SOURCE: Young, Bruce. “Parental Blessings in Shakespeare's Plays.” Studies in Philology 89, no. 2 (spring 1992): 179-210.

[In the following essay, Young studies the ways in which parental blessings in Shakespearean drama reflect early modern attitudes toward parents and children, and argues that Shakespeare's blessings, rather than simply reiterating patriarchal authority, often symbolize love and familial affection.]

At least eighteen of Shakespeare's plays present or refer to parents formally blessing their children. This practice, visually striking because of the gestures involved, serves a variety of thematic and dramatic purposes and also helps situate the plays historically. Despite its pervasive presence in Shakespeare and its frequent appearance in historical documents, however, students of history and of literature have largely ignored the parental blessing. Even those who mention it, I believe, have missed much of its significance. Shakespeare's parental blessings, I will show, have much richer and more complex implications than recent studies suggest. Recognizing how Shakespeare and his contemporaries perceived the parental blessing significantly increases our comprehension of important aspects of the plays, aids in both staging and editing scenes in which the blessing appears, and expands in useful ways our general understanding of family life in Renaissance England.

The ritual has received little scholarly attention. During the past twenty-five years, a few authorities—L. L. Schücking, Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt, Lawrence Stone, Ralph Houlbrooke, and one or two others—have made brief reference to the custom. Besides being brief and sometimes superficial, most of these relatively recent accounts have seriously distorted our understanding of the parental blessing and its meaning for Shakespeare's contemporaries. Schücking treats it as a quaint custom demonstrating the “unconditional subordination” of children in the period.¹ Pinchbeck and Hewitt mention the custom as evidence of “the awful authority of parents” and link it with a child's fear of and distance from parents.² Stone calls the custom “a symbolic gesture of submission” and uses it to support his thesis that in sixteenth-century England, more than at any other time, “the husband and father lorded it over his wife and children with the quasi-absolute authority of a despot.”³ Houlbrooke, one of many historians of the family who have challenged Stone's description of family life in the period as inaccurate and overly negative, gives a somewhat more satisfactory account of parental blessings, but still emphasizes their association with parental authority.⁴

Students of Shakespeare have given even less attention to the ritual. In an article on kneeling in Shakespeare, John Onuska devotes three pages to instances of children kneeling before parents. David Bevington draws on Onuska's article in making a brief reference to the parental blessing.⁵ Coppélia Kahn lists parental blessings among several customs of Shakespeare's England that she sees as “routine, visible reminders of patriarchal power.”⁶ All three writers view the blessing ritual mainly as a symbol of parental power and filial subordination. All three refer to Stone's paragraph-long discussion of the custom and clearly depend on Stone for their understanding of the custom's historical context.⁷ None of the three shows any evidence of independent research into what the parental blessing would have meant to Shakespeare's contemporaries, or how exactly it would have been performed.

I believe that Stone and those who depend on him are essentially wrong about the parental blessing. Because Stone has been almost the exclusive source of information on the blessing (and on family life generally) in recent Shakespearean studies, the occurrences of the ritual in Shakespeare's plays—when not ignored entirely—have been fundamentally misunderstood. Shakespeare's treatment of the blessing is generally positive, and a survey of historical evidence on the subject suggests that Shakespeare's understanding was probably not much different from that of his contemporaries. On some issues, I believe recent comments on the ritual are dead wrong. To connect the ritual primarily with “tyranny” or “despotism,” as Stone has done, is to level significant differences—differences the Renaissance was careful to maintain—between parental authority used appropriately and lovingly and parental authority abused with destructive or coercive effect.

Moreover, the parental blessing was not exclusively or primarily an expression of “patriarchal power,” at least if that phrase is understood as referring only to men. Mothers and fathers both gave blessings. Both had what Houlbrooke calls “quasi-sacerdotal” authority.⁸ Nowhere have I found evidence that blessings by fathers were deliberately privileged over those given by mothers. In Shakespeare's plays, mothers' blessings occur almost as often as fathers', and the blessings performed by women are at least as potent, both in the theater and in the plays' imagined worlds, as those performed by men. Of the blessings actually performed or spoken on stage, mothers give eight or nine, fathers give twelve. In other references to blessings, four to six are given by women, nine to eleven are given by men. Blessings in the plays have similar functions and use similar words, whether given by men or women.⁹

I am not arguing that the ritual had no association with parental authority or filial duty. But other elements were at least as important. In particular, the ritual was viewed as signalling, even reinforcing, the intimate and loving bond that ideally existed between parent and child. By performing the ritual, parents conveyed to their children divine influence—“blessing”—intended to enhance the children's happiness and prosperity. The blessing, given “with great Solemnity and Affection,” was essentially an expression of good will, not an instrument of domination.¹⁰ Though parents offered their good wishes and influence by virtue of their authority as parents, they did not normally perform the ritual in order to assert their authority and use it to dominate or coerce their children.

Understanding Renaissance attitudes associated with the parental blessing can significantly affect how we interpret many of Shakespeare's plays. It can also influence how we perform and edit them. Editors who normally supply stage directions sometimes fail to note that kneeling or other gestures should take place on the stage, either because they are not aware that a blessing occurs in a particular passage or because they do not understand the exact nature of the ritual. Of course, whether editors should supply stage directions at all is a controversial question. But whatever editors do, readers and directors would benefit from knowing when Shakespeare would have imagined certain kinds of stage business occurring and what form that stage business would likely take. Sometimes the text itself is explicit enough that readers and directors can reconstruct the gestures fairly well without historical evidence. But in some instances (such as All's Well That Ends Well 1.1.59-70), anyone without extra-textual understanding of the parental blessing will simply not realize that a blessing is taking place. An early quarto or folio alone, in other words, will not reveal at what points Shakespeare would have imagined a blessing being performed.

Moreover, without historical awareness a certain degree of confusion about how the blessing is to be performed is inevitable. In many modern productions, the gestures originally associated with the blessing are either omitted or replaced with something more vague—usually some sort of embrace. I am not arguing that directors should feel compelled to use the gestures Shakespeare would have had in mind, but only that they should have the option of doing so, an option historical awareness alone can give them. Further, I believe that the parental blessing is an important part of what Alan Dessen has called the Elizabethan theatrical vocabulary, and I agree with him that “to recognize the original conventions is often to recover distinctive Shakespearian metaphors and meanings and to expand our awareness of the full range of his best plays.”¹¹ Having seen parental blessings performed on stage with varying degrees of fidelity to the original custom—and having served as dramaturg for a recent college production of The Winter's Tale in which a blessing takes place—I find that the gestures associated historically with the custom have a simple, impressive power on stage that is absent from the less memorable and distinctive, but more “modern,” gestures often used. Given the benefits of understanding the custom—including the recovery of authentic Elizabethan performance practice and the offering of a wider range of options to directors and readers—it seems to me imperative that editors make clear, in one way or another, when a blessing is taking place and what form it should take.

I. THE PARENTAL BLESSING IN HISTORY

The parental blessing was widely practiced in Renaissance England. It took place daily, at least in “well-ordered” households, with children kneeling before their parents, both father and mother, and asking for a blessing. To quote a source published in Latin in 1588, describing the custom as practiced in England—

It is customary among us for children daily, morning and evening, on bended knee, to ask a blessing of each parent.¹²

William Perkins, writing in 1603, suggests the words a child might have used in asking for a blessing:

Parents in their families teach their children to say, Father I pray you bless me, Mother I pray you bless me.¹³

Peter Erondell gives similar wording: “I beseech you Mother pray to God to blesse me and give me your blessing, if it pleaseth you.”¹⁴ Each parent would respond to the request by calling on God to bless the child, either with a simple phrase like “God bless you” or with more elaborate wording such as that suggested by Erondell: “I pray the strong Almightie God to increase his graces in you, and to blesse you,” or “I pray God to blesse you all my Children, and to increase his graces in you.”¹⁵

While speaking words such as these, a parent would normally use one or both hands to signify the conferring of the blessing. Renaissance writers describe several different forms of the ritual, suggesting that the precise gestures may have varied from person to person or from time to time. Richard Whitforde, writing in 1533, describes the parents holding both hands up, palms together, looking toward heaven as they give the blessing.¹⁶ Richard Hooker, the great Anglican theologian, describes another form: what he calls the “imposition of handes.”¹⁷ This would mean the placing of one or both hands on the head of the child who is kneeling before the parent.¹⁸ The same gestures are described by an eighteenth-century traveler visiting England, with the added information that children may kiss the hands that have blessed them:

Well brought-up children, on rising and going to bed, wish their fathers and mothers “Good morning” or “Good evening,” and kneeling before them ask for their blessing. The parents, placing their hands on their children's heads, say “God bless you,” or some such phrase, and the children then kiss their parents' hands.¹⁹

