[In the following essay, Novy discusses thematic issues associated with family separation and recognition, and the social dynamics of child development suggested by the presence of substitute parents in Pericles and two of Shakespeare's other late romances.]

For about forty years, with the combined influence of women's history and the French “mentalites”/Annales School led by Philippe Aries especially important, we have been learning that the family as an institution has a history. Writing this history has not proved to be simple. Lawrence Stone's view that family relations in early modern England were distant is countered by evidence of affection, and in particular of grief at death in the family, in research collected by Alan Macfarlane, Keith Wrightson, Linda Pollock, Michael MacDonald, and others; yet if Stone is wrong, that does not necessarily mean that ways of imagining the family, and of imagining the self within the family, are constant over time.¹ In the late twentieth century, it is obvious that the family is taking on many new models, as single parenting, stepfamilies, and blended families become increasingly common and adoption often goes international and/or comes out of its mid-twentieth-century closet. Many families, we all now know, do not fit the model of the nuclear family that midcentury sociology assumed was our norm, and even nuclear families frequently need day care. Whether or not it takes a village to raise a child, it is clear that children are often raised by multiple parents of whom some are not the traditional married mother and father who conceived them. (I use the term “multiple” in contrast to this apparently self-sufficient couple—while aware that such a mother and father are obviously also multiple rather than single.)

Early modern England was another time of multiple parenting. Not only was there a high parental death rate with frequent remarriages, there were many other institutions that involved children's presence in households outside their birth families. Many infants were sent away to wet nurses for several years; older children were often sent away to apprenticeships in other households, and aristocratic families practiced informal exchanges of children, partly as a way of reinforcing their alliances.² Unlike modern England and America, early modern England had no formal laws permitting adoption—the institution that today most clearly raises questions about multiple parenthood—but informal adoption of various kinds frequently appears in the theater as well as in the prose romances that were the popular fiction of that time.³

In this essay I read Pericles in relation to the multiple parenting in its first audience's time. In Pericles, as in two other of Shakespeare's last plays, The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline, children are relinquished, abandoned, or taken from their parents and raised by others. Each play ends with the reconstitution of the family of birth. The emphasis on the similarity or affinity of long-separated relatives is strong, and the separated children are noticeably different from what their surroundings would seem to promise. The dominant way of reading family themes in Pericles has, quite plausibly, been to emphasize its mythology of blood—and yet there are other elements that make it possible to read in it some tribute to the effects of nurture and some emphasis on the family as a construction. Although the plot clearly defines the birth parents as the real parents, and some foster parents in Pericles are murderous, it also presents an actively benevolent foster parent.⁴

I want to discuss four closely intertwined aspects of the treatment of multiple parenting in Pericles: the splitting of parents into good versus evil, the emphasis on physical resemblance in the birth family, modes of recognition by separated members, and the discussion of heredity versus environment, or in the plays' terms, nature versus nurture. Pericles clearly poses evil foster parents against good biological parents. Thinking his wife Thaisa is dead, Pericles gives the newborn Marina to his friends Cleon and Dionyza to raise—emphasizing that they should give her education according to her noble rank; because she outshines their daughter in weaving, sewing, and singing, Dionyza plots Marina's murder, and only the chance kidnapping of pirates saves her—to be sold to a brothel.

The term “parent” or “foster parent” is never used in the play to describe the relation Cleon and Dionyza have to Marina; the key word is “nurse.” Pericles plans to leave his daughter “at careful nursing” (3.1.80); when Dionyza thinks about how she will tell Pericles that his daughter is (as she thinks) dead, she says, “Nurses are not the fates, / To foster it, not ever to preserve” (4.3.14-15).⁵ This usage both connects the couple to the common practice of wet-nursing, and points up their opposition to Marina's good foster parent—her nurse Lychorida.⁶ The murder plot occurs after Lychorida's death; Dionyza tries to gain Marina's confidence by saying, “Have you a nurse of me” (4.1.25).

Lychorida is a shadowy figure, who appears only in the scene where Marina is an infant, but it was she who passed on to Marina the story of her birth, and an admirable image of her father's courage and patience.

