SOURCE: Kahn, Coppélia. “The Providential Tempest and the Shakespearean Family.” Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, edited by Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn, pp. 217-43. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.

[In the following essay, Kahn investigates the role of the family in the process of male identity construction as depicted in five Shakespearean romances.]

I

Shakespeare rarely portrays masculine selfhood without suggesting a filial context for it. Of all his heroes, only Timon has neither kith nor kin—but through his obsessive giving he tries vainly to make all Athens his family, dependent on him for nurturance. Even the most pathologically solitary hero, Richard III, defines himself by systematically exterminating his family and violating its bonds in novel ways. It goes without saying that Shakespeare depicts all his women characters as sisters, daughters, wives, or mothers. Cleopatra is only superficially an exception, for her milieu of Egyptian fecundity binds her profoundly to the human family through sexuality and procreation. Yet, at the same time, an intense ambivalence toward the family runs through Shakespeare's works, taking the familiar shape of conflicts between inheritance and individuality and between autonomy and relatedness. As Meredith Skura observes: “The family is so important that characters cannot even imagine themselves without one, yet every family must bring on its own destruction.”¹ That is, characters must break out of their families in order to grow up, and when they have founded families of their own, they must learn both to accept and then to let go of their children.

In this essay, I will set the Shakespearean quest for masculine selfhood in the context of the family and the life cycle. From the beginning of his career to the end, Shakespeare sought a dramatic and psychological strategy for dealing not only with our common ambivalence toward our families but specifically with the male passage from being a son to being a father. He found it through the romance, in one of its typical patterns of action that I shall call “the providential tempest.”² The five plays following this pattern are The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, Pericles, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest, all directly or indirectly based on narrative romance. They depict the separation of family members in a literal or metaphorical tempest; the resulting sorrow and confusion; and the ultimate reunion of the family, with a renewed sense of identity or rebirth for its members. This pattern is that of a journey, and it suggests a passage through time as well as through space—the individual's passage from emotional residence within the family to independence and adulthood. As depicted in the plays, the tempest and shipwreck initiating the main action represent the violence, confusion, and even terror of passing from one stage of life to the next, the feeling of being estranged from a familiar world and sense of self without another to hang onto.³

The only female protagonists in these tempest plays are Viola and Olivia in Twelfth Night, and Viola plays a man's part in most of the action. Marina, Perdita, and Miranda of the romances are accessory to their fathers' development as characters, rather than characters developed for their own sakes, and their spheres of action are severely restricted. While Hermione is strongly defined, it is Leontes' identity crisis that the play stresses. Clearly, with the exception of Twelfth Night, the pattern I am describing—of separation from and reunion with the family—reflects a male passage, and the point of view within the five plays shifts significantly from that of son to that of father.

Reading these five plays as a group, we watch a process of identity formation highlighted in two significantly interrelated crises: that of the youth emerging from the family, more than a child but still not quite a man, and that of the father who has not yet fully accepted his fatherhood. Erik Erikson's division of the lifelong process of identity formation into stages can help us to grasp the tempest action as a symbol for the way family relationships shape the growing self.⁴ The great normative crisis of identity occurs in adolescence; it is then that instinctual and social imperatives for intimacy with the opposite sex and pressures toward a settled choice of work and way of life create a crisis, defined by Erikson as “a necessary turning point, when development must move one way or another.”⁵ These imperatives and pressures create a recoil, a “regressive pull” back into the family, into the identifications of the early, preoedipal stage of ego building. In effect, the adolescent reexperiences separation and individuation, but not solely through his mother.

Peter Blos characterizes adolescence as dominated by two broad affective states: mourning and being in love.⁶ Confronted with the great imperative of finding someone to love, the adolescent must give up the strongest love he has known thus far, his love for his parents. To give it up, he must mourn them, and in mourning them, he has recourse to the usual mechanism of mourning: he identifies with them, or one of them. But he does this indirectly, by merging narcissistically with persons who can mirror him as that parent once did. In effect, he recapitulates the symbiotic merger with the mother preceding separation and individuation.⁷ This recapitulation occurs in what Blos calls the transitory narcissistic stage of adolescence, which normally precedes the definitive stage, the search for a heterosexual object. It is characterized by an overwhelming hunger for a love object of the same sex, in which the real identity of the object, the parent of the same sex, is denied. Whether it is positive or negative, identification with this same-sex object is necessary, as part of the mourning process, before heterosexual love can exist.⁸ It is this process of mourning the loss of the parent by identification, and finding a new object of love after working through identification, that The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night depict.

The next three plays take up the process of maturing at a later turning point in which identity is again a generational issue. Though the father-protagonists of the three romances have broken away and formed families of their own, they return to fighting old battles with their internalized original families in the attempt to redefine themselves as fathers instead of sons. They struggle to accept their difference from and dependence on women and to take parenthood as the measure of their mortality. Shakespeare resolves this crisis through the father-daughter relationship, using the daughter's chaste sexuality and capacity to produce heirs as a bridge to the hero's new identity as father. In the history plays, it was the son on whom the father relied for a reaffirmation of his identity through the male line of succession. In these tempest plays, the patriarchal stress on lineage is softened, but not really changed; the daughter instead of the son carries on the father's line. But whereas the history plays bypassed the role of women in the definition of male identity, these plays recast it. The daughters don't inherit a patrimony in the same sense as the sons did; rather, they are the inheritance of purified female sexuality that the father-heroes pass on to their sons-in-law.

In the first group of plays, the fear animating the identity crisis is the fear of losing hold of the self—in psychoanalytic terms, the fear of losing ego identity. Often it is expressed as the fear of being engulfed, extinguished, or devoured in the sea or in some oceanic entity. The adolescent in the throes of establishing that continuity of self-image, that basic inner stability on which identity is based, fears losing his still-emergent self in another through erotic fusion, which at the same time he ardently desires. What Erikson separates into two stages, adolescence and youth, Shakespeare treats as one in these comedies through courtship, the traditional comic action.⁹ Courtship is a time of self-exploration through amorous adventure and testing, which leads to the final choice of a mate, signifying the transition from youth to maturity.

The second group of plays, the romances, are more oedipally oriented than the first. In them, incestuous threat or wish motivates action, rather than the fear of losing ego identity, or identity confusion more closely related to preoedipal formation. C. L. Barber characterizes the difference between the comedies and the romances thus:

The festive comedies move out to the creation of new families; Pericles and The Winter's Tale move through experiences of loss to the recovery of family relations in and through the next generation … where regular comedy deals with freeing sexuality from the ties of family, these late romances deal with freeing family ties from the threat of sexual degradation.¹⁰

That threat comes, in various ways, from the psychic remnants of old filial relationship, persisting into maturity and preventing fathers from fully accepting the sexual powers of women and their own implication in the cycle from birth to death. Pericles, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest all mirror anxiety about—and even disgust at—desire, female sexuality, and procreation.

Shakespeare also brings out the emotional structure underlying these crises of filial identity through a striking device of repetition or doubling.¹¹ He first uses the twin as a double for the self in relation to the mother; then the daughter, repetition through generation, is a double for the self in relation to the father. Finally, in The Tempest he uses revenge—repeating what was done to you but reversing it onto the other—and the renunciation of revenge as a way of ending the contest of the self against time and against its own children.

