has been imagined as linear and determinative, an empirical matter of subtractions and additions, in which Shakespeare finds and rejects or accepts details of plot structure, character, or style. I would like to re-imagine this relationship less as a transference of formal ingredients, with sources as sites of mere borrowings, than as a culturally determined reading by Shakespeare of contexts that he found provocative—or not provocative enough.

Curiously it is this sense of a source as merely a site of borrowing that feminist criticism has unwittingly adopted in its effort to stake some ideologically consistent claim to Shakespeare. Until recently, feminist criticism of Shakespeare divided itself—and Shakespeare—into two seemingly incompatible ideological camps. Pioneering feminist forays into Shakespeare's canon, while seeking to “compensate for the bias in a critical tradition that has tended to emphasize male characters, male themes, and male fantasies” as well as to develop a uniquely feminist criticism capable of searching out “the woman's part,” discovered in Shakespeare an apparent commitment to the portrayal of liberated female characters, strong in voice and action.¹ Shakespeare here becomes a proto-feminist, testifying either to the Renaissance's general cultural emancipation of women, or to Shakespeare's own ahistorical transcendent genius, his freedom from his culture's assumptions.

Subsequent feminist approaches, confronted by a revision of the Burckhardtian thesis of the Renaissance emancipation of women, rejected this image as a naive idealization of Shakespeare, preferring instead to concentrate on exposing the patriarchal assumptions and structures that govern his drama and marginalize or contain its female energies.² Shakespeare here appears as “the patriarchal bard,” an early modern author incapable of subverting patriarchal structures, able only to promulgate and reinforce a cultural ideology invested in subordinating women: as Kathleen McLuskie puts it, “Feminism cannot simply take ‘the woman's part’ when that part has been so morally loaded and theatrically circumscribed.”³ For these critics, Shakespeare is not free of his culture, but locked within it, its collaborator.

Advocates of both a proto-feminist and a patriarchal Shakespeare have posited a mimetic/deterministic relationship between art and society—the text is either an innocent mirror of cultural process or the no-less-idealized agent of patriarchal ideology. Most proto-feminist advocates, chiefly “psychosexual” in their approach to “the aesthetic, historical, and genre contexts”⁴ of a play, have found in Shakespeare's women, particularly in the comedies, evidence of his culture's incipient challenge to the patriarchy that, according to their reading, the text mirrors. Advocates of patriarchal Shakespeare, aligning themselves with the historical revisionism that ascribes to the Renaissance an increased suppression of women, have pointed to inconsistencies between the “feminist Shakespeare” and feminist ideology: again to quote McLuskie, “when a feminist accepts the narrative, theatrical and intellectual pleasures of this text she does so in male terms and not as part of the locus of feminist critical activity.”⁵ Critics who find Shakespeare less subversive than supportive of patriarchal culture, especially in the tragedies, sharpen the focus of their feminist critique and consider how best to subvert the power of the patriarchal structures he reproduces. Both approaches attempt to gauge Shakespeare's relationship to his culture (to which they seem to attribute a monolithic coherence), yet the conflict itself seems to posit either an ideologically inconsistent or incoherent text.

More recent feminists have sought to escape the proto-feminist/patriarchal polarity, and have turned to an investigation of the often contradictory, competing play of cultural texts that generates it. In complicating the mimetic model of literary genesis, exploring the interconnections of text and context, and revealing the discrepancies between various cultural definitions of the woman's place, such work has revealed patriarchy to be hardly a monolithic, coherent entity speaking with one—either liberating or oppressive—voice, but composed of, indeed founded in, ideological contradictions, inconsistencies, and incongruities.⁶ As a consequence, it would appear that the woman's part, and the man's, are hardly essential and stable categories of identity but contestable and changeable social constructs. Without themselves historicizing notions of gender, these critics have made manifest and urgent the necessity of doing so. They have also made apparent the need for feminism to foreground and further problematize the relationship of text to context, moving beyond the mimetic model of literary production congruent with essentialism.

The construction of social categories and cultural contexts is of interest not only to feminists but also, of course, to the critical movement in Renaissance studies known as new historicism; certainly the resolution of the polarity that some feminisms pursue would be of interest to new historicists, who are concerned with the dynamic that exists between cultural ideology and cultural fictions—with, in Jonathan Dollimore's words, “the interaction between State power and cultural forms.”⁷ Both critical schools share an understanding of literature as a social text. Yet if the great discovery of feminism may be that the personal is political, and that power operates even—if not foremost—on the level of the family, new historicism has tended to consider gender primarily in relation to the court. New historicism, however, does move beyond a strictly mimetic version of the text-context relationship to offer a more comprehensive (if not fully articulated) sense of a text's location in history; and it is this commitment to history from which feminism might profit. If in new historicism's often nostalgic fantasy of a totalized culture, change (indeed history, oddly enough) seems foreclosed, feminism's construction of gender from ego-psychology seems itself unresponsive to the reality of historical change.

To work towards an historicized notion of gender, to gauge progress and difference in how we envision ourselves as gendered subjects, would, I suggest, create a feminism more responsive to the historically specific ideological operations of a text and would also point the way toward our understanding a Renaissance culture in which the subversive impulse of a play (or a person) is not always re-subjugated to the orthodoxy of power, but is instead an agent of change. At the same time, the conception of a text as involved in the production of historical differences rather than in the unwitting or complicit replication of ideology not only leaves behind the mimetic model of literary production (and the delimiting conception of a source) but points to the possibility of a literary text as a significant intervention into history. If the problematic of Shakespeare's relationship to patriarchy—and of a feminist's relationship to Shakespeare—is to be clarified, Shakespeare's relationship to his cultural context must first be made the problem.

I propose to investigate Renaissance patriarchy through a study of fathers and daughters, using both Shakespeare's literary fathers and those fathers and daughters that he presents in his plays. Instead of constructing a deterministic, linear, and purely literary transaction between Shakespeare and his pre-texts, I wish to examine Shakespeare as reading, in his sources, his culture. Literary forebears here are not merely sources of plot and character, but themselves cultural inscriptions and registers of a patriarchal ideology. In studying Shakespeare's investigation of cultural documents, I wish to inquire into the causality and logic that motivates his reaction to their assumptions, a reaction that I see as historicizing both patriarchy and the roles of individuals within it. In a source study—a traditional, even patriarchal, critical method—we can take the measure of Shakespeare's difference from his patriarchal culture in his examination of it.

Shakespeare's experience and understanding of the pressures that patriarchy exerts upon its members enabled him to write plays that interrogate those same patriarchal systems. He developed this understanding by engaging with his artistic fathers and the cultural authority they represent and embody. In order to empower his own writing, Shakespeare rebels against the archetypes he inherits. His refusal to replicate the assumptions of patriarchy—while obviously not part of any specifically feminist agenda—originates in his inquiry into the nature of power, particularly as it is manifested in the imitative pressures of patriarchy. In revising his sources he recasts and demystifies the role of the father, and, mimicking the action he presents, Shakespeare, in the rebellious but also revisionary act of rewriting, questions the power of fathers, a power that demands replication for the perpetuation of the patriarchal system.