My father, as nurse says, did never fear,
But cried, “Good seamen!” to the sailors,
Calling his kingly hands, hailing ropes;
And clasping to the mast, endured a sea
That almost broke the deck.

(3.1.55-59)

Furthermore, Lychorida's importance in transmitting memories is explicitly honored in the recognition scene, when Marina says,

My mother was the daughter of a king,
Who died the minute I was born,
As my good nurse Lychorida hath oft
Delivered weeping.

(5.1.162-165)

The emphasis on the nurse's repetition of memories about Marina's parents and ancestry is a significant contrast to earlier versions of the Pericles story. In the ninth-century Apollonius of Tyre, it is only when the nurse is dying that she tells Marina's prototype her ancestry: The girl exclaims, “If any such thing had happened to me before you revealed this to me, I should have been absolutely ignorant of my ancestry and birth.”⁷ In Gower's Confessio Amantis (1554), there is no reference to what the nurse says about parentage, but in Twine's The Patterne of Painefull Adventures (1594), and in George Wilkins's The Painful Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre (1608), as in the ninth-century version, the girl thinks of the murderous surrogates as her parents until the nurse, at the point of death, enlightens her.⁸ In these several sources and analogues, the daughter's initial lack of knowledge of her origins is like that of Perdita in The Winter's Tale and Guiderius and Arviragus in Cymbeline, though the foster parents in these plays are—apart from the stepmother queen in Cymbeline—beneficent. This alteration by Shakespeare not only gives more emphasis to the nurse as a purposeful bearer of family memory but also means that Marina does not have to undergo the identity revision necessary on discovering that people she thought of as her parents are not simply foster parents but also intended murderers.⁹

Heredity is dominant over environment in Pericles, but environment is not as weak an influence as generalizations sometimes assume. Nature and nurture, one could infer, combine to contribute to Marina's superlative musical skills: Cleon teaches her, but when her achievements far surpass those of his daughter, one might remember that Thaisa's father Simonides had, after all, called Pericles “music's master” (2.5.30) and said, “my ears were never better fed / With such delightful pleasing harmony” (27-28).¹⁰ More important, one might read the supremacy of nature over nurture in the way Marina's goodness escapes the bad influence of Cleon and Dionyza, as well as in the way she shows the courage and patience that the nurse has told her her father exemplified, but one could also credit Lychorida's influence. None of these points is explicit—the spectators can analyze Marina's virtues and talents however they wish.

In the other two romances, characters are more emphatic on the issue. Belarius believes that his sons' true identity appears in their ambition and desire to fight. “How hard it is to hide the sparks of nature! … their thoughts do hit the roofs of palaces, and nature prompts them / In simple and low things to prince it much / Beyond the trick of others” (3.3.79-86). As Susan Baker has noted, the fact that Belarius himself knows they are princes can be seen as influencing his upbringing of them, and so one can argue that it is he who so prompts them, not nature; similarly, one could argue that Lychorida's image of Pericles' courage is more important in influencing Marina's courage than her heredity.¹¹

Pericles emphasizes physical similarity between biological family members, but it is not clearly the crucial issue in their reunion. When Pericles is unknowingly reunited with his daughter, he comments on how similar she is to his wife: “my queen's square brows; / Her stature to an inch; as wandlike straight; / As silver-voiced; her eyes as jewel-like / And cas'd as richly” (5.1.111-114) and he says he will believe her because “thou lookest / Like one I loved indeed” (127-128). But, as we will see in a minute, if he does guess who she is, he does not acknowledge it for many lines and questions after this point.

It is worth noting that a textual emphasis on physical similarity has a complicated effect in the theater; Anne Barton remarked of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night that it would be an extremely rare theater company that would have two characters as similar as Viola and Sebastian are supposed to be; so, in many cases of family resemblance in these plays, the play's language is in tension with the stage picture in which the actors are not really identical.¹² Perhaps the issue is analogous to the issue of how the Elizabethan audience saw boy actors as female characters: Most of the time most of them focused on the female character, but for some of them most of the time and most of them some of the time (cued by textual self-consciousness) awareness of the actor's sex might surface occasionally. The plays are providing much material for twentieth-century reflections on gender as a construction; they may also provide some material for twentieth-century reflections on family relationships as a construction as well. The audience, guided by the dialogue and the plot, will want Marina to look like Thaisa, and will probably imagine that they look similar, if this is at all possible. Sometimes these characters are doubled in performance, which means that the experience of the reunion scene between Pericles and Marina is less of an imaginative construction; but then we would still have to use our imagination about the similarity between Marina and Thaisa in the last scene, however it is staged.¹³