Any psychoanalytic discussion of doubling is of course indebted to Rank and Freud, who first described it in literature as a neurotic manifestation of the Oedipus complex.¹² Freud discusses the double as an example of “the uncanny,” a mental representation of something familiar and homelike but at the same time secret, strange, and sinful—a representation, in short, of our earliest sexual feelings and wishes with regard to our parents, which we later perceive as guilty, repress, and hide. The double expresses the idea that these filial ties are inescapable and will cling forever, no matter how hard we try to shake them off. The double's typical activity in the literary sources cited by Rank and Freud is to pursue and unnerve the hero with his persistent, baffling presence, which specifically prevents the hero from loving a woman. Intervening at crucial moments to poison the hero's attempts at intimacy, the double thus prevents him from becoming independent from his family.

Freud and Rank also stress the double's power to bind the hero to his oedipal past in another way. The double, they maintain, is a potential death bringer, a projection of the castrating oedipal father, while at the same time it represents the hero's beloved, narcissistically/overestimated self. The double makes the hero's life a torment, but the hero's life also depends on the double's existence. If the hero tries to kill his double, he too will die; they are symbiotically bound to each other.

By expressing his protagonists' struggles toward identity through doubles, Shakespeare brings out the fear of ego loss and the regressive narcissistic pull of the family that Freud and Rank stress. But he also uses the double as a means of negotiating the difficult passage from filial rootedness to independence, to suggest a normal resolution of identity crises. Defining himself in and then against his double, the Shakespearean protagonist discovers and affirms his sexual identity and loosens confining family ties, so that “twinship and kinship are replaced by selfhood.”¹³

II

Now the twin-sibling plays, Errors and Twelfth Night. In each, the protagonist feels an intense affection for his twin that inspires his crucial actions, and the confusion caused by being mistaken for his twin leads ultimately not only to the desired reunion with the twin but to a previously unsought union with a marriage partner. The double of these plays, the beloved twin, brings with him not just the morbid anxieties Freud and Rank find but also an ultimately benign confusion that acts as a catalyst for reunion, rebirth, and fulfillment. The twin is a compromise figure, a projection of contending desires; it is through the twin that the protagonist retains ties with the filial past but also through the twin that he finds a mate and breaks with that past to create his own future. Searching for his twin and mistaken for him, Antipholus of Syracuse (Antipholus S.) meets Luciana and falls in love; grieving for her twin and disguised as him, Viola meets Orsino and falls in love.

But in their searching and grieving, Antipholus S. and Viola are both regressing to the earliest stage of identity formation: identification with one perceived as being the same as oneself, which is distinct from object choice, love for someone distinct from and outside the self, predicated on an already formed ego. Identification is first experienced at the mother's breast, when the infant fuses with one who is not yet perceived as “not me.” It is also in infancy that the mother's face mirrors the child to himself, confirming his existence through her response to him before he has an inner sense of his separateness and permanence.¹⁴ Thus the twin, as narcissistic mirror, represents the mother as the earliest, most rudimentary confirmation of the self.

In Errors, the twins' very names stress the idea behind the whole action, that identity is formed in relationship to “significant others.” Shakespeare changed the names from Menaechmus (in his source, Plautus' Menaechmi) to Antipholus, from the Greek anti + philos: love against or opposed to.¹⁵ The entire family, we realize as the play proceeds, has landed in Ephesus as either the direct or indirect result of storm, shipwreck, and separation. As each character is introduced, we see that he feels uprooted and alienated from himself because he has lost that “other” closest to him. The dominant metaphor for this collective psychic state is being lost in or on the sea—precisely the event that caused the state. Shakespeare thus internalizes the external and conventional events of the romance plot.

The focus of psychological interest rests on Antipholus of Syracuse, the melancholy, questing brother who comes to Ephesus in search of a self as well as a family. His first soliloquy crystallizes the interior action of the family romance:

He that commends me to mine own content
Commends me to the thing I cannot get.
I to the world am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,
(Unseen, inquisitive) confounds himself.
So I, to find a mother and a brother,
In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself.(16)

(Err. I.ii.33-40)

One might argue that Antipholus seeks to repeat an oedipal triangle, with his brother taking his father's place. But as the action focuses exclusively on his relationship to his brother, it seems, rather, that he wants to make a mirroring mother of his brother. He envisions extinction—total merger with an undifferentiated mass—as the result of his search. The image of a drop of water seeking another drop stresses his need for his identical twin but also suggests the futility of this means of self-definition. As half of a single drop of water, will Antipholus be more “content” or have more of a self? And the image of that one drop falling into a whole ocean conveys the terror of failing to find identity: irretrievable ego loss.

I hesitate to place much weight on Antipholus S. himself as a character with a complex inner world. Rather, his speech adds a powerful psychological dimension to the farcical action as a whole: it encourages us to see the incipient confusion and the ensuing descent into madness as fantasies of identity confusion and ego loss in adolescence, attendant on the break away from filial identifications and into adult identity. Erikson notes that when “identity hunger” is extreme, young people:

… are apt to attach themselves to one brother or sister in a way resembling that of twins. … They seem apt to surrender to a total identification with at least one sibling … in the hope of regaining a bigger and better [identity] by some act of merging. For periods they succeed, but the letdown which must follow the artificial twinship is only the more traumatic. Rage and paralysis follow the sudden insight—also possible in one of a pair of twins—that there is enough identity only for one, and that the other seems to have made off with it.¹⁷

The irony for Erikson's adolescent and for Shakespeare's character is that seeking identification by narcissistic mirroring leads only to the obliteration, not the discovery, of the self.

That obliteration takes the form of the “errors,” the comic confusions of identity, which provide the mirth of the play. The metaphorical and dramatic forms the errors take, however—metamorphosis, engulfment, and enchantment—allow for a psychological reading along with a farcical one and continue the theme of identity confusion and loss of ego identity. Shakespeare shifts the scene of Plautus' comedy from Epidamnum to Ephesus in order to call on all the associations of that city with magic and witchcraft (well-known to his audiences through St. Paul's visit to Ephesus), and he gains a language in which he can express that theme.

Metamorphosis is first hinted at when Antipholus S., quite naturally fearing he has been robbed, voices deeper anxieties about the robbery of his very identity, by “Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind, / Soul-killing witches that deform the body” (Err. I.ii.99-100). When at first he accedes, dazed and passive, to the new identity rather harshly attributed to him by his brother's wife, his response is parodied by that of his servant, who feels that he is being “transformed … both in mind and in my shape” to be an ape; to one who only plays a part, who isn't really who he seems to be (Err. I.ii.195-99). Then, falling in love with Luciana when she tenderly persuades him that he is someone else, Antipholus S. envisions her as a god, who would “create” him anew.

Calling her a mermaid and a siren, he picks up the oceanic imagery of his earlier soliloquy, and at this point the idea of metamorphosis shades into that of engulfment. Her sister would drown him, but she will rescue him. Metaphorically, she will save him from that obliteration of self, that inauthentic metamorphosis into another person, which her sister promised:

O, train me not, sweet mermaid, with thy note
To drown me in thy sister's flood of tears;
Sing, siren, for thyself, and I will dote;
Spread o'er the waves thy golden hairs,
And as a bed I'll take thee, and there lie, …

(Err. III.ii.45-49)

In raptures he continues, while she protests that he, as her sister's husband, ought to be saying such things to her sister, Adriana. Identifying himself ever more closely with Luciana as “mine own self's better part, / Mine eye's clear eye, my dear heart's dearer heart”—even saying “I am thee,” he asks her to marry him (Err. III.ii.61-66). But again parody questions this instant surrender of self to another, when Dromio of Syracuse wails: “I am an ass, I am a woman's man, and besides myself” (Err. III.ii.76-77). He equates metamorphosis with possession by a woman and possession by a woman with loss of self in the form of engulfment. In a hilariously disgusting blazon of the fat cook Luce, he identifies parts of her body with countries and continents: “spherical, like a globe,” she gushes grease, sweat, and rheum, and “lays claim” to Dromio, believing he is his twin. Woman becomes identified with those engulfing waters in which Antipholus S. feared to “confound” himself in Act I. Dromio's fears of being lost in Luce prove contagious; by the end of Act III, Antipholus S. regards Luciana as a mermaid luring him to death by drowning, and he hastens to leave on the next ship.