In another form of blessing, supported by pictorial and literary evidence, the parent holds one or both hands above the head of the recipient, not actually on it, or even holds both hands aloft, about level with the shoulders, with the palms forward, one hand held to the left and the other to the right of the person giving the blessing. This last gesture was considered especially appropriate for bestowing a blessing on a group.²⁰

This variety of ritual forms is reflected in Shakespeare's plays. Cordelia refers to a hand or hands being held “o'er” her. It is not clear whether she expects the hand to actually touch her head (Lear 4.7.57). Shakespeare's plays also reflect the variable use of either one or both hands in blessing. Though contemporary descriptions more often refer to parents' “hands” (e.g., Hooker, Legg), “hand” is referred to in the singular in Titus Andronicus 1.1.163 (also “arm” in Richard III 1.4.236).²¹ In Lear, the quarto gives “hands” where the folio gives “hand” (4.7.57). Even if the singular “hand” is a typesetting error (as some editors have asserted), it would have been an error easily overlooked by those familiar with the custom in several slightly different forms.²²

As for the child's gestures, the plays indicate that a child might have rested on one or both knees when kneeling for a blessing. The singular “knee” is used in Coriolanus 5.3.50, 75; 1 Henry VI 4.5.32; and Richard III 2.2.105. The plural is used in three instances where pleading is a strong element: Lear 2.4.155 (Lear's offering to reverse the usual order and kneel before his daughters—possibly for a blessing; cf. 3.2.11-12), Two Gentlemen of Verona 3.1.228, and Romeo and Juliet 3.5.168 (these last two refer, not to requests for a blessing, but to a daughter's kneeling to plead to her father). The non-Shakespearean evidence also makes reference to either one or two knees.²³Dives and Pauper, written in the early 1400s but well known into the next century, cites with approval the tradition that one should kneel with both knees to God, but with only one to man.²⁴ Yet kneeling with both knees for a parental blessing seems to have been a common, though not universal, practice. Perhaps parents, as God's representatives in the home, were thought of as occupying a special place above that of other mortals.

This daily kneeling and asking of a blessing was apparently expected of children and youths as long as they lived with their parents and seems to have been viewed as a normal part of daily life, not as an unusual custom limited to the extremely pious. One piece of evidence for how common the practice was is its use in The French Garden, a bilingual text written by a Frenchman to help the English learn French. The author, Peter Erondell, includes in his picture of a typical English day a dialogue in which a daughter asks for and receives her mother's blessing. Supplementing the blessings given by parents were those given by other relatives (especially grandparents) and by godparents.²⁵ But such blessings apparently took place less often.

Besides being practiced morning and evening, the parental blessing seems to have been practiced on special occasions, for instance, at times of parting and reunion.²⁶ While parents and children were separated, blessings might be requested and bestowed by letter.²⁷ Parents who were soon to die might also bless their children, about whose futures they would have felt particularly anxious at this time of final parting. Thomas Bentley asserted in 1582 that “it is the duetie of all godly parentes … when they lye in their death beddes to call their chyldren before them, and to blesse them, and to give them ghostly admonitions, and godly lessons.”²⁸ Alice Thornton's description of her mother's death in 1659 reveals how emotionally intense a deathbed blessing might be:

… she embraced us all severally in her armes, and kissed us, powring out many prayers and blessings for us all; like good old Jacob, when he gave his last blessing to his children. …²⁹

An early seventeenth-century work imagines a father on his deathbed, with “his Children kneeling before him,” to whom he gives his final blessing and counsel. In this work, as in Shakespeare, a person's last words are presented as having special wisdom, even prophetic power.³⁰

In addition to evidence of younger children requesting blessings, there are also accounts of persons who maintained the practice into adulthood. One was Sir Thomas More, in the early 1500s, who, “whensoever he passed through Westminster Hall to his place in the Chancery,” if he saw his father, would go to him “and there reverently kneeling down in the sight of them all, duly ask his father's blessing.”³¹ Nicholas Ferrar, in the early seventeenth century, did likewise: “at first approaching his mother,” he “knelt upon the ground to ask and receive her blessing.”³² And there may have been many others, as is suggested by an Italian source describing the practice in London: we are told that the kneeling and asking of a parent's blessing “happens in the public streets and in the most frequented and conspicuous places of the city, no matter what their age.”³³ Yet the custom was more strongly associated with younger children. One writer describing Thomas More's practice of the custom notes that “men after theire mariages thought themselves not bound to these duties of younger folkes.”³⁴

The practice of giving parental blessings goes back at least to the fourteenth century in England, and probably much earlier. A poem written during the early 1300s—The Good Wife Taught Her Daughter—purports to be a mother's instructions and blessing to her daughter.³⁵ Though the poem does not describe the mother's gestures, it apparently refers to the same kind of formal ritual described in later sources. Other sources describing the practice in England range from the 1400s to the later 1600s, with some allusions in the eighteenth century. The custom appears to have been practiced by Catholics and Protestants, Puritans and non-Puritans, with little variation in form or meaning into the early seventeenth century.³⁶ During the eighteenth century, however, the practice, though not entirely abandoned, seems to have undergone modification—probably becoming less formal and less frequent.³⁷

Bishop Robert Sanderson, writing in 1657, lamented the growing neglect of such ceremonies as the parental blessing. He offered as one reason for this neglect the association commonly made between these ceremonies and “popish” practices: “These last two seven years”—that is, since 1643—“the having of God-fathers at Baptism, Churching of Women, Prayers at the burial of the dead, Children asking their Parents blessing, &c., which whilome were held innocent; are now by very many thrown aside, as rags of Popery.”³⁸ The decline of parental blessings thus seems to have been connected with the religious and social upheavals of the Puritan revolution during the seventeenth century. Specifically, the decline may reflect Calvinist anxiety about attempts to “bind” God through ritual, and may also have something to do with the objections many had during this period against kneeling. Such objections were directed especially against kneeling for communion or before figures of authority—in effect, against kneeling before anyone or anything except God himself. There are references during the seventeenth century to such attitudes among Presbyterians, Quakers, and others. Quaker Robert Barclay, for instance, asserts in a book first published in 1675 that “it is not lawful for Christians to kneel, or prostrate themselves to any man, or to bow the body, or to uncover the head to them.”³⁹ To kneel before another human being, even parents, would have been considered sacrilegious by some religious liberals of the seventeenth century, and would also have been disapproved of by political liberals, who rejected many of the traditional forms of reverence to superiors.

The Renaissance had preserved such acts of reverence as one way of expressing and symbolizing its belief in and desire for social coherence and harmony. The parental blessing, with its emphasis on familial relationships and its linking of past and present and of heaven and earth, was tied to the traditional view of society and the cosmos in which individuals were seen as members of larger organisms. The English Civil War, along with other events, prompted many to seek their own social and religious paths, rather than those determined by family or tradition. The words Shakespeare gives Richard, Duke of Gloucester—“I have no brother, I am like no brother; / … I am myself alone” (3 Henry VI 5.6.80, 83)—though the words of a villain, have some affinity with the ideal, increasingly attractive since the Renaissance, of unique individuality. The decline of parental blessings may thus be a sign of something more massive taking place not only in England, but in the Western world as a whole: the shift from the traditional order of the ancient, medieval, and Renaissance worlds to the modern order with its new stress on individualism and freedom. Accompanying and probably related to this shift was an increasing hostility or indifference toward ritual, a growing feeling that ritual—which brings the supernatural into the life of this world—is offensive to reason. The apparent hostility Lawrence Stone and others have expressed toward the blessing ritual reveals, among other things, their alignment with the modern world view. Besides failing to take seriously the custom's supernatural dimension, those who view it negatively usually assume that submission and reverence are necessarily weak and unfortunate attitudes—expressions (as judged from this hostile point of view) of the “slave morality” that Nietzsche criticized.⁴⁰ The chronological snobbery of what I am calling the “modern” viewpoint is nicely expressed in a nineteenth-century editor's casual reference to “our foolish ancestors,” who took a parent's blessing or curse seriously.⁴¹

The custom of giving parental blessings may have been practiced widely throughout Europe during the Middle Ages, and it has analogues in many ancient cultures.⁴² But by Shakespeare's day, England seems to have been the only nation of western Europe in which the formal practice of requesting and giving parental blessings was part of daily life. John Donne questioned in a sermon, “Children kneele to aske blessing of Parents in England, but where else?”⁴³ And lest Donne be thought the victim of English pride, we can turn to other sources—for instance, the report presented to the Venetian Senate in 1622 by that city's ambassador to England describing what it calls “the admirable custom of the country, well worthy of imitation for every child on first meeting his parents each day to kneel and ask their blessing.”⁴⁴ The French writer Peter Erondell wishes the custom were practiced in his country:

I mervaile verie much that French-men (which bring up and teach their Children so well) doe not make them aske their parentes blessing (I mean their fathers and mothers) seeing that it is a thing that hath bene used by the holy Patriarches. …⁴⁵

I have found an obscure reference to a parental blessing in a German folktale, and Schücking asserts that the practice was known in Germany during the Middle Ages.⁴⁶ Moreover, the practice seems to have been common in Jewish households since ancient times and has persisted even into the twentieth century.⁴⁷ I have yet to establish any direct historical link between the parental blessing as practiced elsewhere—in some cases clearly extending back thousands of years—and the blessing as practiced in Renaissance England. But some sort of connection is likely; and in any case, as we shall see later in this paper, Shakespeare and his contemporaries thought of the custom as being linked to the ancient past.