The tension between recognition and lack of recognition of family members in Pericles' reunion with Marina is complicated. When Pericles' ship accidentally arrives in the same city as the daughter he thinks dead, they are unknowingly brought together with the idea that she will cheer him up from his paralyzing melancholy. The dejected Pericles, unresponsive to anyone else, resists speaking to her at first—perhaps even pushes her away—then begins to talk to her slowly and with rather incoherent echoes of her words: “My fortunes—parentage—good parentage—To equal mine” (5.1.100-101, making the suggestion of their relationship more explicit than in her words, which named their griefs, not their parentage, as equal). After a few more questions he says, “My dearest wife was like this maid, and such a one / My daughter might have been” (110-111). He asks questions about her origin and education, to which she replies enigmatically. When she says she thinks her story is too improbable to tell, he says, “I will believe thee, … for thou lookest / Like one I loved indeed” (125, 127-128). Yet even when she says “My name is Marina” (145), reveals that she was born at sea, and names her dead nurse Lychorida, he cannot acknowledge that she is really his daughter. At various places in this long dialogue, he wonders if she is flesh and blood, or if this is a dream; and when she finally identifies herself as daughter to King Pericles, he does not respond directly to her until he has consulted with Helicanus; then finally, almost one hundred lines after the first hint that he recognizes her, he welcomes her as “Thou that beget'st him that did thee beget” (5.1.200), and even after that wants confirmation about her mother's name. For the audience, his caution dramatizes his melancholy, but also the importance of her return to him, on which the play focuses for this long poetic scene. As Pericles says, “truth can never be confirm'd enough” (206). The spectators know that his sense of her similarity to his lost wife is indeed a true guide to her identity—but the plot, in a sense, stops, to maintain suspense about whether he will trust this partial recognition and when the questions that he asks will lead him to security about it.¹⁴

No line in this scene gives Marina's reaction to her discovery that Pericles is her father, or to her reunion with him. This scene is written to make us imagine his point of view much more than hers; critics seldom discuss the question of when she recognizes him. Terence Cave argues that she “believes that she is healing a disturbed mind, so that his agitation as the truth gradually sinks in seems to her only a symptom of that disturbance.”¹⁵ This is the most likely interpretation, since she has never seen him since her infancy and asks him his name after he greets her as his daughter.

On the other hand, I could imagine a Marina who has been told that this is Pericles and deliberately takes her time in leading him to this recognition, but has a purpose in introducing herself by talking about her ancestry and the loss of her parents. This is not, after all, the inevitable way to assuage the grief of a melancholy stranger. She hints the connections that Pericles will eventually trace out—“She speaks, / My lord, that, may be, hath endured a grief / Might equal yours … ancestors / Who stood equivalent with mighty kings” (5.1.89-91, 103-104). His echoes of her words—“My fortunes—parentage—good parentage—To equal mine” (5.1.100-101)—make the suggestion of their relationship more explicit than she did, though it takes him many lines to acknowledge it. These two different versions of Marina—ironically—might well appear the same on stage, for her consciousness is not explored in the dialogue as Pericles' is.

The final scene is particularly notable for the way in which the embraces of the family reunion are evoked in imagery that both emphasizes the familial physical connection and pictures family members as losing their identities in each other. In the language, first Pericles disappears in Thaisa, then she disappears in him, then Marina merges back into Thaisa, reversing Lychorida's early description of her as “this piece of your dead queen” (3.1.17-18):

PERICLES:
[to the gods] You shall do well
That on the touching of her lips I may
Melt and no more be seen. O come, be buried
A second time within these arms! [They embrace.]
MARINA:
                                                                                                                                            My heart
Leaps to be gone into my mother's bosom.