The play now takes up a third metaphor for loss of ego identity: possession by spirits. The mistaken arrest of Antipholus of Ephesus (Antipholus E.) for debt is described as seizure by “a devil,” “a fiend, a fury,” and the courtesan in the play is called “the devil's dam” who appears, like Satan, as “an angel of light” to gain men's souls. Metaphor becomes dramatic reality when the conjurer Dr. Pinch arrives to exorcise Antipholus E. But his efforts, of course, are vain. The real deliverance from the bonds of error is by angelic power. Pauline word play runs through the scenes focusing on Antipholus E.'s arrest; mistakenly and to no avail, he seeks deliverance from the sergeant's bonds with the coins—angels—which will pay his debt.¹⁸ These echoes of Paul's miraculous deliverance from prison prepare us for the denouement at the abbey, wherein the evil powers of Lapland sorcerers and Circe's cup show themselves to be providence in disguise.

Counterpointing this series of metaphorical and dramatic projections of what it is like to lose or “confound” one's identity, one's relationship to others, and one's grasp of reality in general, are two other senses of reality. Both involve a sense of time. As an aspect of its concern with the development of identity as process rather than a fixed state, Errors fittingly stresses the importance of time in two ways. First, from the beginning of the play, time is the means by which the network of obligations and relations in ordinary life is maintained, allowing people to experience and reaffirm their identities constantly. When the twins are mistaken for each other, appointments are broken, people are late, and the network breaks down. Much of the comic action depends on this precise and mundane sense of time. Contrasted with it is the idea that time is an organic process analogous to conception, birth, and growth. It proceeds at a proper pace toward a destined goal, can neither be hurried nor stopped, and is controlled by God, like the tempest itself. Emilia's final lines firmly link this sense of time with a sense of identity as growth in time—the serious and realistic theme underlying the farce:

Thirty-three years have I but gone in travail
Of you, my sons, and till this present hour
My heavy burden ne'er delivered.

(Err. V.i.400-402)

Identity grows through time and through loss, confusion, and challenge. Errors are part of a process whereby youth grows into and out of the family to find itself.

In Errors, the twin provides an affective bridge from filial to individual identity; seeking the twin, the hero finds his mate, but only when he is able to distinguish himself firmly from his twin. In Twelfth Night, we move a step further from the family, and the twin and other doubles function at first as projections of emotional obstacles to identity and then, in Viola and Sebastian, as the fulfillment of a wish for a way around the obstacles. The play abounds in images of engulfment and devouring connected with the sea and love; often it is suggested that love, like the sea, is boundless and voracious, swallowing up the lover. As John Hollander points out, the play is saturated in watery media, just as two of the main characters (and several of the minor ones) are suffused by their desires.¹⁹ Images of the sea (reinforced by allusions to ships, sailing, and sea trading), of tears, rain, liquor, urine, and the humors surge forth. The images are first stated in Orsino's famous opening speech:

O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou,
That notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe'er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute!

(TN I.i.9-14)

The idea of the sea is reiterated in the succeeding image of Orsino—like Actaeon, being torn apart by his desires. Orsino reverses the image in comparing his love to a woman's, saying:

Alas, their love may be call'd appetite,
No motion of the liver, but the palate,
That suffers surfeit, cloyment, and revolt;
But mine is all as hungry as the sea,
And can digest as much.

(TN II.iv.98-102)

Still, everything about Orsino proclaims that it is he who is consumed by desire and not the opposite. Skittish, giddy, “a very opal” of erotic whim, he himself is like the mutable sea. Similarly, when love comes stealing upon Olivia like the plague, her self-mortifying dedication to a dead brother vanishes instantly, and she becomes a bold wooer. When Orsino and Olivia love, they lose themselves in desire.

Interacting with this tendency to lose the self in surrender to Eros, however, is the attempt to retain identity, through a narcissistic mirroring similar to what Antipholus S. sought in Errors, and through distancing oneself from the object of desire. Viola copes with the supposed loss of her twin brother by in effect becoming him; when she disguises herself as a man, she is another Sebastian, her twin's twin. Viola is parallelled and contrasted with Olivia, another grieving sister; “to season a brother's dead love” she vows to water her chamber once a day with tears. Sequestered with the memory of her brother, she rejects Orsino's constant suits and punishes the world by withdrawing her beauty from it. When Viola falls in love with Orsino, she devotes herself to a martyrdom similar to Olivia's. As long as her disguise proves convincing, she can never confess or consummate her love, and, as Orsino's page, can only express it by furthering his suit to Olivia, her rival. Viola's disguise, it must be said, is to some extent necessitated by her circumstances, and unlike Olivia's attachment to her brother, it is a conscious assumption of a different identity that she maintains in tandem with her real one. Both move, however, from loving dead brothers to loving unattainable male figures, maintaining love with a distance that does not threaten their persistent ties to the family through their brothers.

Orsino's love parallels theirs in the sense that his object is hopelessly unattainable, and in the exacerbated self-consciousness and distancing it involves. His desire for Olivia can never be satisfied. Even though Orsino, like Olivia when she falls in love with Cesario, gives himself over to passion, the fact that he chooses an unyielding object with whom real intimacy is impossible argues his fear of losing himself in passion.

Thus, while all three characters fall madly in love, they all, in different ways, defend against Eros as a threat to the integrity and stability of the self. It is the narcissistic mirroring in which Viola and Olivia engage, however, that is most relevant to the Shakespearean family romance. The twin and the sibling, for Viola and for Olivia, are versions of a need for primary ontological reassurance. Like the mother, they are not fully differentiated from the self (they look the same, or similar, and are of the same blood), and thus they reaffirm the self at the most basic level but keep it from developing further.

However, the fact that mirroring is sought from a double of the opposite sex focuses the issue specifically on sexual identity rather than on identity per se, as in Errors. The errors of Twelfth Night are not merely those of mistaken identity, as in the earlier play, but errors that create an aura of doubt about the characters' sexual identity—for us rather than for them. Twelfth Night is frequently read as a play about masking, about the conscious and unconscious assumption of false identities and about levels of self-knowledge and self-deception;²⁰ this theme is played out prominently through Viola's transsexual disguise.