In the plays of Shakespeare that depict a father-daughter relationship, the issue of a woman's relationship to patriarchy inevitably gains a special kind of prominence. Marriage becomes the focal point. As Gayle Rubin's analysis in “The Traffic in Women” demonstrates, marriage enacts the exogamous valuing of women and thus exposes the patriarchal forms by which women are controlled: “If it is women who are being transacted, then it is the men who give and take them who are linked, the woman being a conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it.”⁸ Needless to say, the emotional needs of individuals are not always congruent with the demands of a political system constituted in and by exogamy. The marriage of a daughter is a difficult moment for a father, especially if he lacks a wife. He must move from the center of his daughter's world to the circumference and must watch another take his place. Lynda E. Boose points out that marriage is inherently subversive of a father's authority in requiring that the daughter leave the father's control: “If she is classified as the family's most expendable member, it may be because she is actually its least retainable. To an institution that fears loss, the daughter's presence constitutes a threat to its maintenance of closed boundaries.”⁹ A daughter's departure through marriage marks the end of paternal control, although a measure of control persists in the father's choice of his daughter's husband; and Boose suggests the emotional logic behind a father's relation to his daughter's marital partner: “Faced with the inexorable loss of something emotionally valued, individuals need to devise some way to reimagine loss as benefit or at least equal exchange. Losing one's daughter through an exchange that the father controls circumvents her ability ever to choose another man over him. …”¹⁰ For Rubin, exogamy creates a political order among men; for Boose, exogamy entails a loss of paternal authority that demands an elaborate compensation.

At the heart of patriarchy is the conflict between the emotional integrity of the family and the demands of a political order that requires the severing of filial bonds in order to perpetuate itself. Patriarchy is, in fact, composed of two principal systems of affective loyalties: the family, over which the father rules, and a social/political system founded on male alliance, in which the father is invested. These two systems of authority, and the divergent commitments that they represent for the father, are conflated under the rubric of “patriarchy,” and they are imagined as compatible parts of a coherent whole, and even used analogously (by James I himself: “Kings are compared to fathers in families: for a King is truly parens patriae, the politic father of his people”¹¹); in effect, however, these systems are hardly versions of each other but are in radical competition. When we look at daughters, we see that they, unlike sons, must violate the integrity of the family to forge the political bonds that constitute the greater social order; fathers must sacrifice one authority in order to uphold another. Patriarchy, then, is not seamlessly monolithic, as some fathers would have us believe, but rather is founded in a profound contradiction; it is this contradiction that Shakespeare explores, focusing on the moments of the intersection of political and familial loyalties, and examining our attempts to resolve or reject the conflicting demands that patriarchy imposes upon us.

In dramatizing the difficulty of marriage, then, Shakespeare dramatizes the difficulty of negotiating between the rival demands of patriarchy. Though The Book of Common Prayer specifies that “for this cause [marriage] shall a man leave father and mother, and shall be joyned unto his wife”¹² (emphasis added), the departure of a daughter can prove far more disruptive to a Shakespearean world. In Much Ado About Nothing, the plot turns on “the niceties of matrimonial law,”¹³ and in King Lear, Lear's tragedy originates in the necessity of Cordelia's departure;¹⁴ central to both plays, and absent from their sources, is a problematic emotional climate that nurtures the bond of father and daughter. Shakespeare's sources would elide the bifurcated structure of patriarchy to present a coherent ideology, creating fathers who carry out their social function successfully. Shakespeare's modifications of his sources foreground both the emotional complexity of the family order and the price at which ideological coherence is acquired.

I

A complicated father-daughter bond is built subtly into Much Ado About Nothing through Shakespeare's deviation from his principal sources: Book V of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and Bandello's story of Timbreo and Fenicia. In both sources the relation of father and daughter is in large part dictated by the economic and political logic of their two worlds. Both Ariosto's King of Scotland and Bandello's Lionato de Lionati of Messina love their daughters, but their selves are far less invested in their love than is that of Shakespeare's Leonato. While apparently preserving the narrative structure of its sources, Shakespeare's version of the story of the slandered daughter is regulated not merely by public patriarchal concerns but by private and emotional ones as well.

Bandello's tale and Shakespeare's Much Ado show especially marked differences. Messer Lionato de Lionati is the central protagonist in the story of his daughter's marriage; in Shakespeare's comedy, Hero as lover takes precedence. For Messer Lionato, the anxieties occasioned by the impending marriage are social and economic. His responsibilities as the father of a daughter are clear; he is the possessor of a marketable commodity. In keeping with the etiquette of this world, the offer of marriage from Fenicia's suitor is addressed to him. The source of the offer surprises Messer Lionato, who did not expect “that the knight would condescend to ally himself to him.”¹⁵ The benefits of exogamy have been shown at the highest social level of this patriarchally ordered world, with the King of Arragon exploiting those benefits by subduing the island of Sicily on the grounds that it “belonged to him as husband of Costanza, daughter of King Manfred” (p. 112). Messer Lionato recognizes a similar bond in the making when Sir Timbreo requests Fenicia as his own, and “knowing Sir Timbreo's power and worth he … showed by a gracious reply how pleased he was that the knight would condescend to ally himself to him” (p. 114). Messer Lionato scarcely mentions his daughter in his negotiations, nor is it made apparent whether he is aware of her attraction to Sir Timbreo; instead, we get the simple statement that “on his return home he informed his wife and Fenicia about the promise he had given to Sir Timbreo” (p. 114). “Agreeable to both” (p. 114), this marriage is an economic alliance between two men, one generous, the other deserving. It is transacted in keeping with the warrant of exogamous exchange to “[confer] its quasi-mystical power of social linkage.”¹⁶ The news of the intended marriage “gave general pleasure to the Messinese, since Messer Lionato was a gentleman rightly loved as one who sought to hurt nobody but to help all as much as he could; so people expressed great satisfaction at the proposed alliance” (p. 114).

The world in which Shakespeare's Leonato receives a similar offer from Claudio is not so simply regulated, and Hero is not so easily dropped out of the male transaction. Unlike his prototype in Bandello, Claudio has no clear advantage of social class or fortune to recommend him to an indulgent father; his inquiry about Hero's inheritance—“Hath Leonato any son, my lord?” (I.i.282)¹⁷—suggests that he is not a wealthy man. After shrewdly ascertaining that Hero is Leonato's sole heir, he plans to propose directly to Hero—albeit through the gratuitous agency of Don Pedro, who, disguised as Claudio, will “take her hearing prisoner with the force / And strong encounter of [his] amorous tale,” and, after “to her father will [he] break” (I.i.312-14). Leonato, informed of a coming marriage proposal, says that he will reply through his daughter: “I will acquaint my daughter withal, that she may be the better prepar’d for an answer” (I.ii.19-20). Hero says that she “will be rul’d by [her] father” (II.i.47-48), yet she and her affections are recognized as party to the marriage negotiations in a way that Fenicia, and Fenicia's feelings, are not. Fenicia, if genteel, is also poor, and Sir Timbreo's social position is argument enough for his marriage proposal to appeal to Messer Lionato. In contrast, Hero's status as heiress requires that Claudio garner some support for his proposal from Hero herself. Hero's acquiescence contrasts with the insubordination of the fatherless Beatrice (II.i.49-52), and Leonato gives her to Claudio with “Count, take of me my daughter, and with her my fortunes. His Grace hath made the match, and all grace say Amen to it” (II.i.288-90).

This marriage, as in Bandello, involves male identity and male honor, and to that extent it models exogamous exchange. Claudio and the Prince invite Leonato, through the transfer of Hero, to join their own privileged company. For his part, Leonato gives his daughter, “and with her my fortunes,” to a man on whom “Don Pedro hath bestow’d much honor” (I.i.9-10). Yet Shakespeare complicates the simple protocol that expresses Messer Lionato's responsibility towards his daughter. He replaces it with a contract whose ambiguities and problems will be revealed in the reaction of Leonato to his daughter's slander. Shakespeare confounds the relationship between social and psychological realities, moving beyond economic or civic rhetoric to expose the potentially destructive emotional logic of patriarchy.

Bandello's unambiguously male and property-oriented world permits a relatively mechanical resolution of the obstacle to comic process that is posed when Sir Timbreo rejects Fenicia. Despite his initial pleasure upon hearing “that the knight would condescend to ally himself to him,” when he is served notice to “‘find another son-in-law’” (p. 118), Messer Lionato repudiates the knight and his “‘injurious accusation of whoredom’” (p. 118). Messer Lionato's faith in his daughter and the quality of her upbringing translates into a genuine knowledge of her worth on the Sicilian marriage market:

“It is indeed true that all things are possible, but I know how my daughter has been reared and what her habits are.” … The good father, never having found his daughter anything but honest, thought that the knight had been seized with disdain at their poverty and present lack of worldly success.