(5.3.44-48)

These images of death and disappearance in reunion reenact and reverse the earlier apparent deaths of Thaisa and Marina.¹⁶ Pericles continues the physical imagery of family connection while returning all to visibility by saying, “Flesh of thy flesh, Thaisa / Thy burden at the sea, and call'd Marina / For she was yielded there” (49-51).¹⁷

This play began with a scene in which Pericles, in his first quest for a bride, discovered that the princess he sought was living in incest with her father; the ending transforms this malignant mingling of identities in the family to a benign version. Physical ties are emphasized—flesh of flesh, heart and bosom, lips and arms. At the same time, the ending occurs in the Temple of Diana. Both Marina and Thaisa are emphatically chaste, and the night-oblations that Pericles promises to Diana in thanksgiving sound to at least one critic, Janet Adelman, like a disturbing attempt to erase sexuality from the reunited family.¹⁸ Marina's ancestry is now confirmed as noble, and accordingly she is married to Lysimachus, who was impressed with her purity when they met in the brothel, but there is little emotional weight given to their relationship. The heart of the play is with the parent-child bond, emphasized as a bond of flesh and blood—and yet the parents and their daughter Marina are to be separated again at the end, when she and Lysimachus are to rule in Tyre while Pericles and Thaisa are to go to her family home in Pentapolis. However joyful parent-child reunion is, however long delayed, in this play it is still fragile—none of the other romances of family reunion is so emphatic that the family is again separated at the end. Perhaps this is another way to measure the strength of the threat of incest here.

Throughout this play, the language of birth and conception echoes repeatedly—most often in literal references to characters' origins.¹⁹ Thus it reinforces the play's “mythology of blood” and its emphasis on biological relatedness. On the other hand, it is striking how often this language is used metaphorically—in the cross-gendered imagery that imagines Pericles delivering—“I am great with joy and shall deliver weeping” (5.1.109)—and Marina begetting her father, but also in in the reference to how Lychorida “delivered weeping” memories of Thaisa.²⁰ Birth and parenthood are not only literal in this play. Arguably it celebrates rebirth and good foster parenthood—along with birth and parenthood. A memorable line when the young Pericles declares his love of Thaisa puts “fostering” and “blood” together and suggests fostering may be seen as just as basic.

SIMONIDES:
What, are you both pleased?
THAISA:
                                                                                                    Yes, if you love me, sir.
PERICLES:
Even as my life my blood that fosters it.

(2.5.88-89)

The family separations and reunions in Pericles, like those in the other romances, have many possible relations to early modern family psychology. They glamorize the shorter-term family separations common in his culture: Here the wet-nursing of baby aristocrats, and their later child exchange to learn manners, and also the training for work of children of other classes are transformed into the more dramatic separations of abandoning, kidnapping, and shipwrecking. Gail Paster writes, in The Body Embarrassed, that Perdita's experience is “a version, romantically heightened, of what happened soon after birth to countless babies in the wet-nursing culture … inexplicable extrusion from the birthing chamber, enforced alienation from the maternal breast, and a journey to the unknown rural environment of a foster family lower in station than its own. Even though the birth parents knew where they had placed their baby and occasionally visited it, the physical and social separation of the two environments was virtually as complete as it is here.”²¹ For much of the plot, it seems that Marina's experience is the nightmare version of this, though finally all ends well. These romance plots also provided a fantasy compensation for the more permanent separations caused by frequent mortality, which was much higher than ours for both parents and children, and highest, it seems, in London, where the plays were performed. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the life expectancy at birth in London was only 22.3, and “by age twenty forty-seven per cent of women born in London had suffered the death of their fathers.”²² Furthermore, infant and child death rates were, in general, high in early modern Europe. “An infant in the first four months of life had in general a 20 to 40 per cent chance of dying before his or her first birthday … the chances of surviving to age twenty were in general no better than fifty-fifty.”²³

Members of the original audiences in different family circumstances probably differed to some extent in their responses to these plays, just as do members of the audience in different circumstances today. Paster has argued, for example, that the emphasis on the difference in behavior between Perdita and her foster family and on characters' identification of her with nobility “offers a powerful counternarrative for the specific fears and repressed anxieties of the wet-nursed child.”²⁴The Winter's Tale might also soothe the anxieties of parents of wet-nursed children—while Pericles would heighten those anxieties considerably before they were ultimately dispelled.