The gestures associated with the blessing have had symbolic meaning in many ages and cultures. Kneeling suggests humility, respect, and dependence. The head has been thought of as, in some special sense, the seat of individual identity and dignity. And the hands have been universally associated with social and emotional bonds between individuals and also with power, including the power to transform and bestow benefits.⁴⁸ In the parental blessing as it was practiced in Shakespeare's time, the child's kneeling was in part a recognition of the parent's superior authority and maturity and an expression of respect for the parent's age, status, and (in some cases at least) virtue and wisdom. By kneeling, children also acknowledged a parent as one of the sources of their own being and identity. The ritual thus symbolized and affirmed the intimate connection, physical, spiritual, and emotional, between parent and child and brought to mind the duties of both: the parent's duty to educate, nourish, love, and discipline the child; the child's duty to love, honor, obey, and (when necessary) care for the parents.

Though subordination—that is, location at a lower point in a hierarchical system—was certainly one of the notions conveyed by the child's kneeling, this subordination did not necessarily imply unconditional submission to a parent's wishes; it certainly did not mean that the child's agency and identity were entirely subsumed within those of the parent.⁴⁹ Yet subordination would have implied respect for the parents' wishes and some degree of dependence on their advice and aid. As Prince Hal puts it, speaking to his father, kneeling is a “prostrate and exterior bending” that witnesses a “most inward true and duteous spirit” and implies respect and a willingness to obey (2 Henry IV 4.5.146-48).⁵⁰

Besides these symbolic, social, and emotional functions, kneeling served the practical function of enabling the parent to conveniently place hands on the child's head. The child's kneeling also effectively stationed the parent between the child and the heavens as a kind of quasi-priestly intermediary ready to bestow heavenly influence on the child. That is how Richard Hooker depicts the parent's role in giving a blessing, which he compares both with blessings described in the Bible and with blessings given in his own time by ministers. “The imposition of handes,” he says, betokens “our restrayned desires to the partie, whome wee present unto God by prayer.”⁵¹ George Herbert went even further to suggest that, because of “the dignity wherewith God hath invested” the person performing the ritual, a “blessing”—whether given by parents or by a priest—“differs from prayer, in assurance, because it is not performed by way of request, but of confidence, and power, effectually applying Gods favour to the blessed.”⁵² Hooker's use of the phrase “restrayned desires” indicates that, besides viewing the parental blessing as a sacred act, he also sees it as a sign of the parent's feeling of responsibility and love for the child and of the connection between them. The hands, laid upon the child's head, not only serve as an instrument for conveying heavenly power, but also effect physical contact between parent and child and thus enable the blessing to serve as an expression of parental affection. During or after a blessing, parents might also show affection by kissing their children, especially younger ones. Some parents also joined kisses and embraces with the blessing of their adult children. For instance, shortly after Nicholas Ferrar's ordination as a deacon, his mother “devoutly blessed him” while at the same time “falling upon his neck, most tenderly weeping, & kissing him most affectionately.”⁵³

The blessing also allowed children to express affection for their parents, for instance, by kissing their parents' hands, an action that is sometimes made explicit in Shakespeare's depiction of the ritual (e.g., The Winter's Tale 5.3.118).⁵⁴ Many children valued the blessing highly and apparently saw it as a way of both showing filial devotion and receiving assurance of their parents' love. Shortly before Sir Thomas More's death, his daughter Margaret, thinking she might “never see [her father] in this world after,” eagerly sought him out for “his final blessing,” which she received “on her knees reverently,” afterwards embracing and kissing him. Her father was so moved by “her most natural and dear daughterly affection” that he again “gave her his fatherly blessing and many goodly words of comfort besides.”⁵⁵ Over a century later, Alice Thornton quoted her brother as saying to their mother, “Forsooth, I cannot have your prayers and blessing for me too often.”⁵⁶

The sense of Hooker's phrase “restrayned desires” is probably that in the blessing ritual the affection felt by parent and child, though strong and deep, is restrained within formal bounds, directed in a controlled, ceremonial way. The ritual expresses deep feeling, but gives that feeling shape and social, even mythic, significance, so that it fits meaningfully into the order of human society and the cosmos. For besides symbolizing the bond of love and identity between parent and child, the parental blessing was viewed as a sacred act linking a particular family and its life with the order of the universe and the powers of heaven. Further, the ritual was seen as a way of linking a child with the family in the larger sense of lineage and even with the whole human lineage going back to the beginning of time.

Given the power associated with the blessing, it was sometimes used by parents as a means of enforcing obedience. Most parents probably expected “duty and observance from their children” in return for the blessing.⁵⁷ In extraordinary cases, parents might charge a child “upon their blessing” to follow certain instructions.⁵⁸ Some withheld blessing in response to their children's disobedience or even cursed or threatened to curse their disobedient children.⁵⁹ Yet blessing seems to have been used only occasionally as a means of explicit pressure, and instances of formal cursing—seriously believed to have supernatural power—seem to have been remarkable for their rarity. Parenthood, Debora Shuger has reminded us, was thought of in the Renaissance primarily as a nurturing role, and parental love was felt to be instinctive and powerful.⁶⁰ Blessing was one way parents were able to convey that love and to act for their children's welfare. If parents' blessings had not been viewed as positive, loving acts, it is unlikely so many Renaissance children would have requested them, as they often did with obvious sincerity.

II. THE PARENTAL BLESSING IN SHAKESPEARE

Shakespeare's plays include thirty to thirty-five references to parental blessings, sometimes with two or three references in a single play. The exact number depends on how many times we are to imagine a blessing being withheld, even when no explicit reference to a blessing has been made. There are also five or six cases of a parent's cursing a child, a practice related conceptually to a parent's blessing.

In twenty-two of the references, the ritual marks a joyful reunion or reconciliation or otherwise represents a positive affirmation of the parent-child bond.⁶¹ In many cases, the parental blessing is not only willingly, but earnestly sought by a child (e.g., Richard II 1.3.69-77; Lear 4.7.56-57). The parents normally respond to the request with words that express a generous, even fervent desire for the child's welfare and happiness.⁶² Sometimes a child seeks a blessing just before parting from a parent.⁶³ Sometimes after separation the blessing serves to reestablish and confirm a special bond of affection and concern between parent and child, and often the closeness of identity between parent and child is emphasized.⁶⁴

Some of these “positive” instances of blessing involve a certain degree of irony. Polonius sends a spy to watch his son after having sent him away with a blessing. Hamlet speaks of a mother's blessing in a scene where he has just expressed extreme anger and bitterness toward his mother.⁶⁵ Perhaps the most clearly ironic use of the parental blessing is in Richard III. When Richard—already responsible for the death of Clarence—kneels before his mother, his heart is hardly in the ritual; yet seeing his mother, he says, “Humbly on my knee / I crave your blessing.” She responds, “God bless thee, and put meekness in thy breast, / Love, charity, obedience, and true duty!” Richard replies “Amen!” but adds in an aside—

                    and make me die a good old man!
That is the butt-end of a mother's blessing.
I marvel that her Grace did leave it out.

(2.2.105-11)

Besides contributing grim humor to the scene, the parental blessing here symbolizes a bond that ought to be present but is not, thereby heightening dramatic tension and emphasizing Richard's hypocrisy, as well as his skepticism and self-involvement. Shakespeare makes a point of balancing Richard's hypocritical request for a blessing with another parental blessing near the end of the play: the giving of a blessing to Richmond, Richard's antagonist, “by attorney”—that is, through his step-father—“from [his] mother” (5.3.83-85). The normality of the relationship between Richmond and his mother makes a revealing contrast to the abnormality of Richard's familial relationships. The blessing also serves as a prophetic foreshadowing of Richmond's victory over Richard, who by the end of the play receives his mother's curse (4.4.188).