(pp. 118-19)

Messer Lionato can believe in Fenicia in a way that Shakespeare's Leonato is incapable of emulating. Explaining Sir Timbreo's disdain by his own lack of financial worth, Messer Lionato is able to phrase his defense of his daughter in the economic and exclusively male terms that have governed the transaction throughout. We sympathize with Messer Lionato and his daughter as victims of class prejudice rather than emotional cruelty, for Fenicia's moral character is never at issue in the minds of those who matter to her: “it is enough for [her] that before the just tribunal of Christ [she] shall be known innocent of such baseness” (p. 120). The economic mores that regulated Fenicia's exchange from one man to another now protect her from blame of promiscuity.

In Shakespeare's version, the social status and concerns of father and suitor no longer completely dictate their behaviors or define their roles. Unlike their counterparts in the source, Leonato and Claudio are social equals, and therefore Claudio's wish to marry Hero does not breach class hierarchies. Leonato is richer; Claudio, better connected. Thus economic considerations do not explain his rejection of Hero. Bereft of this explanation, Leonato reveals an investment in Hero more complicated than Messer Lionato's in his daughter. Shakespeare's Leonato is a father too ready to disown his Hero, and too ready to believe her suitor's accusation. When he hears of Hero's “misgovernment” (IV.i.98), Leonato judges her to be guilty as her accusers do. Believing Claudio's report of “a ruffian at her chamber-window” (IV.i.90), Leonato believes—contrary to every indication of her character—that Hero has committed this breach of both his emotional and exogamous authorities, choosing a sexual partner without regard to his interests and without his consent or knowledge. Leonato is certain that he has misplaced his trust in her, and, much like Brabantio in Othello, feels that the “fatherly and kindly power” (Much Ado, IV.i.73) he exercises is subverted, and that Hero, like Desdemona, has “made a gross revolt” (Othello, I.i.136). Yet the revolution of Much Ado is less Hero's than Shakespeare's.

Denied the benign economic explanation of Claudio's refusal that Messer Lionato has access to, the benevolently paternal response of Messer Lionato is unavailable to Leonato. Leonato must construct a response to Hero's presumed betrayal of his authority unaided by any clear cultural logic. As he is apparently bereft of his alliance with his daughter, the only response immediately available to Leonato is to attempt to imitate Claudio's action. Claudio refuses Hero as damaged goods, citing the code of exogamy: “There, Leonato, take her back again. / Give not this rotten orange to your friend” (IV.i.30-31). But although Leonato tries to imitate Claudio's rejection, he cannot. Leonato has not only taken the expedient of allying himself with his daughter as a route to male alliance but has also taken the risk of loving her. With Claudio's rejection of Hero, Leonato's identity in the male world becomes incompatible with his identity as a father, and this comedy verges on tragedy as Shakespeare confronts the ideological confusion of the patriarchal system.

These contradictions inform Leonato's attempted repudiation of Hero. In its last paternal exercise, his authority has been flouted; to regain his social power among men, Leonato paradoxically must disown her. If Hero were merely a commodity to be exchanged, Leonato would suffer a loss of male pride and property, but Leonato's response betrays a deeper suffering and betrays the power of his love for his daughter: “Hath no man's dagger here a point for me?” (IV.i.108). Shakespeare divests patriarchy of its disinterested political aspect to reveal its radical investment in the affective order of the family. Leonato's regard for Hero reveals itself in a vocabulary of possession that is shockingly narcissistic:

But mine, and mine I lov’d, and mine I prais’d,
And mine that I was proud on, mine so much
That I myself was to myself not mine,
Valuing of her …

(IV.i.135-38)

Contrary to the expectations of exogamy, Hero here is no mere commodity to be exchanged in a male marketplace, but an aspect of Leonato's identity. The confrontation with Hero's sexuality that Claudio's accusation forces means that Leonato must also recognize his daughter's identity as separate from his own. With the loss of male alliance, the benevolent political rhetoric of patriarchy gives way to a poetics of desire. Patriarchy—potentially a simple political order—has been powerfully rephrased in psychological terms.

As Leonato realizes the implications of disowning his daughter, the conflict between his fatherly love for Hero and his social need for male honor reveals itself in his response to Hero's physical self. As seen in happier times, “Truly, the lady fathers herself. Be happy, lady, for you are like an honorable father” (I.i.105-7). Hero's physical resemblance to her father guarantees her mother's fidelity, and with it, her father's honor. Yet once Hero's own honor appears “but … sign and semblance” (IV.i.32), Leonato abruptly rejects the testimony of physiognomy. Obsessively exploring the taint of sexuality, he now wishes Hero derived “from unknown loins” (IV.i.134), for she

                                        is fall’n
Into a pit of ink, that the wide sea
Hath drops too few to wash her clean again,
And salt too little which may season give
To her foul-tainted flesh!

(IV.i.138-42)

When Hero faints and is believed dead, Leonato responds almost thankfully: “O Fate, take not away thy heavy hand! / Death is the fairest cover for her shame” (IV.i.114-15). Leonato's perverse resolve to sever himself from his blood results in an inability to recognize that blood. The Friar, viewing Hero's blush, instinctively recognizes her innocence:

                                        I have mark’d
A thousand blushing apparitions
To start into her face, a thousand innocent shames
In angel whiteness beat away those blushes,
And in her eye there hath appear’d a fire
To burn the errors that these princes hold
Against her maiden truth.

(IV.i.157-63)

Leonato, in contrast, believes that, as Claudio claims, “Her blush is guiltiness, not modesty” (IV.i.41), and he interprets this evidence accordingly:

                                        Friar, it cannot be.
Thou seest that all the grace that she hath left
Is that she will not add to her damnation
A sin of perjury; she not denies it.
Why seek'st thou then to cover with excuse
That which appears in proper nakedness?

(IV.i.169-74)

It is as if Hero's very body is marked by the competing demands of patriarchy. Only the fictional death of her offending flesh will allow Hero to escape the contradiction to assume the only role this system permits her: “One Hero died defil’d, but I do live, / And surely as I live, I am a maid” (V.iv.62-63).¹⁸ Leonato's rejection of Hero testifies to his radical possession of her, a possession inappropriate to comedy and exogamy alike, however psychologically understandable. In order for the play to conclude in marriage, Leonato must become a father again in a less possessive way and acknowledge the necessity of granting his daughter's alterity.

Shakespeare's source in Ariosto supplies a model for Leonato's transformation. The father in Book V of Orlando Furioso has a daughter whose fate is similar to that of both Fenicia and Hero, yet his reactions are even more strictly defined by patriarchal law than are those of Messer Lionato. This father, though “sore … grieu’d to heare these newes” (V.66.1), submits to his own law in the treatment of his slandered daughter; for

… on this point the lawes are so expresse,
Except by combat it be proou’d a lie
Needs must Geneura be condemn’d to die.(19)

The determination of Genevra's chastity rests not on personal judgment or knowledge but on trial by combat: an imposition of a formal, stylized, arbitrary—above all, impersonal—arbitration of Genevra's sexual behavior: all that Leonato's tortured outburst has not been. The patriarchy of Ariosto urges an even greater distance between father and daughter than in the Bandello, where both the insistence on marriage as an alliance between men (rather than as separation of parent from child) and the social determinants of economic convention preempt the confrontation of the father or the text with the emotional content of the father-daughter bond. Ariosto's King of Scotland acts not as a father but as a king, and the regulation of Genevra's sexual behavior is a public issue: the private, affective space of the family does not exist, or is made irrelevant by the public domain of patriarchy (although it is to his credit that the king does not doubt Genevra's chastity, despite his lack of any explanation for the slander. Perhaps if you are king, you have fewer anxieties about male bonding).