For the greater part of the play, until Act V, scene 2, each of the three major characters is wholly certain of who it is that he or she loves: Orsino, unaware of his growing attachment to Cesario, ardently pursues Olivia; Olivia gives herself passionately to a man she knows as Cesario; and Viola is constant to Orsino. Viola's transsexual disguise, until she and Sebastian are mistaken for each other in the duel with Sir Andrew, works on us more deeply and disturbingly than it does on the characters it fools, precisely because it fools them and doesn't fool us. As we watch Viola mediating between Olivia and Orsino, inhabiting one sex with them and another with us, we are forced to conceive of several novel and conflicting ways in which sexual identity might be detached from personal identity; we are cut loose from our habitual assumption that the two are inextricable, that the person is defined by his or her sex. In effect, we experience that state of radical identity confusion typical of adolescence, when the differences between the sexes are as fluid as their desires for each other, when a boy might feel more like a girl than a boy, or a girl might love another girl rather than a boy.²¹

Consider these several possibilities. Olivia believes Cesario to be a man, but we know he isn't, and are titillated by the suggestion that Olivia, loving a woman instead of a man, isn't the woman she should be. Similar doubts arise with Orsino, who has unclasped his bosom so readily to a charming boy. At the same time, Shakespeare lets us see that both Olivia and Orsino are drawn to Viola because they find in her those characteristics of the opposite sex to which they are attracted. Orsino says:

For they shall yet belie thy happy years,
That say thou art a man. Diana's lip
Is not more smooth and rubious; thy small pipe
Is as the maiden's organ, shrill and sound,
And all is semblative a woman's part.
I know thy constellation is right apt for this affair.

(TN I.iv.30-35)

Olivia, musing on Cesario's statement that he is “a gentleman,” declares:

                                                                                                    I'll be sworn thou art;
Thy tongue, thy face, thy limbs, actions, and spirit
Do give thee five-fold blazon. Not so fast: soft! soft!
Unless the master were the man.

(TN I.v.295-98)

At some level, Cesario is a homosexual object choice for each of them, and at another, a heterosexual one. Yet “she” or “he” is the same person, one person. Creatures whose sexual identity is not simply and clearly male or female—hermaphrodites or eunuchs—threaten the binary opposition on which sexual identity, and much else in culture, is based. Without the strict differentiation of male from female, psychic integrity disappears and chaos impends. When Viola refers to herself as a “poor monster,” she but touches on the fearsome aspects of her disguise that have been evident to us as she moves ambiguously from Orsino to Olivia.

Yet, in the delicate comic irony of the scenes between Viola and each of the other two, Shakespeare reminds us through Viola's poignant double entendres of what Viola herself never forgets: that no matter how the duke and countess see her, she is not androgynous but irreducibly a woman. The fluid sexual proclivities of youth promise to clash with the reality principle, for that “little thing” she thinks she lacks of being a man is crucial.

The early introduction of Sebastian into the play, however, assures us that all will end properly with a mate of the opposite sex for both Orsino and Olivia. When Sebastian and Viola recognize each other as brother and sister in the last scene, and Olivia is reprieved from the shadow of our doubt that she might have been in love with a woman, Sebastian says: “So comes it, lady, you have been mistook. / But nature to her bias drew in that” (TN V.i.257-58). Nature's bias is usually regarded as a heterosexual one, but the line is actually ambiguous.²² “Nature's bias” can mean that Olivia followed nature in loving a woman for a short and perhaps necessary period, before actually marrying a man.²³ Similarly, Orsino perhaps needed to see Viola as a girlish boy before he could accept her as a real and ardent woman. The dramatic device of identical, opposite-sex twins allows Orsino and Olivia to navigate the crucial passage from identification to object choice, from adolescent sexual experimentation to adult intimacy, from filial ties to adult independence, without even changing the objects of their desires.

Feste's song, “When that I was and a little tiny boy,” which concludes the play, states in its offhand, colloquial, cryptic way the conception of a man's life cycle in terms of psychosexual stages that underlies the action of Twelfth Night. Several interpreters have suggested that the “foolish thing” of the first stanza is the membrum virile.²⁴ Before the speaker comes to “man's estate,” sexuality can be like a toy, playful and open to experimentation, fluid, spontaneous, and uncommitted. But man's estate in the second stanza implies status, responsibility, wealth, and property, which “knaves and thieves” may cheat him out of. He must leave sexual play behind and, in the third stanza, take himself a wife. Now the issue is “swaggering,” the pretense and display of courtship, as we have seen it in the play through Orsino's elegant embassies of love and Sir Andrew's pathetic attempts at valor, neither of which “thrive.”

The song skips over marriage and parenthood, coming to rest in the puzzling fourth stanza at the last stage of life, a decline into drunkenness and sleep,²⁵ before ending with a sigh at the perpetual recurrence of the cycle: “A great while ago the world began … / But that's all one, our play is done.” Twelfth Night traces the evolution of sexuality as related to identity, from the playful and unconscious toyings of youthful courtship, through a period of sexual confusion, to a final thriving in which swaggering is left behind and men and women truly know themselves through choosing and loving the right mate.

III

With Pericles, written six or seven years after Twelfth Night and toward the end of Shakespeare's career, the family romance moves to its second stage: the protagonist as father, and his daughter as a different kind of double than the twin, one who repeats but reverses his experience and lifts him decisively out of the oedipal family of his past. Through her he becomes a father anew, accepting his fatherhood as his identity, and stops trying vainly to deny his mortality.

Pericles begins by plunging boldly into a representation of the oedipal family. The hero, seeking the hand of a princess, must win her by answering the riddle her father Antiochus has devised, or lose his head. The riddle simultaneously proclaims and hides the incest between father and daughter:

I am no viper, yet I feed
On mother's flesh, which did me breed.
I sought a husband, in which labour
I found that kindness in a father.
He's father, son, and husband mild;
I mother, wife, and yet his child:
How they may be, and yet in two,
As you will live, resolve it you.

(Per. I.i.65-72)

Riddles occur at points of life crisis in folklore and literature because the riddle structure offers an expressive model for the reconciliation of essential dualities. It creates confusion and then establishes clarity, reaffirming the rules and essential distinctions on which social life depends.²⁶ Underlying the riddle in Pericles is the ancient image of the uroboros, the mythical snake swallowing its own tail, nourishing itself from its own substance. In a Jungian sense, the uroboros is:

an expression of the archetypal domination of nature and the unconscious over life. … In this phase the Archetypal Feminine not only bears and directs life as a whole, and the ego in particular, but also takes everything that is born of it back into its womb of origination and death.²⁷

It signifies the mystical and perhaps sinister unity of life and death in woman, a mortal creature who gives birth to another creature who will also die. In the specific context of incest that the riddle traces, however, this mystical continuity of life and death is perverted. The union between the princess and her father denies the ongoing process of producing life from one generation to the next; her womb, receiving the seed from which she herself was generated, is a haven of sterility and death instead of the source of life. The uroboros suggests the incestuous oedipal family doubling back upon itself, consuming generational differences instead of sending forth new generations. The riddle and the Antioch experience as a whole are thus a negative analogue for “the family romance in Pericles [which] brings together a separated father, mother, and daughter only to divide the generations again for reproduction and rule.”²⁸ In particular, the riddle stresses the destructive confluence of father and daughter, which will be canceled out by the role Marina is to play as one who figuratively and positively “gives birth” to her own father.

Clearly the father-daughter incest of the riddle is a projection of the son's desire to possess the mother and is associated with Pericles as a son. Whether he answers the riddle or feigns ignorance, he is helpless in Antiochus' hands, and through the rest of the play, he is dogged with miseries—though he does nothing to deserve them. Not his character, but the action of the providential tempest demands that he suffer punishment for a guilty desire not dramatized as his. Antiochus' riddle-scheme impressively depicts the castration threat (the stage is decked with the heads of failed suitors), while Pericles' meek, passive response to it represents the son's desire to renounce his phallic challenge to the father and regain his love, in effect taking the mother's place.