There is irony too in the blessing the Countess of Rossillion gives her son in All's Well That Ends Well. The blessing, which most editors and directors have apparently failed to notice, takes place in the first scene, just before Bertram leaves for Paris. The ritual begins when Bertram says, “Madam, I desire your holy wishes”; his mother replies, “Be thou blest, Bertram, and succeed thy father / In manners as in shape!” She then gives six lines of motherly advice, reminiscent of Polonius' advice to Laertes, also given in connection with a parental blessing (1.1.59-70).⁶⁶ If acted out ritually on the stage, with Bertram kneeling and his mother placing her hands on or above his head, this blessing will be dramatically impressive and will inevitably affect how viewers experience and interpret the play. The ritual emphasizes a crucial moment of interaction between mother and son. It sounds a theme at the opening of the play—the theme of grace versus gracelessness—that will stay longer in an audience's memory if it is seen as well as heard. The giving of a blessing serves as a prototype for events that come later in the play: the blessing is the first instance among several of a gracious woman appealing to heaven to bless Bertram.

Besides increasing the scene's dramatic effectiveness, the blessing ritual in this first scene also complicates—and thereby enriches—an audience's interpretation of Bertram and of the play. As with Richard in Richard III, Bertram's receiving a parental blessing may be set in ironic contrast to his subsequent gracelessness. Yet Bertram, unlike Richard, gives no hint when the blessing takes place of being insincere in the humility and reverence he shows toward his mother. Bertram says very little, and perhaps his restraint can be taken as evidence that he feels ambivalent as a son. But the scene certainly does not exclude the possibility of his being at least passively willing to receive blessing and instruction, respectful of tradition and familial bonds. His request for a blessing can thus be taken as a sign of his essential, though yet undeveloped and untested, goodness, perhaps even as a foreshadowing of his eventual redemption, or at least movement toward redemption.⁶⁷

Despite the ironies in some of the situations just mentioned, the blessing itself carries essentially positive connotations in the twenty-two occurrences I have cited. And though the idea of filial duty is certainly present to some degree in most of these occurrences, the parent's desire for the child's welfare is almost always a more important element. Sometimes this desire is expressed through the giving of advice (e.g., All's Well 1.1.64-68; Hamlet 1.3.58-80).⁶⁸ This advice, though it implies the parent's maturity or authority, is hardly coercive and is joined with good wishes and affection for the child. Indeed, the great majority of blessings in Shakespeare's plays express strongly felt love on the part of both parent and child. And in some cases, paradoxically, parents humble themselves in some sense before the child or receive renewed life from the child to whom they had earlier given life. Hamlet makes his mother's reformation the condition for his seeking blessing from her (Hamlet 3.4.170-72). Titus Andronicus calls his daughter “the cordial of mine age” after she requests his blessing (Titus Andronicus 1.1.166). Lear similarly sees Cordelia as a source of life and healing, and he kneels to her when she asks for a blessing (Lear 4.7.46-48, 5.3.10-11). Children have restorative power in several other plays, including The Winter's Tale (1.1.39, 1.2.170-71, 4.4.1-3, 5.1.152, 5.3.125-28), Pericles (5.1.195, 204-13, 223, 5.3.44-48), and The Tempest (5.1). One phrase from Pericles is especially striking: shortly before giving her his blessing, Pericles calls his daughter Marina “Thou that begget'st him that did thee beget” (5.1.195).⁶⁹

Though filial duty and parental authority are not the dominant notes in the twenty-two references I have so far discussed, five or six of Shakespeare's blessings are tied closely to the ideas of duty or authority: Coriolanus 5.3.50-52 (Coriolanus wants to show himself more dutiful than “common sons”), 2 Henry IV 4.5.146-48 (Hal kneels to his father as an expression of his “inward true and duteous spirit”), Cymbeline 3.5.30-32 (Imogen's appearance—and presumably kneeling—before father and step-mother is called “the duty of the day”), and As You Like It 1.1.3-4. Especially in this last case, parental authority is a clearly positive force: the father's charge, given “on his blessing,” ought to motivate Oliver to treat his brother better. In Richard III Clarence similarly refers to the blessing his father gave to all three sons, charging them “to love each other” (1.4.235-38).⁷⁰ In two other episodes, harder to classify, fathers concerned to protect their sons want to use their blessing to keep the sons from going into battle. In 1 Henry VI 4.5.32-55, Talbot charges his son, “upon [his] blessing,” to leave battle; the son refuses, and Talbot finally yields to the son's wishes. In Cymbeline 4.4.43-50, Belarius' adopted sons ask at once for a blessing and for permission to go to battle, but assert their intent to proceed, if necessary, even without their “father's” blessing. Again, the father yields.

In a few cases, the parental blessing—or a parody of it—functions to depict familial disorder. In King Lear, for instance, Lear kneels before his daughters, in an ironic reversal of the usual form of blessing, and he does so to express his hurt and outrage and to ridicule what he considers Regan's undaughterly request that he apologize to Goneril. “On my knees,” he says with mock humility, “I beg / That you'll vouch-safe me raiment, bed, and food” (2.4.155-56). For the audience, Lear's kneeling symbolizes not only his anger, but also the overturning of the natural order, the topsy-turvy world created by filial ingratitude and cruelty and by Lear's departures from his proper role as father.

The blessing also appears in distorted form in Coriolanus, where it may be taken as suggesting the unhealthy domination of parent over child. Coriolanus kneels twice to his mother, once fairly early in the play (2.1.169-71) and later in the climactic scene where he has determined not to submit to her. As it turns out, he is unable to resist (“Nature”—that is, natural affection and loyalty—is too strong in him), and he ends by bidding his knee “sink … i' th' earth” (5.3.22-52). In the same scene, his mother uses the custom to manipulate her son. Interestingly enough, she does so, not by giving a blessing, but rather by kneeling as if she were asking for one. She kneels before her son—like Lear, reversing the order of nature—but it is clear that she does so, deeply offending him by “this unnatural scene” (as he calls it) of a mother humbling herself before her son, so that he will feel compelled to grant her request (5.3.53-62, 183-89). It is a turning point for Coriolanus and, as he realizes, will lead to his downfall.⁷¹

Apart from some of these parodies of the blessing ritual, the only clearly negative allusions to the custom involve a parent's withholding blessing, or cursing a child. These allusions, indeed, show parental tyranny or lack of generous good will. But they do so precisely because a blessing is positive, suggestive of harmony and mutual love. The cursings occur in 1 Henry VI 5.4.25-33 (after Joan has refused to acknowledge the shepherd as father and receive his blessing); in Richard III 4.4.188 (when Richard is cursed by his mother); possibly in Winter's Tale 4.4.458 (though it is not likely the shepherd means seriously to curse Perdita); allusively in 2 Henry VI 3.2.155 and King John 3.1.256-57; and most memorably in Lear 1.1.204, 1.4.300, 2.4.146, 170. Blessings are withheld, sometimes with an implied cursing, in Winter's Tale 2.3.67, 154-57; Romeo and Juliet 3.5.158-203; and possibly Othello 1.3 and Midsummer Night's Dream 1.1—though in these last two the idea of blessing or cursing is not explicitly introduced. Othello is an interesting case, since Brabantio in effect gives his blessing—certainly his ex post facto permission (1.3.175-78, 189-98). But of course his clear dissatisfaction (lines 240, 292-93, etc.) constitutes a kind of implied cursing.

Some might argue that these harsher modes of tyranny take over when a child refuses to submit “voluntarily” and that kneeling for a blessing represents such a submission. But in fact, in none of the twenty-two cases I listed as clearly positive does the child submit to a specific command or wish expressed by the parent. Indeed, in several cases, the parent is acknowledging or submitting to—or is asked to submit to—a request made by the child or by someone else on the child's behalf. Nor is withholding a blessing necessarily coercive. In Winter's Tale 2.3, Paulina presents a new-born daughter to Leontes and “commends it to [his] blessing” (line 67). Instead of taking the child in his arms and praying for divine protection—as Henry VIII does in giving the infant Elizabeth her first father's blessing (Henry VIII 5.4.10-11)—Leontes refuses to acknowledge the child as his and even threatens her life. His horror of being linked with “another's issue” leads him to imagine seeing Perdita grow up to “kneel / And call [him] father,” as if requesting a blessing (Winter's Tale 2.3.155-56). Rather than pressuring the child to act or refrain from acting, Leontes' refusal to bless his daughter is an attempt to distance himself from her, a refusal to acknowledge the responsibility and love, as well as the physical and social bond, that would be implied by a blessing. If he were to give a blessing, the act he would be performing would clearly be—for both his daughter and himself—positive, even redemptive. Leontes' withholding of a blessing helps set in motion a series of terrible, tragic events; and similarly, in Lear (where coercion is involved), the cursing of Cordelia leads to disaster. In both plays, the failure to bless is disastrous because it amounts to a failure of generosity and love, a cutting off or denial of the living connection between parent and child symbolized by the blessing ritual. Even its negative uses, then, effectively emphasize the positive side of the parental blessing, for it is the ritual's distortion or absence that signals or produces disaster.