In fact, at issue in Ariosto is less the marriage of a daughter than the barbarity of a double-standard that condemns women alone for adultery: it is significant that Rinaldo defends Genevra (and justice) sight-unseen and anonymously: “If fair Genevra had her friend or no. … The law, I say, is partial and nought” (IV.51-54.401-25). His chivalry provides an attitude, a certain generosity and judicious impartiality that Leonato needs in order to regain his fatherly qualities and make the emotional transition that the marriage of his only daughter requires of him. In the distant, idealizing stance of the chivalric champion, Leonato can love Hero and learn to release her, chivalry gracefully mediating her loss, while the “macho” aspect of the challenger allows him to recover the social honor and identity that Claudio's rejection of Hero and exogamous alliance has called into doubt.

In Bandello's Messina, the reconstituting of exogamous alliances contrasts significantly with Shakespeare's psychological reconstitution of Leonato's identity. Messer Lionato's recourse is that of a man aware of his social responsibilities as father of a marriageable daughter. He resolves to “send the maiden out of Messina. … Then, having restored the girl … until she had regained her former beauty and strength … he might marry her off in two or three years under another name” (pp. 121-22). He designs his plan with confidence in his daughter's recuperative abilities and with a shrewd business instinct. When Sir Timbreo discovers Fenicia's innocence and suggests by way of recompense that Messer Lionato “must make use of me and mine as if the alliance had taken place,” Messer Lionato requests that “since ill fortune has made [him] incapable of an alliance by marriage” (p. 127) he be allowed to provide Sir Timbreo with a wife should he choose to marry, and thus to sustain the alliance no longer directly available through exogamy. Once Fenicia is restored to health, her father “decide[s] to delay no longer in putting his plan into effect. … Then and there in so many words [he] wed[s] his Fenicia” to Sir Timbreo (pp. 127-28).

Leonato arrives at this culturally and comically desired goal by a significantly different route, one that derives from Ariosto. The King of Scotland is prevented by his own law from the defense or guardianship of his daughter's chastity, and it is this distance that Shakespeare collapses and then cultivates. When Benedick simultaneously defends the “very bent of honor” of Don Pedro and Claudio yet allows the possibility that “their wisdoms be misled in this” (IV.i.185-86), he suggests to Leonato the opportunity for the recovery of both his honor and his love for Hero. As Benedick is part of the male world Leonato would join, his endorsement of the possibility of Hero's innocence allows Leonato to retract his rejection of his daughter and to permit himself access to the emotional knowledge of her character (and his own) that he thought he needed to suppress. Now his “soul doth tell [him] Hero is belied” (V.i.42), and he exchanges the vocabulary of narcissism for that of a chivalric protector. While Leonato's subsequent defense of Hero employs the rhetoric of the lover, it is a rhetoric that represses any overt suggestion of sexuality in its attitude towards the loved one.

“If they wrong her honor” (IV.i.190), Leonato declares, he will be her most formidable champion. His response transcends the call of Messer Lionato's simple duty. Leonato is that which Ariosto's King of Scotland wishes for: he “that will in armes defend his daughter deare, / And prove her innocent in open fight” (V.68.3-4). Leonato defends Hero with a chivalric righteousness and challenges Claudio as an equal, despite his age:

I speak not like a dotard nor a fool,
As under privilege of age to brag
What I have done being young, or what would do
Were I not old. Know, Claudio, to thy head,
Thou hast so wrong’d mine innocent child and me
That I am forc’d to lay my reverence by
And, with grey hairs and bruise of many days,
Do challenge thee to trial of a man.

(V.i.59-65)

Her knight, he acts to rescue Hero's honor, and his own. In the stylized posture of the knight—a nostalgic image of an innocent patriarchal culture—Shakespeare provides Leonato with a model for expressing love for his daughter, a model that edits the suggestion of incestuous possessiveness while simultaneously allowing him to defend his male honor in the exogamous system. Leonato becomes, quite literally, a courtly old gentleman, and the archaism of the formal vocabulary is ironically adequate to his own aged “reverence.”

Leonato's appropriation of a courtly rhetoric allows him to enact the process of comedy in which fathers are made archaic. Having paid for his excessive, obsessive doubt of Hero's virtue with a more than fatherly effort to defy her slanderers, Leonato is saved from certain defeat at the hands of Claudio by the ubiquitous Dogberry. Leonato regains the composure of his role only after Shakespeare allows us to view the extremes of his love for Hero, exposing the simple patriarchal regulations of his sources as controlling mechanisms for the emotional turmoil inherent in the father-daughter relationship. As Leonato changes from jealous slanderer to chivalric champion, he resurrects Hero, who changes from cast-out whore with “foul-tainted flesh” (IV.i.141), to “my Lady Hero … falsely accus’d” (V.ii.90-91). The proprietary and proper patriarchs of the sources have given way to a father who expresses the depth and character of his love for his daughter—a potentially destructive love—in a vocabulary that is inconsistent with the images of fathers that his culture propagates. Shakespeare, then, re-idealizes the patriarchal system; yet he does so in terms so highly artificial that they make us conscious of their presence and the emotional logic they would dissemble.

As if testifying to the impossibility of Leonato's giving away a daughter who is “mine so much / That I myself was to myself not mine,” Shakespeare has Antonio, Leonato's brother, give Hero in marriage. Antonio has no such investment in Hero—his affection is, quite simply, avuncular, and he can thus comply with the conventions of exogamous exchange without further ado. Antonio “must be father to [his] brother's daughter, / And give her to young Claudio” (V.iv.15-16). Disguised, and given in marriage by her uncle, Hero is safely removed from Leonato; the father is doubly replaced: first by Antonio, and finally by Claudio. Leonato is relegated to spectator, and it is Antonio who, this time, says to Claudio, “I do give you her” (V.iv.53). Like the resolution of this comedy, Leonato's arrival at the posture of the patriarch is labored and highly ironic, requiring a suggestion of tragedy that can never be fully dismissed by the high artifice of a happy ending. Only with the symbolic death of his daughter—a death he once wished for in earnest—can the objectives of both comedy and exogamy be achieved, and in the macabre fantasy of Hero's death, Shakespeare insists upon the costs of constructing and maintaining his patriarchy.

King Lear probes even more deeply into the emotional content of the father-daughter bond. Here, the incestuous aspects of the relationship between father and daughter are more explicit and, in the context of tragedy, less easily redeemed and purified than in comedy. Again the catalyst of emotional disclosure is marriage. Leonato's dilemma exposes the emotional costs of patriarchy; in Shakespeare's rendering of Lear's story, another aspect of patriarchy—i.e., its consuming nature—is revealed in Lear's attempts to engineer a version of exogamy that will disguise—if only rhetorically—the loss that marriage entails. Leonato may be confused about how to choose between conflicting patriarchal commitments, but Lear tries impossibly to fuse familial and political authorities, to combine the impulse to conserve the integrity of the family with the social demands of exogamy. Leonato slanders his daughter only after others have declared her undesirable; Lear's slanders are unprompted, and he defames Cordelia in the hope that “Dow’r’d with [his] curse,” others will refuse her (I.i.205).

As Much Ado transforms Bandello's simplicities, King Lear transforms its sources to create more problematic patriarchal relations. Most significantly, both in Holinshed's account (1587) and in the anonymous play The True Chronicle Historie of King Leir (1605), Leir's behavior is clearly motivated by the question of political succession. In Holinshed, Leir's preference for Cordeilla is made explicit: he loves “specially Cordeilla the yoongest farre aboue the two elder.” Logically enough, Leir wishes to “preferre hir whome he best loued, to the succession ouer the kingdome.”²⁰ As stressed in the anonymous play, there is no “heyre indubitate, / Which might have set upon [Leir's] royall throne … by [whom] we might have peace.”²¹ Leir must confer his kingdom on his daughters, and the question remains: how best to protect “our state … ’gainst all forrayne hate” and “so establish such a perfit peace” (p. 338; King Leir, I.i.55-68). Leir's solution is to marry off his three daughters to three political successors “by whose united friendship, this our state / May be protected” (p. 338; King Leir, I.i.54-55). Since Gonorill and Ragan have already been spoken for, the youngest daughter's engagement is all that remains to be negotiated.