Pericles' episodic voyages from place to place, and his successive experiences of loss, are symbolic confrontations with oedipal desire and oedipal fear. The recurrent father figures he encounters represent his continuing difficulty in resolving his image of the father and his position in relation to him. Simonides, on whose shores Pericles is washed up half-dead after the first tempest, is a jolly, generous, nurturant figure who at first delights in playing the possessive father as a joke, then gives his daughter Thaisa to Pericles with his blessing. Cleon, the governor of a kingdom decimated by famine, is aided by the hero with gifts of food; out of gratitude, Cleon takes in Pericles' daughter Marina after the second tempest, when her mother (Thaisa) supposedly dies. But Cleon proves spineless before his envious, scheming wife, who arranges for the girl's death; thus he betrays Pericles' trust. Cerimon, a holy, wise, and kindly magus, restores Thaisa to life by his art. Lysimachus, the governor of Mytilene whom Marina redeems from carnal vice, charitably reunites her with her father and becomes his son-in-law.

Collectively, these figures bear an array of ambivalent traits: generous and impoverished, powerful and powerless, ascetic and fleshly. Throughout his encounters with them, Pericles can only bow his head, suffer, and endure. Only once does he show initiative and act a hero's part—whereupon the second tempest hits him. He is pointedly enjoined to learn patience, the virtue analogous to renunciation of the oedipal project. Unable to do so, he withdraws from the world in a deathlike trance, from which only his daughter can save him.

The shift from twin to daughter as the figure through whom the hero gains his final identity is crucial. What it means is that he breaks out of time conceived as a repetition of oedipal patterns and breaks into the future through his daughter and his own new family. The twin is the hero's physical and temporal double; born at the same time and looking just like him, he represents the hero's ties to the preoedipal past. But the daughter, of the opposite sex, born from but after the hero, the product of his union with a woman, is not his mirror image but his successor and opposite. Her fruitful chastity is the opposite of his mother's problematical oedipal sexuality, and (in Pericles and The Winter's Tale) reunion with her precedes reunion with his wife. Thus she validates his separateness from his own father, his fatherhood, his uniqueness.

Pericles falls conspicuously into two halves, the first tracing the hero's adventures, the second beginning some years later when his daughter approaches maturity and centering on her. Her life recapitulates his in that she too suffers several “tempests”. She is threatened with death by her foster mother, captured by pirates, and finally delivered to a brothel to become a whore. Her name and her character make her a walking symbol of the tempest action:

                                                                      Ay me! poor maid,
Born in a tempest, when my mother died,
This world to me is as a lasting storm,
Whirring me from my friends.

(Per. IV.i.18-20)

In addition, her oblique, cryptic, enigmatic mode of speech links her to the riddling, incestuous princess of Antioch. Plainly enough, her relationship with Pericles in the reunion scene is the reverse of the father-daughter incest of the play's beginning, her redemptive chastity paradoxically more truly fruitful than the princess' lust. Pericles calls her “Thou that beget'st him that did thee beget” (Per. V.i.195). Her purity banishes the shadow of oedipal sexuality and brings the hero back to his wife and to the world.

IV

In an illuminating essay, C. L. Barber says that “the primary motive which is transformed in The Winter's Tale … is the affection of Leontes for Polixenes, whatever name one gives it.”²⁹ Though Leontes is a mature man—king, husband, father—the nine-months' visit of his boyhood friend reveals that he is still split between two identities, the boy of the past and the father of the present. Following J. I. M. Stewart (who follows Freud) in interpreting Leontes' jealousy, I would argue that the hero's belief that his wife loves his best friend is his defense against the horrified realization that he too still loves that friend, his way of saying: “Indeed, I do not love him, she loves him!”³⁰ Recall the appealing imagery used to describe the affection that “rooted” between Leontes and Polixenes in their boyhoods. It portrays a paradise of sameness and oneness, the complete untroubled identity of each with the other:

We were as twinn'd lambs that did frisk i' th' sun,
And bleat the one at th'other: what we chang'd
Was innocence for innocence: we knew not
The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dream'd that any did.

(WT I.ii.67-71)

Clearly, Polixenes is Leontes' double, one of the same sex and age who only mirrors him; loving Polixenes is depicted as guiltless, Edenic, and asexual, as opposed to loving a woman. It is also a love that denies time; Leontes and his friend were “Two lads that thought there was no more behind / But such a day to-morrow as to-day, and to be boy eternal” (WT, I.ii.63-65).

The homosexual implications of this nostalgic fantasy are less important than what it suggests about Leontes' attitude toward his mature sexuality, his manliness. He would like to escape and repudiate it, because being a husband and father means entrusting one's sexual dignity to a daughter of Eve, ceding the future to one's children, and facing death. Being “boy eternal,” on the other hand, means being free of sexual desire, with its risks, its complications, and its implication in the procreative cycle, and being, though only in fantasy, immortal. In Polixenes' idyllic picture of boyhood, childish innocence is contrasted with adult sinfulness, and that sinfulness is then specifically associated with the women he and Leontes married, the “temptations” later “born” to them. The association of sin with the carnal pleasure legitimized by marriage betokens a guilt-ridden reluctance to accept, let alone appreciate, the natural desire of men for women—a reluctance soon rationalized in the violent misogyny through which Leontes voices his jealousy, the conviction that women are false through and through.

Having lost the mirror of his masculine identity in Polixenes, Leontes then seeks it in Mamillius, as he normally would in the patriarchal Shakespearean world. But his jealousy provokes him, ironically, to misinterpret the strong physical resemblance between himself and Mamillius. While Shakespeare makes it clear that this resemblance is the legitimate confirmation of Leontes' sexual union with Hermione, and the proof of her fidelity, Leontes finds Hermione's assertion of it another indication of female treachery:

                                                                      … they say we are
Almost as like as eggs; women say so,
(That will say anything) …

(WT I.ii.129-31)

In several significant ways, Shakespeare makes Mamillius a symbol of the union of male and female. His name associates him with the maternal function of nursing, and he is shown in the female company of his mother and her attendants. But he is also “a gentleman of the greatest promise” and universally acknowledged as the future ruler of Sicily, Leontes' heir. The news of his death arrives immediately upon Leontes' denial of the oracle, an act that spells Hermione's doom. That is, Mamillius dies when Leontes denies most absolutely his natural and legitimate sexual union with the feminine, with Hermione, of which Mamillius is the sign and seal. And he is driven to deny it because he cannot sustain it. Despite his age, his kingship, and his fatherhood, emotionally Leontes is stuck at the developmental stage preceding the formation of identity, the stage of undifferentiated oneness with the mother, on which his oneness with Polixenes was modeled.³¹ He cannot sustain a relationship with a woman based on the union of his and her separate identities, in which trust and reciprocity mediate that separateness.

Fittingly, in robbing Leontes of an heir, Mamillius' death deprives him of a supremely important aspect of his male identity. Just as Macbeth cannot rest content with kingship so long as he lacks heirs to pass it on to, so Leontes is incomplete without an heir, and his lack of one is the direct result of his inability to accept his dependence on feminine power and to sustain a trusting union with Hermione. With the deaths of Mamillius and (seemingly) Hermione, Leontes' delusion lifts, and he enters into a period of realization and repentance. At this point Shakespeare makes explicit, through the figure of Father Time, connections that have been implicit in the first half of the play: those between the human experience of time in the life cycle, women, and the formation of masculine identity.