It seems to me that a fair appraisal of Shakespeare's use of parental blessings would be something like this: twenty-two to twenty-five references to blessings are positive and non-coercive; five to seven emphasize filial duty or parental authority, but are not really coercive; three or four are mixed, hard to place in either category; and nine to twelve references are to acts (cursing or withholding blessing) that are clearly negative and to some degree coercive. Though the blessing did not have exclusively positive associations, Stone's connecting it with “the utter subordination of the child” and Kahn's description of it as an “extreme” expression of patriarchal power hardly seem accurate reflections of Shakespeare's use—or his contemporaries' experience and understanding—of the custom.⁷²

Besides reflecting Renaissance attitudes, Shakespeare uses parental blessings for a variety of theatrical purposes: for instance, to convey information, create comic effects, and bring plots to climax and resolution. In Cymbeline 3.5.30-32 Imogen's absence from court is first noted when she fails to appear for “the duty of the day,” a ceremony that probably involved kneeling and receiving a blessing. Two examples of comic uses of the motif are found in Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Merchant of Venice. In the first, Launce acts out the request for a father's blessing with his shoe standing in for his father (2.3.23-26). In The Merchant of Venice—in a scene that intentionally echoes Jacob's receiving a blessing from his blind father Isaac (Genesis 27)—Launcelot Gobbo has to ask his “sand-blind” father for a blessing repeatedly before being acknowledged and finally says: “Pray you let's have no more fooling about it, but give me your blessing. I am Launcelot, your boy that was, your son that is, your child that shall be” (2.2.78-86).⁷³

Probably Shakespeare's most moving use of the parental blessing is in the plays where it expresses reconciliation and reunion in a family that has experienced conflict and separation. This is its function in the “romances”: Marina kneels before Pericles, who says, “Now blessing on thee! rise th' art my child,” and before her mother, who says, “Blest, and mine own!” (Pericles 5.1.213; 5.3.48); Imogen kneels before Cymbeline and says, “Your blessing, sir” (Cymbeline 5.5.266); and Ferdinand kneels before his father Alonso, who cries, “Now all the blessings / Of a glad father compass thee about!” (Tempest 5.1.179-80).

Shakespeare uses this reconciling and reuniting function of the parental blessing to help create two of his most powerful scenes—the reconciliation between Lear and Cordelia in King Lear and the final scene of The Winter's Tale. In King Lear, as we have seen, Lear earlier kneels before a daughter to express his anger and grief, cynically reversing the usual order of things. The parental blessing appears again later in the play, this time also with complications, but now conveying the positive values and feelings normally associated with the practice. After awakening from madness and despair to find himself before Cordelia, Lear begins to kneel, perhaps thinking her a “soul in bliss,” certainly (once he knows who she is) wanting to express his shame and sorrow and ask for forgiveness. But Cordelia, wanting to honor him as father and to forget past offenses, resists having him kneel, seeing in that gesture a reversal of the proper relationship between them. She is the one who ought to kneel, and so she does, asking for a father's blessing:

                                        O, look upon me, sir,
And hold your hand[s] in benediction o'er me.
No, sir, you must not kneel.

(4.7.56-58)

Though Shakespeare uses contemporary attitudes here, he has achieved an unusual effect by transforming the customary ritual in one important respect. What his audience would have seen is not a child kneeling before a standing parent, but rather a parent and child kneeling to each other, both offering themselves to the other. Their kneeling is a potent symbol of what their relation has become, no longer proud domination on the one hand and virtuous resistance on the other, but on both sides love, submission, and forgiveness, and a desire to bless and be blessed by the other.⁷⁴ This image of parent and child kneeling to each other is repeated later in the play when, before being led to prison, Lear says to Cordelia, “When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down / And ask of thee forgiveness” (5.3.10-11).

In King Lear, as in Renaissance life outside the theater, the blessing ritual draws much of its power from its association with the sacredness of the parent-child bond, one of the “holy cords” that Kent calls “t' intrinse t' unloose” (2.2.74-75). The connection between parental blessings and the blessings given by the biblical patriarchs—Isaac and Jacob especially—further enhances the sense of the sacred associated with the practice. Shakespeare and his contemporaries were quite aware of this connection and saw it as giving the practice both antiquity and the authoritative sanction of a sacred text. In his discussion of parental blessings, Richard Hooker cites the specific precedent of Jacob or Israel: “Thus when Israel blessed Ephraim and Manasses Josephs sonnes, he imposed upon them his hands and prayed. …”⁷⁵ The fourteenth-century poem I referred to earlier ends with this blessing:

Nou thrift and thedom mote thou have, mi leve swete barn.
Of alle oure forme-faderes that were or arn,
Of patriarches and prophetes that evere weren on live,
Here blessinge mote thou have, and wel mote thou thrive.(76)

Over three centuries later, much the same attitude still prevailed. A seventeenth-century commentary on the Bible, after describing Isaac's blessing of Jacob, suggests that parental blessings had their origin in the biblical practice:

And faithful Parents do well in imitation hereof to bless their children, and to teach them to come and crave their blessing to this day.⁷⁷

Especially relevant to Shakespeare is a reference to the ancient practice in an earlier dramatic version of the Lear story, The True Chronicle History of King Leir. Shakespeare used this, in fact, as a source for his own play and specifically borrowed from it the idea of kneeling and blessing. The earlier play makes explicit what is only implicit in Shakespeare—the sacred nature of the act of blessing—by having Leir cite the blessing given by Jacob to his son Judah. These are the words Leir speaks to Cordella (as she is called here) as he blesses her:

The blessing, which the God of Abraham gave
Unto the trybe of Juda, light on thee,
And multiply thy dayes, that thou mayst see
Thy childrens children prosper after thee.(78)

Among the significant features of this blessing is the idea, borrowed directly from the Bible, of prophecy as part of the parental blessing. This association of the parental blessing with prophecy was apparently common in Renaissance England. Writer after writer on the subject repeated the idea, “the blessing or curse of the Parents, hath almost ever a Propheticke power joyned with it.”⁷⁹ The power of a parent's blessing or curse is also alluded to in Cymbeline, As You Like It, 1 Henry VI, and elsewhere. As presented by Shakespeare, however, the parent's cursing of a child or withholding blessing is a destructive and often clearly sinful act, disastrous for both parent and child. The terrible events in Lear, The Winter's Tale, and perhaps Othello and Romeo and Juliet can be in part attributed to a parent's cursing, or failing to bless, a child. By contrast, the giving of a blessing is often part of a creative, healing process in which divine powers may be at work.

Of all the parental blessings in Shakespeare's play, perhaps none conveys a sense of the sacred more powerfully than the one at the end of The Winter's Tale. The sense of the sacred comes from several sources—the description of the oracle and its island earlier in the play, the awe-inspiring moments of birth and death, the chapel where Paulina takes Leontes and Perdita at the end of the play and the resurrection that supposedly takes place there, the words “miracle” and “wonder” that echo through the closing scenes, and the word “grace,” used throughout the play to suggest beauty, gracefulness, virtue, favor, graciousness, generosity, forgiveness, and unconditional love. All of these are possible meanings of the word grace, and all stem from its basic meaning of “gift”—especially a divine gift—since that gift may be one of sanctity or beauty or may be the impulse to imitate heaven's bounty and give freely and graciously. All of these meanings have gathered around the word by the time it occurs in the final scene where the parental blessing is given.

The first hint of a parental blessing comes early in the scene when Perdita kneels before what appears to be a statue of her mother and says,

                                        And give me leave,
And do not say 'tis superstition, that
I kneel, and then implore her blessing. Lady,
Dear queen, that ended when I but began,
Give me that hand of yours to kiss.

(5.3.42-46)

The reference to superstition, especially joined as it is here with kneeling before a “statue,” may reflect the anxiety felt by some during the seventeenth century as to whether kneeling for a parental blessing might be among the “reliques of Popish … superstition.”⁸⁰ (Compare Paulina's later reference to “unlawful business.”) But surely the primary associations Perdita's words and gestures should evoke are the filial love and reverence of a daughter for her mother as she kneels for a mother's blessing.

Later in the scene, as the statue apparently comes to life and it becomes clear that this is the living Hermione, Paulina turns to Perdita and says, “Kneel / And pray your mother's blessing.” To the mother she says, “Turn, good lady, / Our Perdita is found.” Hermione then asks heaven to bless her daughter:

                                        You gods, look down
And from your sacred vials pour your graces
Upon my daughter's head!