In the anonymous play, Leir knows and appreciates that his youngest daughter loves him best. So, with unabashed manipulative intent, he seeks to secure her profession of love in order simply to assure his own choice of a political successor. Just as, in Bandello, Messer Lionato's interest in his daughter was innocently benevolent, so Leir's is naively coercive. By demanding the public profession of love from all three daughters, Leir hopes to disguise his attempt to manipulate the youngest through her love for him. In the play, Leir frankly, even gleefully, admits his scheme and its use of Cordella's love. The three sisters of this play are not competing for dowries so much as for the husbands a dowry would insure. Leir wishes to manipulate his daughters' dependence upon dowries in order to force Cordella to abandon her desire for a love-match—“No liking to a Monarch, unlesse love allowes” (p. 338; King Leir, I.i.62)—to his own desire for a marriage of convenience:

                     … they joyntly shall contend,
Eche to exceed the other in their love:
Then at the vantage will I take Cordella,
Even as she doth protest she loves me best,
Ile say, Then, daughter, graunt me one request,
To shew thou lovest me as thy sisters doe,
Accept a husband, whom my selfe will woo.

(p. 339; King Leir, I.i.81-87)

Leir does not want to minimize loss here, but to maximize gain—of the “heyre indubitate.” He views Cordella's love for him as his one advantage over her resolve, and intends to exploit this for his own ends: “to match her to some King within this Ile” (p. 338; King Leir, I.i.66). He anticipates, as he schemes, his victory:

Although (poore soule) her sences will be mute:
Then will I tryumph in my policy,
And match her with a King of Brittany.

(p. 339; King Leir, I.i.89-90)

The reasons for King Lear's staging of the dowry pageant in Shakespeare's play are not so simple or self-evident, nor so safely hinged upon politics. Lear faces two problems at the beginning of Shakespeare's play: the threat to the coherence of the English nation, compounded by, even contingent upon, the threat that exogamy poses to the integrity of Lear's authority over his family. In Lear's attempt to meet these threats, Shakespeare explores the emotional conservatism of patriarchy (literally, the desire to conserve the order of the family), which Lear converts into a tyrannical legislation of affective bonds.

Shakespeare removes a concern with political succession from the list of Lear's declared priorities. “The division of [his] kingdom” (I.i.4) seems to be a foregone conclusion that poses few problems for all concerned. As Coleridge notes,

It was not without forethought, nor is it without its due significance, that the division of Lear's kingdom is in the first six lines of the play stated as a thing already determined in all its particulars previously to the trial of professions. …²²

Lear seems to have no patrilineal regrets about the parcelling of his isle; he is not looking to choose a sole male successor. Indeed, as Harry Jaffa remarks, Lear seems never to have had any intention of relinquishing his kingdom:

Lear divided his kingdom into “three” but the parts are not mathematical “thirds.” Cordelia was not only to be situated in the middle, but to have the richest portion of the realm. … Living on as king with Cordelia, with Albany and Cornwall acting as his deputies in regions which he could not control without their loyalty anyway, does it seem that Lear was giving up anything that he could in any case have kept to himself much longer?²³

In Shakespeare's dramatization, the general acceptance that greets the division of the kingdom may well signal that this unusual gesture will have little impact on power relations; Harry Berger, Jr., observes that Lear “formally renounces power and property primarily with the intention of keeping informal control over them.”²⁴ But if the division is merely ceremonial, why the need for a public display?

The need arises, I would argue, out of the fact that Shakespeare has created not only a political but also a personal set of pressures as motivations for the dowry division. The urge to preserve his authority over his family, no less than over his kingdom, complicates Lear's actions. This desire is threatened in the marriage of Cordelia, Lear's favorite. Her marriage signifies the final dissolution of the Lear family and the Lear empire, and painfully emphasizes the irrevocable passage of time, which all of Lear's authority cannot counteract. Lear is concerned with parental succession; to whom must he cede Cordelia, to whom shall he render up “rule … interest … and cares” (I.i.49-50) of his youngest daughter?

Unlike his literary predecessors, Lear already possesses two sons-in-law. In keeping with the tone of his relationship with his elder daughters, Lear claims a filial and perfunctory relationship with both “our son of Cornwall, / … our no less loving son of Albany” (I.i.41-42). The two dukes are natural choices as sons-in-law, each occupying strategic extremities of Lear's kingdom. In both sources, Cordelia's prospective husband is absent from the court at the moment corresponding to Shakespeare's dowry distribution. In Holinshed it is only after Leir divides the kingdom in halves between his two eldest daughters that “one of the princes of Gallia … hearing … of the said Cordeilla, desired to haue hir in mariage” (p. 13). Similarly, in the source play the Gallian king first appears in his native land, planning a voyage to Britain, blithely unaware that Leir has already divided his “Kingdome … / ’Twixt [Cordella's] two sisters to their royall dowre” (p. 345; King Leir, I.iii.318-19).

In Holinshed Leir cares little who or if his daughter marries: “answer was made [to Aganippus], that he might haue his daughter, but as for anie dower, he could haue none” (p. 13). In the anonymous play Leir's attitude to her marriage is different but equally straightforward: he is deeply interested in Cordella's choice, and he schemes to force her into a politic marriage. Both play and chronicle sources lack the pressure of the expectant France and Burgundy attending on Lear's decision; both France and Burgundy pose significantly different marriages—different both from each other and from the source play—in terms of the power relations the exogamous exchange would construct. In Shakespeare's version neither foreign suitor presents as stable a political bond as might “some King within this Ile.” They have furthermore been “long in our court”; Lear must answer them. The prospect of losing his daughter is much more immediate and is highlighted as the concern of the play. But if Holinshed's king is indifferent to his daughter's marriage, and the source play's father quite the opposite, the attitude of Shakespeare's Lear is difficult to characterize.

The sources do not present the dowries as objects for rivalry among the sisters. In Holinshed's account Leir simply asks “how well she loved him” without informing his daughters of the reason for his request; furthermore, it is not clear in the text whether the demand is meant to solicit rivalry or merely to confirm Leir's favoritism: “he thought to understand the affections of his daughters towards him, and prefer hir whome he best loued, to the succession ouer the kingdome” (p. 12). In the source play, the evident stakes are husbands, with dowries only as the necessary route to matrimony. But Leir does not disclose this condition, and his request is phrased rather ingenuously:

Resolve a doubt which much molests my mind,
Which of you three to me would prove most kind;
Which loves me most, and which at my request
Will soonest yeeld unto their fathers hest.

(p. 343; King Leir, I.i.232-35)

In Shakespeare's version the stakes are not husbands but dowries, and the conflict of the scene is Cordelia's marriage alone, the choice of her suitor the ostensible end. With this in mind, Lear announces the dowry contest; his purpose and phrasing are bald:

Which of you shall we say doth love us most,
That we our largest bounty may extend
Where nature doth with merit challenge?

(I.i.51-53)

As Goneril and Regan are already married to ducal power and property (if Jaffa is correct, the assets they perfunctorily flatter for are the ones they are already married to), with no fears of impoverished spinsterhood to motivate their flatteries, Lear must be speaking to Cordelia alone. For his purposes, it is not “Our daughters' several dowers” (I.i.44) that are at stake, but Cordelia's only.