On the other hand, what of the many audience members whose parents had died early and who had been raised by at least one stepparent, or by foster parents? How important was it to them to emphasize their connections with their deceased parents? How much did their stepparents take on parental roles in their imagination? In Pericles, more than any other of the romances, they could have found the negative pole of any ambivalence they had about substitute parents dramatized, before they enjoyed the wish fulfillment of the reunions with birth parents. But to the extent that they loved their surrogate parents, they might also have drawn another kind of satisfaction—as could parents who were raising stepchildren—from the fact that actors seldom have as much similarity as the characters they are playing are supposed to have. The doubleness of effect—characters are biologically related, and the text tells us to see them as similar, actors are not related, and probably do not look very similar—is analogous to the doubleness in the meaning of family terms such as “father” and “mother” that stepfamilies and adoptees have to deal with.²⁵ The term “role” is used in connection with parenthood, in ordinary language today, almost as much as it is used in relation to sex and gender. Is there a theatrical aspect to parenthood? Or is this usage a sign of inauthenticity? What are the strengths and limitations of the formulation “The real parents are those who act like parents”? Should parenthood be defined by nurturing behavior (what would most often be considered metaphorical parenthood) or by biology? Does Pericles act like a parent when he leaves Marina at Tharsus? For much of the rest of both plays, penance is the only way he has of acting like a parent, a role that Pericles has never played with his daughter until their reunion. From what we hear, Lychorida seems the most parental character—though her parental qualities are presented mostly by Marina's memories of her words, particularly her words about Marina's birth parents.

The plots of the romances—somewhat like contemporary American adoption law—are largely structured to limit a family to one “real” set of parents, male and female, and the conclusion of Pericles—following such a brief appearance of the good foster parent, Lychorida, and the vividness of the wicked foster parents—stays close to this model. But knowing something about the frequent uses of nursing, fostering out, and other varieties of child care beyond the nuclear family in Renaissance England may help to explain one of the most vexed aspects of this play: Why is Pericles not only grief-stricken, but also virtually immobilized and apparently also in need of prolonged penance after he hears about his daughter's death from Dionyza, since he acted in good faith believing that she and Cleon were responsible people?

With infant and child death rates so high, it may well be that parents whose children died while in someone else's house had a particularly complicated sense of self-blame—they were following the accepted pattern in their society, but was that why their child had died? Within England, Gottlieb argues, while wet-nursing was often criticized, sending children away after age seven was not openly questioned—but at least one Italian observer felt that this showed “the want of affection in the English.”²⁶ When Pericles, concerned about returning to Tyre in time to get its crown, assumes that he must give Marina to others to raise in their home, instead of taking her and Lychorida or another nurse with him—when the years he stays away pass quickly in Gower's Act Four Chorus—perhaps those whose children had died, or who feared their children might, while away, had particular reasons for interest in his story. (Both the death of children and their boarding out might have been especially frequent in 1608-1609, the probable first year of Pericles' performance; plague closed the theaters part of that time.)²⁷ Perhaps it was because the occasion for disaster seemed such ordinary behavior—rather than the insane jealousy of Leontes, for example—that Pericles may have been one of the most popular Shakespearean plays of its day.²⁸

Notes

1. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977); Alan MacFarlane, Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction 1300-1840 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680 (London: Hutchinson, 1982); Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

2. Beatrice Gottlieb, The Family in the Western World from the Black Death to the Industrial Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 145, 160. Gottlieb claims that apprenticeship often began around age seven, but Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos finds that ten, twelve, or later were much more likely ages, though younger children could be boarded out for reasons such as schooling, outbreaks of plague, poverty, or parental death; see her Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 54-64. Her view of apprentices' age is supported by Paul Griffith, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England 1560-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 33.

3. Jack Goody, Development of the Family and Marriage in England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 73.

4. Barbara Estrin, The Raven and the Lark: Lost Children in Literature of the English Renaissance (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1985), while noting that such plots in literature “predicate that the biological parents are superior to the adoptive ones,” also writes that “the good of art appears in the adoptive sections where the supremacy of inheritance is superseded by the idealization of the replacement,” 14.