(5.3.119-23)

The power of this blessing depends partly on the words used—the rhythms, the imagery, the word “grace” with its accumulated meanings. And of course it depends on the situation—the years of separation and the restoration of a bond between mother and daughter that was broken just after Perdita's birth. But the power of the blessing comes also from the gestures used: the kneeling of Perdita, Hermione's lifting of her hands to appeal for heaven's graces (a gesture not specified by the text or by editors, but surely appropriate), and her placing of her hands at the same time on or above her daughter's head to symbolize the bestowing of those graces on her—and to symbolize also the bond now newly created between her daughter and herself.

What Hermione and Perdita do in this scene—and what Lear and Cordelia do as well—is both a reflection of Renaissance practice and an allusion to customs of great antiquity, highly charged with religious associations. It is also an affirmation of the bond linking parent and child and of the connection between this bond and the powers that rule the cosmos. Specifically, in The Winter's Tale the parent's blessing serves as an image of what has happened through the whole course of the play, what happens most clearly as the play closes: from their sacred vials, the gods are pouring “grace” in all its senses into the world of human life. What we feel at the end of this play is something very close to what Shakespeare and his contemporaries felt when they used the word “blessing” or “benediction,” especially when referring to a parent's blessing: a feeling of coherence and connection, a sense of sanctity and renewal and heaven-empowered love. What Shakespeare adds, or at least makes clearer than it would have been in many of the blessings given daily in Renaissance England, is the role the child has in blessing the parent. Especially in Lear and The Winter's Tale, where children teach and heal their parents, the blessing ritual functions as a reciprocal act. As they kneel, Lear and Cordelia bless and heal each other. Hermione calls for heavenly grace to descend upon her daughter, yet at the same time Perdita conveys grace—love, regenerative power—in return. It is as if Perdita, especially now that Hermione can see and touch her, brings the resurrection of her mother to completion, gives birth to the woman who bore her.

In modern productions, the gestures originally associated with the ritual are usually absent. In their place, an embrace of some kind is often used. Though an embrace certainly can and should follow the blessing, it seems to me that the gestures originally associated with the ritual possess great power, even for a modern audience. As I witnessed a recent college production of The Winter's Tale for which I served as dramaturg, I was surprised—despite having insisted on the historically authentic gestures and having anticipated their effectiveness—at how powerful I found them. Even in early rehearsals, with actors dressed in modern street clothes, the blessing was immediately, unexpectedly striking. I believe the blessing's effect came from several sources. The impressive formality of the ritual allowed it to contain and give shape to the emotional power of a reunion of mother and daughter and, by delaying the release of the emotions in more expansive form, actually heightened their power. The sense of the sacred was even more strongly present than I had anticipated. As she performed the ritual, Hermione became a priestess-like figure, endowed with heavenly authority, stationed between the heavens and her kneeling daughter. Hermione's hands, placed on Perdita's head, besides serving as instruments to convey heavenly power, also suggested the physical and emotional connection between mother and daughter. There was something simple, honest, and immediate about the ritual that invited me—and I believe others—to share a moment of intimate human contact and to feel the bonding effect of that moment. I believe the scene left a deeper and more memorable impression than it would have without the solemnity and formality of ritual.

III. CONCLUSION

Parental blessings come at some of Shakespeare's most powerful dramatic moments, and they express some of his most important themes and values. They may convey love, submission, reconciliation, reunion, and a sense of the sacred; or they may be used ironically to express the opposite, or humorously for the sake of satire or entertainment. Understanding the custom's historical background can enhance our appreciation of Shakespeare's stagecraft and of his patterning of ideas and imagery. Specifically, such background can help us imagine how the scenes might be played and can offer invaluable help to directors who aim for authenticity or dramatic power.

The historical background has other uses as well, especially that of helping us see Shakespeare's plays in relation to social and intellectual changes taking place at the same time they were being written and first performed, including the movement toward democratic individualism, toward less formality in social relations, and toward an attenuated sense of the sacred. The parental blessing ritual—now so unfamiliar to us—can be especially helpful to us in our efforts to see the plays against this “background” of social change.

Shakespeare's treatment of the ritual can also help us see it as something quite different from the instrument of domination it has recently been taken to be. Indeed, in many instances, from quite different kinds of plays, the parent who is asked to bless is anything but dominating. Furthermore, in several plays—especially Richard III, All's Well That Ends Well, and The Winter's Tale—the blessing is associated with the power of women. In some plays this association may be explained by the father's absence through death. But in The Winter's Tale, with both parents alive and especially given Leontes' failure to bless Perdita as an infant, the deliberate foregrounding of a mother's blessing has unavoidable implications for issues of gender. The emphasis on a mother's blessing, in this and other plays, helps strengthen women's association with generosity and sacred power. Perhaps because the authority to perform the ritual derives from natural powers and relationships—and perhaps, too, because blessing, like cursing, is viewed as possessing supernatural power—the blessing ritual symbolizes women's access to a power independent of, and in some ways superior to, that found in the political structures within which Shakespeare's men operate. (That would help explain Richard III's powerlessness, even fear, in the face of the women who curse and try to bless him.) Especially in The Winter's Tale, the parental blessing also functions as a means one woman has of expressing her solidarity with another. And in several plays it serves as an instrument women use to instruct and influence men.

I would argue that, far from being aberrant in his use of the blessing ritual, Shakespeare is reflecting attitudes of his time.⁸¹ He is more imaginative, more generous, more aware of the personal interiority of women and children than many of his contemporaries. Yet in using the blessing ritual as an instrument of female power and as a way of expressing mutual, and mutually deferential, love between parents and children, Shakespeare draws on, and often expands on, attitudes he shared with many of his contemporaries. The plays thus join with other historical evidence in calling into question one of Lawrence Stone's central assertions: that parental blessings functioned mainly to reinforce patriarchal power, whether this is taken to mean a parent's power over a child or a man's power over a woman. The main function of the blessing appears, in fact, to have been that of expressing love and symbolizing, even effecting, the sense of connectedness and belonging that was highly valued in Renaissance England.

For certainly it is a myth—and by that I mean a false or erroneous notion—that parents and children of the Renaissance did not love each other. Mountains of evidence, both literary and documentary, make the opposite inescapably clear.⁸² But that love was likely to be ceremonious rather than chummy. Parents and children of the Renaissance felt affection for each other and felt it powerfully, but they often expressed it as “ceremonious affection,” to use a phrase from King Lear (1.4.59). Perhaps no custom expressed such ceremonious affection more clearly and repeatedly than did the parental blessings practiced by the families of Renaissance England. I suspect that is one reason Shakespeare chose to use it—and was able to use it to such powerful effect—in so many of his plays.

Notes

1. Levin L. Schücking, The Puritan Family: A Social Study from the Literary Sources (New York: Schocken Books, 1970), 72-73.

2. Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt, Children in English Society, vol. 1 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 18-19.

3. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 171; The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 591. See also The Family, Sex and Marriage, 7, where Stone asserts that, in the family type that dominated in England from 1580 to 1640, the father was “a legalized petty tyrant within the home.”

4. Ralph A. Houlbrooke, The English Family, 1450-1700 (London: Longman, 1984), 31, 41, 145, 168, 182, 188, 203.

5. John T. Onuska, Jr., “Bringing Shakespeare's Characters Down to Earth: The Significance of Kneeling,” Iowa State Journal of Research 56 (1981-82): 36-38; David Bevington, Action Is Eloquence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 153-54.

6. Coppélia Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 16.

7. Onuska and Bevington both refer to Stone's Family, Sex and Marriage, 171. Though on general issues Kahn cites the same book, she gives as her source on the parental blessing a paragraph from an earlier essay by Stone that is virtually identical with the paragraph in The Family, Sex and Marriage: “The Rise of the Nuclear Family in Early Modern England,” in The Family in History, ed. Charles E. Rosenberg (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), 41. Stone himself and most of the other historians who discuss the parental blessing base their discussion on a handful of sources and neglect what I believe is abundant evidence for a different interpretation.