Given the prominence of Cordelia's imminent departure, her removal through the necessity of exogamy, King Lear's elaborate divestment of authority could be construed as a way to ease his pain at her loss. The ceremony of the division of the kingdom may be a way for Lear to formalize his loss and thereby minimize his pain. If the division of the kingdom and the division of Lear's family are inextricably linked, perhaps Lear resolves to divest himself of his kingdom, hoping that, by signing away his worldly goods and titles, he will find it easier to accept the loss of Cordelia. “Conferring [all] on younger strengths” (I.i.40), specifically those of France or Burgundy, he will be able to relinquish Cordelia as he parts with his lesser possessions, and perhaps the loss of “our joy” (I.i.82) will be less to him among the loss of all. Lear assembles the members of his court in order to persuade himself, under public pressure, to relinquish Cordelia to that “lord whose hand must take [her] plight” from him (I.i.101).

More likely, however—given the purely formal nature of his divestment of political authority—Lear never intends to relinquish Cordelia. Or rather, he wishes both to give her away and to keep her, to marry her off and yet “to set [his] rest / On her kind nursery” (I.i.123-24). (In practical terms, this desire suggests that Lear's probable intention is for Cordelia to marry Burgundy, both remaining in Cordelia's third of England, it being unlikely that the king of France would move to England, or the king of England to France.) Lear hardly wishes to divest himself of either of his patriarchal positions of authority, but rather to combine them in a fantasy of absolutism, which reveals itself as such in the contradiction of Cordelia's both going and staying. His perversion of the dowry ceremony reveals his desire to prevent its consummation, to conserve and combine his emotional and territorial authorities in a monolithic whole.

Though Lear knows he must fulfill the public responsibilities of patriarchy in exogamous exchange, the demands of exogamy are at odds with political and emotional needs, and the pressures of the latter subvert his rhetoric of policy. Lear's insistence that his daughter flatter him for her dowry is ostensibly his last act of ownership over her, but it is designed to retain control. He makes no mention of maintaining the patriarchal prerogative to choose a husband, a prerogative that would compensate him for his loss of parental authority. Rather, he wishes Cordelia to buy from him, with her capacity to love, her right to marry.

The custom of exogamous exchange, however, does not normally demand that the daughter buy her right to marry. Indeed, it is the father who buys, with his offer of a dowry, his daughter's right to marry from another man whom he will choose. Lear wishes to reformulate this exchange. Where the Leir in the anonymous play hopes to make his daughter buy the husband of his choice with her need of a dowry, Lear wants Cordelia to buy her dowry with the very capital she herself must use to marry: her love. Unlike his predecessor, the last thing Lear wishes is that Cordelia “shew thou lovest me as thy sisters doe”; he has no desire that Cordelia prove her love by marrying his choice of suitor. In fact, any mention of Lear's choice of suitor is conspicuously absent: France and Burgundy “are to be answer’d” (I.i.48), but presumably by Cordelia. The relationship under negotiation here is not between two men but between father and daughter. Lear's wish is to secure a pledge of love that, as the rhetoric of Lear's ultimatum urges and as Cordelia implies, would make her marriage impossible (I.i.82-86, 95-104).

Lear appropriates the public patriarchal terms that his predecessors exercised conventionally in the sources, but he misunderstands their use. Their use of custom is unselfconsciously coercive and conventionally exogamous. Lear, in contrast, wishes to force the two contravening orders of family and state into a metaphorical relationship with each other, and he strives to make the order of his kingdom dependent upon the coherence of his family. Cordelia, however, points out the ideological inconsistencies in Lear's monolithic designs, exposing the contradiction upon which he has built his absolutist fantasy. Whereas the Leir of the anonymous play hoped to silence Cordella's recalcitrant wish for a love match, Shakespeare's Lear finds Cordelia's resolve to “Love, and be silent” (I.i.62) subversive of his plan. Her denial of her father's authority responds to his own perversion of patriarchal power and repudiates his claim to such power over her. Cordelia's refusal to “draw / A third more opulent than [her] sisters'” (I.i.85-86) exposes the all-consuming greed of Lear's request, and this criticism, coupled with the disproportionate rage that it provokes, reveals the qualitative difference of Lear's emotionally confounded power from the merely manipulative political authority of his predecessors.

Cordelia never claims, as Cordella does, that she will only marry for love: on the contrary, she is perfectly willing to comply with her father's choice of suitor. Her subversion, as she herself points out, is no rebuke to patriarchy: “No unchaste action, or dishonored step, / … hath depriv’d me of your grace and favor” (I.i.230-31). Cordelia reminds her father—and us—of the emotional loss he would deny, or would configure as merely political or economic. She is sensitive to the “necessity” of patriarchal custom but more so to the emotional logic it would gloss; as far as exogamy is concerned, she is perhaps Shakespeare's most conservative daughter.

Cordelia's answer to Lear points out the totalizing structure of his request, and she reminds him that political structures are built by the limiting of affective bonds. If her answer is callous, it is so only in response to the greater insensitivity of Lear's question. As he wishes to know “Where nature doth with merit challenge” (I.i.53), she answers him in terms of her natural duty: “According to my bond, no more nor less” (I.i.93). Cordelia's reply is meticulous in its calculation of filial duty, much like Desdemona's reply to her father:

                                        My noble father,
I do perceive here a divided duty.
To you I am bound for life and education;
My life and education both do learn me
How to respect you. You are the lord of duty;
I am hitherto your daughter. But here's my husband,
And so much duty as my mother show’d
To you, preferring you before her father,
So much I challenge that I may profess
Due to the Moor my lord.

(Othello, I.iii.182-91)

Ironically, it is Cordelia alone, in refusing Lear's monolithic desire to retain her within his emotional and geographic boundaries, who insists throughout upon the exogamous definition of marriage. In this play, it is the father who subverts the conventions of patriarchy in defying its demand for male alliance through marriage. Unlike Leonato, who is eager to contract male alliance through marriage, Lear's terms demand an alliance with his daughter in spite of marriage. In Much Ado, Leonato thinks that Hero has chosen another over his choice, and he reacts accordingly. Cordelia's behavior, however, is completely consistent with the terms of exogamy, and thus Lear's response is bewildering in a way that Leonato's is not. In the comedy, Leonato's repudiation of his daughter hinges on the unclear circumstances of Claudio's rejection. We understand the source of Leonato's response even if we condemn it, attributing his credulity to the power of the male word in a patriarchal world. In King Lear, we need more to help us make sense of Lear's response, for he himself has tampered with the logic of patriarchy. His anger and pain are “irrational” in a way that Leonato's are not. In disowning Cordelia he testifies to the desires that inform his request: his love for her, his fear of losing her, his need to mitigate the pain of her departure. In this scene, rather than simply presenting a patriarch's control over a woman, Shakespeare investigates the incestuous possessiveness that exogamy counteracts; in demystifying the public forms that govern the exchange of women, he reveals the conservative emotional logic of those forms.

Shakespeare explores both the willful nature of political power and the politics of the family. Confronted with the emotional truths that Cordelia will not suppress, Lear continues to abuse his power as a king to protect his emotional investment as a father; as Coleridge puts it, “the inveterate habits of sovereignty convert the wish [to enjoy his daughter's violent professions] into claim and positive right, and an incompliance with it into crime and treason.”²⁵ Lear has tried to phrase concerns of state in the disarming and beneficent terms of affective loyalty; conversely, in his rage he de-mystifies the nature of fatherly power to reveal its coercive, tyrannical potential. His last proprietary act as father over Cordelia is defied, and Lear's shaky acceptance of her marriage is undermined. He disowns her with the ruthlessness of a despot. As Cordelia has made it impossible for him now to “rest / On her kind nursery” (I.i.123-24), Lear acts swiftly to insure that no other enjoys it. He tries to remove her from the reach of the two princes, his “Great rivals in our youngest daughter's love” (I.i.46). Paradoxically, to keep Cordelia he must discard her, as the contradictions of patriarchy assert themselves once again.