5. All quotations from Pericles are taken from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. David Bevington, 4th ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).

6. Dionyza's words resonate ominously with some contemporary cases of infanticidal nursing, mostly of illegitimate children: see Keith Wrightson, “Infanticide in Earlier Seventeenth-Century England, Local Population Studies 15 (1975): 10-22. Thanks to Frances Dolan for sending me a copy of this article.

7. See Elizabeth Archibald, Apollonius of Tyre: Medieval and Renaissance Themes and Variations (Bury-St. Edmunds: D. S. Brewer, 1991), 145.

8. See Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, VI (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 396-405, 445-453, 518-529. Wilkins's Pericles alone motivates this secrecy, by telling the nurse that Marina should be “brought uppe as the daughter of Cleon and Dyonysa, lest that the knowledge of her highbirth, should make her growe prowd to their instructions,” 524.

9. Unlike Marina's prototype in these sources, Perdita, Guiderius, and Arviragus have no lines commenting on their discovery of a different set of parents, and the foster parents and birth parents in each play make alliance by the end.

10. F. D. Hoeniger, “Introduction,” in Pericles, ed. Hoeniger, Arden Edition (London: Methuen, 1963), lxxviii, notes that Pericles' role as music teacher is emphasized in the sources.

11. Susan Baker, “Personating Persons: Rethinking Shakespearean Disguises,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (1992).

12. Anne Barton, “As You Like It and Twelfth Night: Shakespeare's Sense of an Ending,” Shakespearian Comedy, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 14, ed. D. J. Palmer and Malcolm Bradbury (New York: Crane, Russak and Co., 1972), 176.

13. Compare the way Paulina in Winter's Tale enumerates details in the baby girl's face that are like Leontes (2.3.101-103), making the audience imagine a resemblance inevitably impossible to see.

14. From the early example in Greek tragedies such as The Libation Bearers, recognition scenes often contain a prolonged questioning which heightens emotions as it suspends the recognition in time: see Marianne Novy, “Recognition Scenes and Their Thematic Significance in Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies,” Dissertation, Yale University, 1973, 9.

15. Terence Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 289.

16. As Janet Adelman points out, they also rearticulate, benignly, “the deadly mergers of the beginning—the collapse of mother, wife, and daughter in Antiochus's daughter's body and the attendant collapse of Pericles's masculine identity;” Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York: Routledge, 1992), 197.

17. I have commented on this imagery further in Love's Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 178-179, where I note that recognition scenes in Shakespeare's comedies generally have less physical imagery.

18. Adelman, 197-198.

19. Doreen Delvecchio and Antony Hammond give a list of examples: see their “Introduction” to Pericles, Prince of Tyre, ed. Delvecchio and Hammond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 47-49.

20. For an interpretation of the cross-gendered imagery emphasizing female power and male nurturance, see Novy, 171-172, 175; for the view that it involves male appropriation of female procreative power that excludes women, see Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 197-198 (which also emphasizes the repression of sexuality), and Marilyn Williamson, The Patriarchy of Shakespeare's Comedies (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986), 165.

21. Gail Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 273.

22. Dubrow, “The Message from Marcade: Parental Death in Tudor and Stuart England,” in Attending to Women in Early Modern England, ed. Betty S. Travitsky and Adele F. Seeff (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 147-167, esp. 157.

23. Gottlieb, The Family in the Western World, 133. Frances E. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England 1550-1700 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 168, has argued that Winter's Tale in particular is a displaced, aestheticized resolution of anxiety about infanticide. Such anxiety is less displaced in Pericles.

24. Paster, 276.

25. In her forthcoming book, Heather Dubrow makes an analogous comment about the relationship of step-parenting to role-playing.

26. Daniele Barbar, “Italian Relations” (1551), in Molly Harrison and O. M. Rooyston, eds., How They Lived, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1963), pp. 267-268; in Gottlieb, 162. She notes criticism of this pattern eventually developing in England, beginning with William Penn, and argues that “some people were genuinely puzzled by why they were doing what was expected” (161).

27. See Hoeniger, xxv.

28. Hoeniger notes that “There are few plays by Shakespeare for which as much evidence is available to testify to their popularity on the stage during the early decades of the seventeenth century,” lxvi-lxvii.