8. The English Family, 145.

9. Compare, for instance, Henry VIII 4.2.133 and Cymbeline 5.5.350-51; Winter's Tale 5.3.121-23 and Tempest 5.1.201-2; Richard III 5.3.84 and Richard II 1.3.78; Titus Andronicus 1.1.167 and Richard III 2.2.109; King John 3.3.71 and Hamlet 1.3.57; Hamlet 1.3.57-81 and All's Well 1.1.64-72; and Merchant of Venice 2.2.92-93 (“thou art mine own flesh and blood”), Pericles 5.1.213 (“th' art my child”), 5.3.48 (“Blest, and mine own!”), Cymbeline 5.5.264 (“my flesh? my child?”), and The Winter's Tale 5.3.123 (“mine own”). All quotations from Shakespeare's plays are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

10. The quoted phrase is from Matthew Henry's An Account of the Life and Death of Mr. Philip Henry, 2nd ed. (1699), 56.

11. “Shakespeare and the theatrical conventions of his time,” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies, ed. Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 98. The notion of a distinctive Elizabethan theatrical “vocabulary” is discussed throughout this article—e.g., p. 85 (“the original theatrical language or logic of presentation”)—and in Dessen's book, Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

12. Thomas Stapleton, Tres Thomae (Douay, 1588), 12. I have translated from the original Latin: “Solent enim apud nos liberi quotidie mane ac vesperi benedictionem flexo poplite ab utroque parente petere.” See also Thomas Becon, Works (1564), fols. 519v, 524v.

13. A Treatise of the Vocations or Callings of Men (1603), in The Works of William Perkins, ed. Ian Breward (Appleford, Eng.: The Sutton Courtenay Press, 1970), 469.

14. Peter Erondell, The French Garden (1605; rpt. Menston, Eng.: The Scolar Press, 1969), sig. E7v.

15. Erondell, sigs. E7v, P5v. Compare the simpler “God bless thee, my son!” in Misogonus (1577), in Six Anonymous Plays, 2nd series, ed. John S. Farmer (Guildford, Eng.: Charles W. Traylen, 1966), 233.

16. Richard Whitforde, A Werke for Housholders (1533). Whitforde—a priest writing before England's break with Rome—advises that “the father or mother holde up bothe handes, and joynynge them both togyder, loke up reverently and devoutly unto the heven” (sig. D4v) and also suggests that parents use the sign of the cross.

17. Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, vols. 1-3 of the Folger Library Edition of The Works of Richard Hooker, gen. ed. W. Speed Hill (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977-1982), 2: 321.

18. In blessings given with only one hand, the right hand would probably have been used.

19. César de Saussure, A Foreign View of England in the Reigns of George I. and George II., quoted in J. Wickham Legg, English Church Life from the Restoration to the Tractarian Movement (London: Longmans, Green, 1914), 168.

20. See John Weemes, The Christian Synagogue (1630), 296-97, for a discussion of the gestures used by priests in ancient Israel to bless groups. David Calderwood—noting similarly that “if many [were to be blessed], then the Priest lifted up both his hands, as high as his shoulders, toward or over them, and blessed all together”—argued that such gestures were still appropriate (A Defence of our Arguments against Kneeling [Amsterdam, 1620], 44). For pictorial evidence for various forms of blessing, see Reiner Haussher, Rembrants Jacobssegen (Opladen, Germany: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1976); “Bénir” and “Imposition des mains,” in Dictionnaire d'archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, 1926 ed.; Gertrud Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, trans. Janet Seligman (London: Lund Humphries, 1971, 1972), vol. 1: plates 376, 444; vol. 2: plates 423, 429; George Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), 65.

21. Lewis Theobald first added the commonly used stage direction to Hamlet 1.3.57 describing Polonius' “laying his hand on Laertes' head.” (See “Textual Notes” to Hamlet in The Riverside Shakespeare, 1188.) Theobald's singular “hand” probably reflects his own early eighteenth-century awareness of what was by then a dying custom.

22. The passage in Lear seems to have been set by Compositor E, “who had a marked tendency to omit or add a final ‘-s’” (see MacD. P. Jackson, “The Transmission of Shakespeare's Text,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies, ed. Stanley Wells [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986], 180). Furthermore, the uncorrected state of the folio (Fa) reads “yours hand,” probably a “compositorial metathesis, followed by (in Fb) correction without reference to copy” (see Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, et al., William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987], 538). The evidence is thus fairly strong that the folio, as well as the quarto, should read “hands.”

23. See Legg, 168-71; Becon, fol. 524v (“bow the knee”); Philip Stubbes, A Perfect Pathway to Felicitie (1592), sig. C4 (“fall downe upon thy knees”); and Francis Beaumont's play The Knight of the Burning Pestle, ed. Andrew Gurr (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), in which a mother says to her son: “Downe on thy knees, thou shalt have my blessing” (p. 33; 1.4.11-12).

24. Dives and Pauper, ed. Priscilla Heath Barnum, vol. 1, EETS 275, 280 (London: Oxford University Press, 1976, 1980), part 1: 106.

25. See Legg, 168-69.

26. Hugh Rhodes, writing in the sixteenth century, advised: “When that thy parents come in syght, / doe to them reverence. / Aske them blessing if they have / bene long out of presence.” See The Boke of Nurture, or Schoole of Good Maners (1577), in Manners and Meals in Olden Times, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, EETS o.s. 32 (1868; rpt. New York: Greenwood, 1969), 73.

27. Houlbrooke, English Family, 31, 145. For examples, see Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, ed. Norman Davis, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 43, 540; James M. Osborn, Young Philip Sidney 1572-1577 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 11-14; The Ferrar Papers, ed. B. Blackstone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), 261, 263, 264, 276, 303; Diaries and Letters of Philip Henry, ed. Matthew Henry Lee (London, 1882), 335, 348, 353-55, 359, 363, 365.

28. The Monument of Matrones (1582), “The Sixt Lampe of Virginitie,” 37.

29. The Autobiography of Mrs. Alice Thornton, ed. Charles Jackson, Surtees Society 62 (1875), 112-13.

30. The Fathers Blessing (1616; adapted from James I's Basilicon Doron), 5-9. Shakespeare presents the dying John of Gaunt as a kind of prophet (Richard II 2.1.1-68); see especially lines 5-6 (“they say the tongues of dying men / Enforce attention like deep harmony”) and 31 (“Methinks I am a prophet new inspir'd”).

31. William Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More, in Two Early Tudor Lives, ed. Richard S. Sylvester and Davis P. Harding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 221.

32. Dr. Peckard's life of Nicholas Ferrar, in Christopher Wordsworth, Ecclesiastical Biography, 3rd ed. (London, 1839), 4: 173. Compare George Herbert, who, at age thirty-three, asked for his mother's blessing just before explaining why he was not going to follow her advice (Izaak Walton, The Lives of John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert and Robert Sanderson, intro. by George Saintsbury [London: Oxford University Press, 1927], 279).

33. Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, 1621-1623, vol. 17, ed. Allen B. Hinds (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1911), 451.

34. Ro. Ba., The Lyfe of Syr Thomas More, Sometymes Lord Chancellor of England (1599), ed. Elsie Vaughan Hitchcock and P. E. Hallett, EETS o.s. 222 (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), 59-60.

35. The Good Wife Taught Her Daughter; The Good Wyfe Wold a Pylgremage; The Thewis of Gud Women, ed. Tauno F. Mustanoja (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1948).

36. The lack of evidence from the late 1500s and early 1600s for any noticeable increase in emphasis placed on the custom, along with the custom's already venerable antiquity and its pious observance by an early sixteenth-century figure like Sir Thomas More, makes it difficult to accept Lawrence Stone's thesis that deference toward parents—including the deference shown through the blessing ritual—grew markedly from 1530 to 1640 (Family, Sex and Marriage, 171).

37. See Legg, 168-71 for eighteenth-century evidence of parental blessings. Houlbrooke asserts that even “during the seventeenth century the blessing was coming to be bestowed more informally, with a bedtime kiss, for example, or restricted to solemn occasions” (The English Family, 145). The blessing John Cannon received from his father in 1712 is much less formal than the ritual common in Shakespeare's day, perhaps because John was ill at the time, but probably also because of changes in the way blessings were usually given. According to Cannon, his father “laid hold of my hand & gave me his benediction & praised God that he had found me alive” (χρονεχὰ [χρονικὰ] Seu Annales or Memoirs of the Birth Education Life and Death of Mr Iohn Cannon Sometime Officer of the Excise and Writing Master at Mere Glastonbury & West Lydford in the County of Somersett, n.d., MS in the Somerset Record Office, Taunton, 102). I owe this reference to R. A. Houlbrooke, who has examined the manuscript quoted here.