Inga-Stina Ewbank shows how Leontes, crazy in his jealousy, acts with feverish haste, “goes against time and is therefore blind to truth.” In the tradition of Renaissance iconography appropriated by Shakespeare in this play, time is a father, an old man, just what Leontes does not want to be. Ironically, in defying Father Time, he denies his own fatherhood and deprives himself of a son and a future. He is plunged into seemingly endless mourning for his past actions. As Ewbank says, now Leontes “has to become aware of truth in a wider sense … through subjection to Time the Revealer.”³² It is in this second half of the play that women, Paulina and Perdita, gain effective dramatic power to nurture men; concurrently, time becomes the revealer, whose daughter is truth, rather than the destroyer, tempus edax, who seized Mamillius and Hermione. The play moves to “a world ransomed” (Bohemia), and through a number of parallels in dramatic structure and action, Shakespeare keeps alive his “primary motive,” Leontes' feeling for Polixenes, now changed into the wide gap of enmity dividing the once “twinn'd” brothers. But this time the younger generation, the sons and daughters, are to redeem (or in Shakespeare's metaphor “beget”) their fathers, restoring them to new identities as fathers.

Camillo's plot to present Florizel as his father's ambassador to Leontes provides the middle term by which the breaches between father and son, and brother and brother (Leontes and Polixenes), can both be healed at once. As Murray Schwartz argues: “By impersonating his father, Florizel can replace him without really replacing him.”³³ But more important for the play's main action, the transformation of Leontes' affection for Polixenes, Florizel in the latter's place bridges the gap between the two men and makes them friends again, not as “twinn'd lambs” but as men who have erred, suffered, and lost. The king's greeting to his future son-in-law makes this change clear:

Your mother was most true to wedlock, prince;
For she did print your royal father off,
Conceiving you …
                                                  … Most dearly welcome!
And your fair princess—goddess! O! alas,
I lost a couple that 'twixt heaven and earth
Might thus have stood, begetting wonder, as
You, gracious couple, do; and then I lost
(All mine own folly) the society,
Amity too, of your brave father, whom
(Though bearing misery) I desire my life
Once more to look on him.

(WT V.i.123-25, 129-37)

Florizel and Perdita represent complementary modes of mediating separation and difference from significant others, a crucial task in identity formation. He fights his father, then reconciles with him. Perdita, on the other hand, does not fight but subsumes opposites into a transcendent reality. On the sexual level, she reconciles virginity and erotic appeal, modesty and abandonment; mythically, through the imagery and ambiance of Bohemia, she is associated with “things dying” and “things newborn,” with mother earth, the womb and tomb of all. She combines the qualities of the chaste preoedipal mother and the sexually desirable oedipal mother, symbolically uniting Leontes' divided attitudes toward women.

Significantly, though, Leontes' recognition of Florizel precedes his recognition of Perdita; he regains a son before he regains a daughter, thus recasting his relationship with his “brother,” Polixenes, before he goes on to recognize and recast his relationship with the feminine in Perdita and then Hermione. This sequence of reunions recapitulates the sequence of identity development for which I am arguing. The total identity of like with like which Leontes found with Polixenes was an effort to repeat the mother-child symbiotic unity and to avoid male identity. When Leontes “takes” Florizel “for” Polixenes as well as “for” Mamillius, he is accepting paternity, his and Polixenes', as the crucial component of his male identity—and paternity is equally based upon his separateness from the feminine and his union with it. To acknowledge Perdita as his daughter is to accept the sexuality he had wanted to repudiate; to acknowledge her as his heir is to accept the mortality he had wanted to escape. It is fitting that Leontes, as he clasps Hermione's hand (that crucial gesture again), characterizes his reunion with her in terms of the most primitive, elemental human activity, begun at the mother's breast:

                                                                                O, she's warm!
If this be magic, let it be an art
Lawful as eating.

(WT V.iii.109-11)

V

The island setting of The Tempest and the centrality of Prospero as demiurge make it a fantasy of omnipotence. Prospero not only controls; he creates. He devises scenarios of his deepest wishes and causes them to be enacted, redesigning his world so as to rectify or compensate for his past. The play's several interwoven actions—the courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda, the ordeal and illumination of the court party, the usurpations attempted by Antonio and Sebastian, and by Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo—are all foreseen or overseen by Prospero. They are his attempts to work through his oedipal past, to complete himself. As such, they are only partly successful. He redefines himself as man rather than magician, and regains his dukedom. But while he gives up his omnipotence in the end, he never recognizes and accepts his sexuality and his relationship to women as Leontes does. Unlike Pericles and The Winter's Tale, The Tempest does not depict the rebirth of a family as well as of a man, and thus Prospero's final identity lacks the fullness of that achieved by the other heroes.³⁴

Unlike them, Prospero has no wife; strangely, he doesn't even allude to his duchess' fate in the otherwise detailed account of his past that he gives Miranda. Moreover, his only mention of his wife is highly ambivalent, at once commending and questioning her chastity: “Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and / She said thou wast my daughter” (Tmp. I.ii.56-57). In addition to Miranda, the only other woman in the play is Sycorax, the “foul witch” and bad mother who penned Ariel in a cloven pine and gave birth to Caliban the freckled whelp. Marina and Perdita as doubles of their fathers grow up independently from them, their qualities and powers developing spontaneously and freely. They then function as mothers to their fathers by “delivering” them to new identities as fathers. They also serve as doubles of their mothers, uniting chastity with fertility and countering their mothers' oedipally tinged sexuality. Miranda, on the other hand, has never left her father. She is his creation, exclusively nurtured, tutored, and controlled by him on the island. Her sexuality, like that of the other daughter-doubles, is firmly allied with the divine order behind nature. But it is Prospero who defines and guards that sexuality, subsuming it into his larger project for the settling of old scores and the resumption of his role in Milan.

On a larger scale, Prospero's subjugation of sexuality in Miranda is figured in the antithesis between Ariel and Caliban. Spirit and flesh, air and earth, god and beast: these facets of human existence, it is implied, are decisively sundered in Prospero as in his underlings, whom he keeps separate by anxious, vigilant control. Ironically, neither character is actually as distinct from the other or as one-dimensional as Prospero thinks he is; each has potential that the magus is too busy with his task of defensive control to notice. Though Ariel is not human and cannot feel, he knows what sympathy and love are and moreover, values them as a human being would:

ARIEL.
                                                                                                                                            The King,
His brother, and yours, abide all three distracted,
And the remainder mourning over them,
Brimful of sorrow and dismay …
                              … Your charm so strongly works 'em,
That if you now beheld them, your affections
Would become a tender.
PROSP.
                                                  Dost thou think so, spirit?
ARIEL.
Mine would, sir, were I human.
PROSP.
                                                  And mine shall.
Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling
Of their afflictions, and shall not myself,
One of their kind, that relish all as sharply,
Passion as they, be kindlier mov'd than thou art?