Cordelia will take truth alone for her dower (I.i.108), and she will marry pride (I.i.129). Lear hopes that if she will not marry on his terms, she will not marry at all. Lear's slanders recall Leonato's, yet they are more powerful in their originality: “thou my sometime daughter … here I give / Her father's heart from her” (I.i.120-26). Doing his best to make her unattractive, “her price … fallen. … / … Unfriended, new-adopted to our hate, / Dow’r’d with our curse, and stranger’d with our oath” (I.i.198-205), Lear hopes to discourage Burgundy and France. Predictably, he succeeds in convincing Burgundy of her undesirability, but not France. Burgundy, confused by Lear's sudden violation of the social codes that should govern marital exchange and political alliance, demurs: “Pardon me, royal sir; / Election makes not up in such conditions” (I.i.206-7). Knowing that exogamy is an alliance between men, Burgundy knows that Cordelia “with [her father's] displeasure piec’d” (I.i.200) is an inappropriate conduit to such a relationship, and he cannot respond to Lear's terms: “I know no answer,” he says (I.i.202). He wins Lear's favor by refusing to become his son-in-law: “Come, noble Burgundy” (I.i.268). France, on the other hand, accepts Lear's unorthodox terms and responds in kind: “Thee and thy virtues here I seize upon, / Be it lawful I take up what’s cast away” (I.i.254-55). In terms of exogamy, France's action is not lawful, since Cordelia, “this unpriz’d precious maid” (I.i.261), is no gift, but a cast-off.

At the play's conclusion, stripped of his political authority, Lear also exchanges his public relationship with Cordelia for the private inclusive one his terms had urged:

… Come, let’s away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies. …

(V.iii.8-13)

Lear has found a metaphor and rhetoric properly expressive and has left the constraint of patriarchal forms behind. He greets Cordelia with “… as I am a man, I think this lady / To be my child Cordelia” (IV.vii.71-72); she is both lady and child, he both man and father, and in his bewildered conflation of roles he enunciates the emotional complexity of the father-daughter bond.

II

To identify the place of women in Shakespeare is frequently to describe the controlling artistic and patriarchal forms. Women are celebrated (if domesticated) in comedy; marginalized (if excused) in history; empowered (if destroyed) in tragedy—and are a subversive presence in each mode. A feminist critique, exploring the politics of gender, may also expose something about the politics of genre and reveal the implicit similarity between the authority of literary forms and the power of the cultural forms they represent. One of feminist criticism's greatest strengths is its ability to identify and analyze the workings of power structures—both the literary and the more overtly political—that define the roles of women in a culture. Lynda E. Boose notes that the subversive aspect of the daughter's role within the patriarchy of the family (in her necessary departure from the domain of the father) may be a lesser threat to patriarchal structures than the father's incestuous wish to retain his daughter in defiance of the cultural demand for exogamy:

Patriarchal ideology has always imagined that women—and especially the unstructured daughter—pose the ultimate threat to the maintenance of its control. But the real threat to patriarchy may not be the imputed female enemy at all. It may instead be the fathers themselves. To quell the menace of paternal behavior deviating from the authoritarian ideal, the cultural mythmaking apparatus seems to have continually needed to reify patterns of dictatorial, resolutely unsentimental fatherhood modelled into father-Gods and God the Fathers. By insinuation, the model is divinely sanctioned. The greatest menace to patriarchy would be the threat of the fathers rebelling against the archetypes they inherited. …²⁶

In this formulation the culture's glorification of the father forecloses his potential for threatening exogamy and thus patriarchy. And if the real threat to patriarchal political structures, as Boose and Shakespeare's plays suggest, is the father's desire to contain the daughter within the parental family, then a critique of patriarchal power would be most effective in exposing the labelling of woman-as-subversive-agent, as an instrument engineered to idealize the father. Consequently, much of feminist criticism locates the sanctification of the father inscribed in various cultural texts, including Shakespeare's.

I am, however, arguing that Shakespeare himself works against this sanctification; his portrayal of fathers refuses to authorize patriarchal power. Shakespeare's fathers have a real difficulty (verging on inability) accepting their replacement by another in their daughters' affections, and as a result they abuse their political power over their daughters, confusing political and emotional needs, behaving coercively and destructively. It is a fairly simple (and by now unremarkable) activity of feminist criticism to discover the ways in which patriarchy is produced and reproduced in literature and in the world; it is, however, more difficult and perhaps more rewarding to move beyond identification of the ideological structuring of experience—as I believe Shakespeare does—to explore the emotional logic in human relations that generates such structures.

Kathleen McLuskie's “The patriarchal bard” attacks Shakespeare's collaboration with received cultural authorities. Her source study of King Lear finds that “the folk-tale of the love-test provides an underlying pattern in which harmony is broken by the honest daughter and restored by her display of forgiveness. The organization of the Shakespearean text intensifies and then denies those expectations so as once more to insist on the connection between evil women and a chaotic world” (p. 102). She assumes a mimetic relationship between play and world, although she does posit an incoherent patriarchal culture accessible to feminist criticism: “the text was produced within the contradictions of contemporary ideology and practice and … similar contradictions exist within the play” (p. 104). McLuskie finds a role for the feminist critic in searching out and exposing those contradictions in the play. For her, however, Shakespeare remains an adversary of the feminist project, neither questioning nor resisting the patriarchal culture from which he draws his plots. For her, then, literary production remains an imitative rather than an interrogative process.

Ironically, this assumption of Shakespeare's unproblematic relationship to his cultural sources recalls the patriarchal and essentialist model of literary transmission advanced by Harold Bloom, whose theory of poetic influence excuses Shakespeare from the battle of father-to-son poetic inheritance. Bloom argues that both the nature of his dramatic form and his lack of a strong precursor liberated Shakespeare from the anxiety that was to plague poets from Milton to the present. Shakespeare, rather, achieves “the absolute absorption of the precursor”;²⁷ literary influence remains a process of (male) strife, in which an author's inevitable choices are either collaboration with the father or competition resulting in patricide, both of which re-engender (and re-gender) the oepidal configuration. Yet while Shakespeare's response to his literary predecessors may exhibit ingenuousness, clearly he is not exempt from or ignorant of the weight of literary precedent. Must the response to cultural authority be located in a combative, self-perpetuating totality that disallows the possibility of change? Shakespeare is not, by some quirk of literary history, free of anxiety, but rather he frees himself from it. Shakespeare makes this influence his subject, interrogating the power of patriarchy instead of guilelessly imitating it.

Like the daughters in his plays, Shakespeare defies the control of patriarchy, separating and individuating his own identity from that of his literary authority. This is not to say that Shakespeare stands as a daughter to his literary fathers; he does, however, strike an analogous relation to patriarchal influence to which the metaphor permits us access. In the daughters he creates and in the stormy necessity of their removal from the control of their fathers, he forges a critical perspective from which to view patriarchy, a perspective that need not replicate patriarchy's self-characterizations innocently or idealistically. If Prince Hal, while in Eastcheap, may be “sworn brother to a leash of drawers, and can call them all by their christen names” (1 Henry IV, II.iv.6-7), he nonetheless realizes that he must be reinscribed within the patriarchal order and the order of the family. Upon his father's death he assures his brothers “I’ll be your father and your brother too. / … Yet weep that Harry's dead, and so will I; / But Harry lives …” (2 Henry IV, V.ii.57-60). While oedipal conflict demands a challenge of patriarchal authority, it is a temporary tension, for the son always becomes the father: if Oedipus kills his father, it is only to marry his mother and to take his father's place in the family order. Patriarchy demands, at least of its sons, its replication; its pressures are those of imitation. Daughters, on the other hand, must leave the control of the father and the emotional system of the family, limiting, as Cordelia does, the love that would contain them within family bounds, separating and differentiating themselves. In the departure of the daughter, Shakespeare realizes the limitation of the omnipotence of a certain kind of cultural authority, and thus provides us with the possibility of its revision.