(Tmp. V.i.11-14, 16-24)

Prospero, who is human, has to be reminded that he has a heart by one who lacks it. The terms of endearment with which he plies Ariel and no one else are wasted on the spirit, who nonetheless has a touch of humanity. On the other hand, the savage and deformed slave on whose nature, Prospero claims, nurture will never stick, reveals a touching sensitivity to beauty and a capacity for wonder to which his master is oblivious. Caliban gives his heart, however foolishly, to Stephano and Trinculo, but at least he has affections. All that matters to Prospero, though, is that Caliban tried to rape his daughter; it was then that the magician abandoned the task of educating his creature and removed him from the cell to imprisonment in a rock (Tmp. I.ii.346-64). In the last scene, Prospero hardly gives Caliban's moral enlightenment its due, though he hints he'll pardon him and directs him back to the cell instead of the rock. Ariel finally gains his freedom, as Prospero gains his, in renouncing revenge, but Caliban is likely to remain confined on the island, as Prospero's sexuality remains confined in himself and in Miranda's chaste marriage.

Essentially, in coming from Milan to the island, Prospero went from childlike, self-absorbed dependency to paternal omnipotence, skipping the steps of maturation in between. Whether he surrendered the cares of state to Antonio or whether Antonio stole the state for himself (Prospero's self-contradictory account suggests both; see Tmp. I.ii.66-132), Antonio in effect served as his brother's parental provider before casting him out.³⁵ Then, assuming dominion over the island, Prospero became free to pursue his studies in a boundlessly nurturant environment, without significant rivalry. The island was his virgin space: he was the first man on it. Having previously withdrawn from all competition in the world of men, under these special conditions he was given a second chance to eradicate his father's preeminence and priority in time, and become his father's equal, through preeminence and priority on the island. As Harry Berger argues, the island is like a child's microsphere, where he makes a model of his painful experiences so as “to play at doing something that was in reality done to him,” and thus “redeems his failures and strengthens his hopes.”³⁶ This “playing” is a magical, wish-fulfillment form of delayed growing up for Prospero.

Specifically, he plays out rivalries which he never fully confronted before, using his brother as a stand-in for his father. He does so through a brilliant compromise between revenge and charity, which allows him to have his cake and eat it too. When Providence brings his treacherous brother and his brother's confederate Alonso to the island in a tempest, he re-creates for them his own near-fatal voyage “in a rotten carcass of a butt” years before. He subjects Alonso to the threat of usurpation and the seeming loss of his son, again versions of their actions against him. These trials would add up to a tidy revenge were they not sheer illusion, the product of Prospero's strenuous art, and were they not perpetrated for the sake of arousing “heart-sorrow and a clear life ensuing.” They are and are not revenge. For Prospero to take revenge in reality would be to repeat what was done to him and become mired in the family past, in a cycle of successive revenges. But not to take revenge would be passivity and impotence. By recognizing his own anger in the realization that “the rarer action lies in virtue than in vengeance,” and by stopping short of revenge, he breaks out of repetition, out of the revenge cycle, and out of his oedipal past. But he fails to re-create in any sexual relationship the life-giving love experience first known with the mother.³⁷

Delineating the centrality of the rival sibling motif to the Shakespearean conception of masculinity, Joel Fineman argues that “branching pairs of siblings, real or virtual, male and female, rooted together in synonymous rivalry” are crucial to male identity. For since the male's first sense of self is implicated with the mother, in order to define himself he must separate decisively from her; he must establish a crucial difference. Fineman sees fratricidal rivalry as the adult rephrasing of this early, essential differentiation, and he regards it as essential to the next step in masculine identity formation, the oedipal conflict and its resolution.³⁸ Among Shakespearean rivals, Prospero neither fights his brother to the death, as Claudius does King Hamlet, or Hal Hotspur, nor reconciles with him as does Oliver with Orlando, or Proteus with Valentine. Rather, he effects the unique compromise I have described. But that compromise brings him no closer to acknowledging his sexuality or to uniting with the feminine, because he has still not fully worked through his oedipal past, or perhaps because he has sublimated it too well in his art.

Presumably, Prospero's years on the island were devoted to two ends: perfecting his art and perfecting Miranda. Her chastity, like Marina's and Perdita's, functions as a denial of her father's past desires. By giving her to Ferdinand, the son of his brother's partner in crime, and ensuring legitimate heirs to his regained dukedom, he symbolically resolves his old rivalries and validates his new identity as duke. The summit of Pericles' and Leontes' lives is reunion with their daughters and then with their wives: recovery of what they denied and lost before. In contrast, the triple crown of Prospero's life is to give up revenge, then to give his daughter away, and finally to give up his art.

A final question suggests itself. All through the play, Shakespeare stresses in Prospero a superb combination of power and control. There are signs of strain in his tetchiness with Ariel, his disgust with Caliban, his obsession with Miranda's virtue, his hatred of Antonio. But on the whole, he commands his art in the service of giving vent to but transcending his violent feelings. Why must he renounce his art? Why can't he keep it and hold his dukedom too, since it has served his worldly and his personal aims so well? He gives it up because he doesn't need it any more, because with its aid he has accomplished the project of emerging from the family and becoming his own man, the Duke of Milan. The cost of this achievement, however, is sexual and social isolation.

A romance is a fiction of wish fulfillment. The plays I have discussed are all romances by virtue of their sources, or their nature as dramas, or both. They articulate the ambivalent wish to get free of the family and find a self outside it, while at the same time to stay within it, nurtured by its loves. All these plays seek a compromise between the two conflicting urges, and the compromise turns on the finding of a mate. From the male protagonist's point of view, this means that it turns on his ability to accept woman and sustain intimacy with her. She is at once the seal of his male identity and the obstacle to it; he fears her and he needs her. Without her, he can neither leave his family of origin and find himself, nor father his own family and play his part in the patriarchal world. At the cost of great suffering, Leontes wins the fullest acceptance of woman, and The Winter's Tale presents the richest vision of male identity defined within the family. Leontes is both, and equally, husband and father. Significantly, though, the family romance concludes with The Tempest, in which woman is most strongly repressed. Prospero's identity is based entirely on his role as father, and his family is never united or complete. The Shakespearean family romance, then, remains closer to the imperfect realities we live with than to the wishes we cherish.

Notes

1. Meredith Skura, “Interpreting Posthumus' Dream from Above and Below: Families, Psychoanalysts, and Literary Critics” (Chapter 11 in [Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, edited by Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980]).

2. See Frank Kermode's Introduction to the new Arden edition of The Tempest (London: Methuen, 1954) for a useful discussion of this motif in relation to its literary and historical sources and its intellectual background.

3. Several Shakespearean critics have written perceptively on the tempest motif. First and notable is G. Wilson Knight, Myth and Miracle (London: Chatto and Windus, 1929) and The Shakespearian Tempest (London: Chatto and Windus, 1932), who finds the storm “percurrent in Shakespeare as a symbol of tragedy” and sees the opposition of storm and music as central to the canon. Others are Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1965) and Douglas Peterson, Time, Tide, and Tempest: A Study of Shakespeare's Romances (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1973). So far as I know, no one has pursued the psychological interpretation of the tempest that I will present here.

4. For Erikson's concept of identity, see his Identity: Youth and Crisis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964), 22-23, 50, 159-60 and passim; for the eight stages of psychosexual development, see his Childhood and Society, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), 247-75. I will be concerned here with three of the four stages succeeding latency: adolescence, characterized by a conflict between identity and role confusion; youth, by a conflict between intimacy and isolation; and maturity, by a conflict between generativity and stagnation.

5. Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis, p. 16.

6. Peter Blos, On Adolescence: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation (New York: Free Press, 1962), 100, but see 87-128 and passim.