In Much Ado, Shakespeare creates in Leonato a father whose authority we question. We see him caught in the inconsistency at the heart of patriarchy, and Hero's passivity serves only to accentuate his ambiguous position. Her very subservience works to de-idealize Leonato's fatherhood: she cannot bear the weight of the accusation directed against her, and, fainting, defies any attempt to paint her as a subversive presence in order to preserve Leonato's honor. Our knowledge that Hero did not in fact contravene her father and suitor's bond forces us to censure Leonato's belief in Claudio's accusation with, at the very least, indignation: he is unjust, disloyal, and too ready to sacrifice his love for his daughter to the ideal of male alliance. The omniscient and innocent patriarchal power, fully operative in the source, is de-idealized in Shakespeare's version and shown to be incapable of sustaining the emotional toll of exogamy.

King Lear works in a similar way to call into question our own assumptions about patriarchal authority, especially as it is manifested in the omnipotent form of monarchy. If anything, Lear is more manipulative than his prototypes, and, disowning Cordelia, he uses political power to further emotional ends. The misappropriation of one rhetoric for another reveals the coercive nature of a power that would represent itself as disinterested, innocent of desire and of emotional bias. Cordelia's denial of her father's request and her refusal to accept blame demystify Lear's glorification of his own omnipotence. What in the source is mere manipulation made explicable, if not excusable, by political circumstance becomes a power comprehensible only in terms of a tragic willfulness born of fear, of anger, and of a complicated love. Lear, like Leonato, abuses his authority. Shakespeare, in letting us see him make such a mistake, undermines our confidence in the power that we invest in kings and fathers.

Much like Cordelia, Shakespeare exposes and investigates the coercive pressures of patriarchy. Shakespeare does not become another patriarchal bard. He responds to his sources in a way that consciously rebukes and revises patriarchal authority; he does not transpose, unaltered or unjudged, the cultural propositions that generate the sources' unremarkable conclusions. And while he struggles to subvert his fathers, he does not do so only eventually to replace them in propagating their assumptions, because the form of his rebellion is not so much a categorical rejection of forms as an inquiry into our need for their construction. He does not replicate ideology; rather, he exposes its assumptions, forcing us to examine their emotional content, their source in human desire, and the loss and vulnerability they would work to prevent or deny. Shakespeare rewrites patriarchy, resisting its conclusions, revealing its idealized images of fathers as fictions constructed against the complexity of human desire. What perhaps made him attractive to his culture, and what continues to make him attractive to our own, is his interrogation of cultural orders. Shakespeare defies his literary fathers as the women of his drama resist patriarchy, and his subversion of cultural authority empowers their own.

Notes

1. The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, eds. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1980), Introduction, p. 4. See also Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976).

2. See Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (London: Phaidon, 1950), p. 240 ff.; and Joan Kelly-Gadol, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” in Women, History, and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 19-50.

3. “The patriarchal bard: feminist criticism and Shakespeare: King Lear and Measure for Measure,” in Political Shakespeare: new essays in cultural materialism, eds. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 88-108, esp. p. 102. See also Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1983). The development of Shakespearean feminism is also delineated by Carol Thomas Neely in her article “Feminist modes of Shakespearean criticism: Compensatory, Justificatory, Transformational,” Women's Studies, 9 (1981-2), 3-15.

4. Lenz, Greene, and Neely, p. 9.

5. “The patriarchal bard,” p. 98.

6. See, for example, Coppélia Kahn, “‘Magic of Bounty’: Timon of Athens, Jacobean Patronage, and Maternal Power,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, 38 (1987), 34-57; Carol Thomas Neely, Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985); Marilyn Williamson, The Patriarchy of Shakespeare's Comedies, (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1986); and Rewriting the Renaissance: the Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, eds. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986). Also exploring these issues were the papers presented at the session “Shakespeare and the New Feminisms,” held at the Shakespeare Association of America's 1987 meeting, chaired by David Scott Kastan, who, in his opening remarks, described this “New Feminism” as “seeking to locate difference in the cultural and textual densities they explore, and … to disrupt the binary that has been constructed between feminism's largely psycho-social concerns and the historical political focus of (what seems to me an equally inadequately theorized) new historicism. The new feminisms reveal that gender and politics are reciprocally tied, each at least partially responsible for the other, and literature is recognized as a significant cultural locus for the production and reproduction, the articulation and interrogation of these constructs” (“The Cell and the Beehive”).

7. Political Shakespeare, Introduction, p. 3. Also see essays in English Literary Renaissance, 16 (1986) by Jean E. Howard, “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies,” 13-43, and Louis Adrian Montrose, “Renaissance Literary Studies and the Subject of History,” 5-12. For one assessment of the recent relations between feminism and new historicism see Peter Erickson, “Rewriting the Renaissance, Rewriting Ourselves,” SQ, 38 (1987), 327-37.

8. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Towards An Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 157-210, esp. p. 174.

9. “‘The Father's House and the Daughter in It’: The Structures of Daughter-Father Relationship,” in Daughters and Fathers, eds. Lynda E. Boose and Betty S. Flowers, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, forthcoming). See also David Scott Kastan, “Shakespeare and the ‘Way of Womenkind’,” Daedalus, 3 (1982) 111, 115-30, esp. pp. 128-29.

10. Daughters and Fathers, forthcoming.

11. Cited in Coppélia Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), p. 15. See pp. 12-17 for a discussion of the Renaissance analogy between familial and political patriarchies.

12. The Book of Common Prayer 1559, ed. John E. Booty (Washington, D.C.: Folger Books, 1976), p. 297.

13. Margaret Loftus Ranald, “‘As Marriage Binds, and Blood Breaks’: English Marriage and Shakespeare,” SQ, 30 (1979), 68-81, esp. p. 73.

14. For further discussion of Lear's proposal, as well as an analysis of the ritual structure of Shakespearean marriage, see Lynda E. Boose, “The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare,” PMLA, 97 (1978), 325-47.

15. La Prima Parte de le Novelle del Bandello in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, 8 vols. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1958), Vol. II, 114.

16. Rubin, p. 174.

17. All Shakespeare citations are from The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1980).

18. Carol Thomas Neely's suggestive discussion of this and other “deaths” of Shakespearean heroines concludes with a recognition of the significance of the “death” as a public event: “Although the motif appears in all genres, playing dead can perhaps be seen as a female version of the tragic hero's literal and symbolic journeys. Its effect is not to transform the woman as the tragic hero is transformed, but to achieve the transformation of her image in the eyes of the hero and to alter and complicate the audience's view of her” (Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays, p. 53).

19. Orlando Furioso, trans. Sir John Harington (London: Richard Field, 1591), V.66.6-8. This translation of Orlando Furioso, Book V, also appears in Bullough, Vol. II, 82-104.

20. Raphael Holinshed, The Firste and Second Volumes of Chronicles (London: 1587), p. 12; also printed in Bullough, Vol. VII, 316-19.

21. Bullough, Vol. VII, p. 338 (King Leir, I.i.44-48).

22. In Shakespeare Criticism, ed. D. Nichol Smith (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1916), p. 285.

23. “The Limits of Politics: King Lear, Act I, scene i,” in Shakespeare's Politics, Allan Bloom with Harry V. Jaffa (New York: Basic Books, 1964), pp. 123-24.

24. “King Lear: The Lear Family Romance,” Centennial Review, XXIII (1979), 348-76, esp. p. 356.

25. Shakespeare Criticism, p. 286.

26. Daughters and Fathers. Rubin also points out that Levi-Strauss argues that “the incest taboo should best be understood as a mechanism to insure that such [exogamous] exchanges take place between families and between groups” (“The Traffic in Women,” p. 173).

27. The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. 11.