7. Symbiotic merger and the separation-individuation process are described and analyzed in Margaret S. Mahler, Fred Pine, and Anni Bergman, The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation (New York: Basic Books, 1975).

8. Blos, pp. 90-91.

9. For a brief description of these stages, see Erikson, Childhood and Society, pp. 261-66; for a more extensive discussion, see Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis, pp. 142-207.

10. C. L. Barber, “‘Thou that beget'st him that did thee beget’: Transformation in Pericles and The Winter's Tale,” Shakespeare Survey, 22 (1969), 59-67.

11. I am greatly indebted to John T. Irwin, Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1975), for the ideas of the sibling as a double, of incest and revenge as forms of repetition, and the relation of doubling, incest, and revenge to the sequence of generations within the family.

12. Otto Rank, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, ed. and trans. Harry Tucker, Jr. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1971), first published in 1914, expanded 1925. See also Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), 17, pp. 217-52.

13. Marjorie Garber, “Coming of Age in Shakespeare,” The Yale Review, 66 (1977), 517-33. Her understanding of sexual maturation in Shakespeare parallels mine at several salient points.

14. See D. W. Winnicott's description of this process in Playing and Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1971), pp. 111-18. Paula Elkisch, “The Psychological Significance of the Mirror,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 5 (1965), 235-44, relates the need to see oneself in a mirror to narcissistic crises of identity; one who fears ego loss turns to the mirror for protection against it, trying to retrieve in the mirrored image his self, his boundaries. Morris W. Brody, “The Symbolic Significance of Twins in Dreams,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 21 (1952), 172-80, claims that twins in dream and folklore, whether of the same or opposite sexes, represent the dreamer and his or her mother in the fusion of the womb or of nursing; they symbolize the ambivalent wish to maintain union with the mother but at the same time not to be swallowed up in her, maintaining separation through duplication of the self.

15. See R. A. Foakes, new Arden edition of The Comedy of Errors (London: Methuen, 1962), p. 2.

16. This and subsequent quotations from the plays discussed here are taken from the new Arden edition (London: Methuen): The Comedy of Errors, ed. R. A. Foakes, 1962; Twelfth Night, ed. J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik, 1975; Pericles, ed. F. D. Hoeniger, 1963; The Winter's Tale, ed. J. H. P. Pafford, 1963; The Tempest, ed. Frank Kermode, 1954.

17. Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis, 178.

18. Antipholus E.'s hoped-for redemption from arrest by money in the form of angels parodies the liberation of Peter from prison in Acts 12:1-11, and it adds a spiritual dimension to the subsequent liberation of Antipholus from the errors of mistaken identity and domestic dissension plaguing him.

19. John Hollander, “Twelfth Night and the Morality of Indulgence,” Sewanee Review, 67 (1959), 222-35.

20. See L. G. Salingar, “The Design of Twelfth Night,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 9 (1958), 118-35, and Joseph H. Summers, “The Masks of Twelfth Night,” in Shakespeare: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Leonard F. Dean (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961), 128-37.

21. Blos explains that in adolescence the withdrawal of love from the parents, or from their object representations in the ego, deflects love onto the self; the adolescent thus enters into the “transitory narcissistic stage” described in n. 6, which precedes attachment to a heterosexual object. In the boy, this narcissism may lead to a same-sex object choice based on an ego ideal. Blos cites Tonio Kröger's crush on Hans Hansen as an example; Mann says that Tonio “loved him in the first place because he was handsome; but in the next because he was in every respect his own opposite and foil” (quoted in Blos, p. 80). Helene Deutsch describes “a strongly bisexual tendency” in girls in early adolescence, which leads them to stress masculine traits, to suffer the same kind of homosexual crushes as boys do, or to have bisexual fantasies about a brother (often a twin) endowed with all the qualities the girl herself would like to have, or blamed for the impulses she represses and rejects. See The Psychology of Women: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1944; rpt. New York: Bantam Books, 1967), 1, pp. 88-89).

22. The editors of the new Arden edition of Twelfth Night, J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik, comment that “Nature followed its inborn tendency, to mate female with male and so undo the effects of Viola's misleading disguise.”

23. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1959), makes this suggestion.

24. Hollander, p. 236; Leslie Hotson, The First Night of Twelfth Night (New York: Macmillan, 1954), 173.

25. Furness and Halliwell in the Variorum edition, and Craik and Lothian in the new Arden edition, cite Sir Thomas Overbury's Characters for “beds” as denoting old age.

26. Phyllis Gorfain, “Riddles and Tragic Structure in Shakespeare,” Mississippi Folklore Register, Special Issue: Shakespeare and Folklore, ed. Philip C. Kolin, 10 (1976), 187-209.

27. Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), 30.

28. Phyllis Gorfain, “Puzzle and Artifice: The Riddle as Metapoetry in Pericles,” Shakespeare Survey, 29 (1976), 11-20.

29. Barber, “‘Thou that beget'st him,’” 65.

30. J.I.M. Stewart, Character and Motive in Shakespeare (London: Longmans, Green, 1949), p. 34. See also Sigmund Freud, “Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia, and Homosexuality,” Standard Edition, 18, pp. 221-33.

31. See Sigmund Freud, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood,” Standard Edition, 11; “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” Standard Edition, 14; and Murray M. Schwartz, “Leontes' Jealousy in The Winter's Tale,” American Imago, 30, (1973), 250-73, and “The Winter's Tale: Loss and Transformation,” American Imago, 32, (1975), 145-99. Arguing that Leontes is motivated by a “fear of separation from idealized others” and that he attempts “to reunite himself with a fantasized ideal maternal figure,” Schwartz analyzes the paranoia of the hero's jealousy as a radical denial of separation. He sees the second half of the play as a successful reconstitution of continuity and union rooted ontogenetically in the mother-son symbiosis. His interpretation of the play's psychology is rigorous, comprehensive, and brilliant; I am greatly indebted to it.

32. Inga-Stina Ewbank, “The Triumph of Time in The Winter's Tale,” in Shakespeare's Later Comedies, ed. D. J. Gordon (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1971).

33. Schwartz, “Loss and Transformation,” p. 178.

34. Carol Thomas Neely, in “Women and Issue in The Winter's Tale,” a paper delivered at the Central Renaissance Conference in April 1975, firmly distinguishes Shakespeare's treatment of sexuality in The Winter's Tale from that in the other romances, which “hover uneasily between the extreme idealization of sex and its extreme degradation,” while in The Winter's Tale, “fully developed women characters play central roles” to free men from distorted sexual attitudes. I came upon her paper after writing this essay to discover that its view coheres with my own at many points.

35. Karl M. Abenheimer, “Shakespeare's Tempest: A Psychological Analysis,” Psychoanalytic Review, 33 (1946), 399-415, suggests this interpretation.

36. Harry Berger, Jr., “Miraculous Harp: A Reading of Shakespeare's Tempest,” Shakespeare Studies, 5 (1970), 253-83, makes this point.

37. Hans W. Loewald, Psychoanalysis and the History of the Individual (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1978), remarks that “ego development does not proceed in a straight line, does not consist in a movement further and further away from id. … One might come close to human time by saying that it consists in an interpretation and reciprocal relatedness of past, present, and future … an ascending spiral in which the same basic themes are re-experienced and enacted on different levels of mentation and action” (p. 23).

38. Joel Fineman, “Fratricide and Cuckoldry: Shakespeare's Doubles” (Chapter 5 in [Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, edited by Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980]).