38. Robert Sanderson, 36 Sermons (1657), 8th ed., ed. Izaak Walton (1689), 73-74.

39. Robert Barclay, An Apology for the True Christian Divinity (1675), 7th ed. (1765), 515. Defenses of kneeling sometimes mention the parental blessing or other cases of “civil” kneeling. See Thomas Morton, A Defence of the Innocencie of the Three Ceremonies of the Church of England (1618), 300; John Burges, An Answer Rejoyned to that Applauded Pamphlet … (1631), 478; William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (1622), 439. Gouge's discussion makes it clear that objections to the practice of giving parental blessings were being raised by the 1620s. Even as early as the 1500s, conflict between conscience and parental authority was leading some to question the validity of parental blessing and cursing; for instance, Julius Palmer, who was to be executed under Queen Mary, responded to his mother's curse by saying that he had God's blessing (see Houlbrooke, The English Family, 168). By the 1620s, Puritan writers like John Downame were arguing that, when “considered as religious gestures,” such actions as bending the knee “are proper and peculiar to God alone” (A Guide to Godlynesse [1622], 123). See also William Bradshaw, A Proposition Concerning Kneeling (1605; rpt. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum; Norwood, N.J.: Walter J. Johnson, 1979), 9 (“the Idolatrous kneeling of Papistes”); William Ames, A Fresh Suit Against Human Ceremonies in God's Worship (1633), 79, 88, “An Addition” 40-41 (requiring kneeling and other ceremonies is a burden to conscience and a restriction of Christian liberty); and others. Note also Samuel Butler's description of “An Hypocritical Nonconformist,” whose “mortal Hatred to Ceremonies” derives from seeing them as “Signs of Submission,” in Characters, ed. Charles W. Daves (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970), 54.

40. See the “Ninth Article” (or chapter) of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil (1885), trans. Marianne Cowan (South Bend, Ind.: Gateway Editions, 1955), especially pp. 201-6.

41. H. N. Hudson, quoted in the New Variorum ed. of King Lear, ed. Horace Howard Furness (1880; rpt. New York: American Scholar Press, 1965), 302 n. 58.

42. For evidence of the custom among early Christians, see St. Ambrose, The Patriarchs (De patriarchis), in Seven Exegetical Works (vol. 65 of The Fathers of the Church), trans. Michael P. McHugh (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1972), 241. Francis X. Weiser claims that the “custom of parental blessing … was a universal tradition in all [European] countries before the Reformation” (Handbook of Christian Feasts and Customs [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958], 139), but as performed elsewhere the custom may not have coincided in form and frequency with the English practice. As Weiser describes the custom in Religious Customs in the Family (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1956), 27-28, parents bless their children, usually on special occasions, by making the sign of the cross on the children's foreheads. For examples of non-European (and non-Christian) blessings, see Ernest Crawley, Oath, Curse, and Blessing, ed. Theodore Besterman (London: Watts, 1934), 4-6.

43. The Sermons of John Donne, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter, vol. 9 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958), 59. Compare the assertion of Fynes Moryson that among the customs used in England and “in no other Kingdome that I knowe” is “for Children at morning and evening to aske their Parents blessing, and extraordinarily their Godfathers when they meete them” (Shakespeare's Europe: Unpublished Chapters of Fynes Moryson's Itinerary, ed. Charles Hughes [London: Sherratt & Hughes, 1903], 479). Thomas Stapleton also referred to it as a peculiarly English custom (Tres Thomae, 12).

44. Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, 17: 451.

45. The French Garden, sigs. E7v, E8v.

46. The Grimms' German Folk Tales, trans. Francis P. Magoun, Jr., and Alexander H. Krappe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960), 607; Schücking, The Puritan Family, 73.

47. See Philip Birnbaum, A Book of Jewish Concepts, rev. ed. (New York: Hebrew Publishing Co., 1975), 108-9; Joseph H. Hertz, The Authorised Daily Prayer Book, rev. ed. (New York: Bloch, 1963), 402-3; and Isaac Klein, A Guide to Jewish Religious Practice (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary, 1979), 61, 209.

48. See David P. Wright, “The Gesture of Hand Placement in the Hebrew Bible and in Hittite Literature,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 106 (1986): 433-46. For Renaissance discussions of the uses and significance of the hand (“the instrument of instruments”), see William Austin, Haec Homo (1638), 114-18 and J[ohn] B[ulwer], Chirologia: or the Naturall Language of the Hand (1644).

49. Even on an issue so crucial as a child's potential marriage partner, the consistent counsel of moralists of the period was that a parent's advice and consent be sought, but that the child's wishes always be respected. The legal requirement was that, “without Consent [i.e., of the bride and groom] there cannot be any Matrimony” (Henry Swinburne, A Treatise of Spousals or Matrimonial Contracts [1686; written before 1624], 51). Shakespeare presents the same position in Romeo and Juliet (1.2.16-19), The Winter's Tale (4.4.404-10), and elsewhere. Of course, both in Shakespeare and in Renaissance life outside the theater, parents sometimes exceeded their proper authority. See Bruce Young, “Haste, Consent, and Age at Marriage: Some Implications of Social History for Romeo and Juliet,” Iowa State Journal of Research 62 (1987-88): 459-74.

50. Compare Thomas Becon, who, writing in the mid-1500s, described “bow[ing] the knee” to ask for a blessing as one way of showing “honorable reverence toward [parents], as parsons representing the majestie of God” (Works, fol. 524v); and James Cleland, who wrote in 1607 that, “The bowing of the knee declareth that we submit our selves to him [before whom we bow], & that we wil not remaine equal, but wil humble, and make our selves inferiour” (The Institution of a Young Noble Man [1607; rpt. New York: Scolars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1948], 1: 178).

51. Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 2: 321.

52. The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 286. Strong Calvinists, by contrast, emphasized that it was actually God (not the parent or priest) who gave blessings.

53. John Ferrar, A Life of Nicholas Ferrar, in The Ferrar Papers, ed. B. Blackstone, 26. For the kissing of younger children in conjunction with the blessing ritual, see Two Horrible and Inhumane Murders done in Lincolneshire (1607), in Reprints of English Books, 1475-1700, ed. Joseph Arnold Foster (Claremont, 1948), 4: 16. Shakespeare has a parent kiss an infant child while blessing her in Henry VIII 5.4.9-11. As both this scene and one in The Winter's Tale (2.3) suggest, infants may sometimes have been blessed. An infant, of course, would not have knelt, but apparently would have been held and perhaps kissed when given a blessing.

54. Note also the kissing of parents in Two Gentlemen of Verona 2.3.26, 28.

55. William Roper, Life of Sir Thomas More, 251.

56. The Autobiography of Mrs. Alice Thornton, 64. See also Paston Letters, 1: 540 (John Paston asks his mother by letter for her daily blessing), and the play Misogonus (published in 1577), in which a son reunited with his father cries out, “Bless me, my father!” (Six Anonymous Plays, 233).

57. The phrase is from John Mayer's discussion of parental blessings in A Commentary upon the Whole Old Testament (1653), 1: 201.

58. For instance, Magdalen Herbert “upon her blessing charged [her son Edward] never to learn Swimming,” for fear he might drown (The Life of Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury Written by Himself, ed. Horace Walpole [London, 1770], 10). A niece of Nicholas Ferrar's was charged by her mother “on her blessing to returne a true aunsweare” concerning a disputed matter (The Ferrar Papers, ed. B. Blackstone, 286-87).

59. For example, in 1644 the mother of Anne Murray (later Lady Halkett) became so angry with her daughter for disobedience that “for fourteene months shee never gave mee her blesing” (The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett and Ann, Lady Fanshawe, ed. John Loftis [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979], 20). Wills sometimes used the threat of a curse or the withholding of blessing to ensure that instructions were followed. For example, Henry VIII's will “charg[es] and command[s]” his son Edward to be advised by specified counselors “on Peyn of our Curse” (Foedera, Conventiones, Literae, et cujuscunque generis Acta Publica, 2nd ed., ed. Thomas Rymer [1728-35], 15: 115). I owe this reference to R. A. Houlbrooke.

60. See chapter 6 in Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

61. See Titus Andronicus 1.1.161-68; Two Gentlemen of Verona 2.3.23-29; Richard III 2.2.104-11, 5.3.83-85; King John 3.3.69-71; Merchant of Venice 2.2.77-95; Hamlet 1.3.52-82, 3.4.170-72; All's Well 1.1.59-70; Lear 4.7.56-58, 5.3.10-11, 5.3.196; Coriolanus 2.1.169-71, 5.3.68-76; Pericles 5.1.204-13, 223, 5.3.44-48; Cymbeline 5.5.264-69, 347-56, 368-72; Winter's Tale 5.3.42-46, 118-23; Tempest 5.1.178-80; Henry VIII 4.2.131-38, 5.4.9-11.

62. See the instances already cited from Titus Andronicus; Richard III; King John; Richard II; Hamlet 1.3; All's Well; Coriolanus 2.2, 5.3.68ff.; Pericles; Cymbeline 5.5; The Winter's Tale; The Tempest; and Henry VIII.

63. E.g., All's Well 1.1; Cymbeline 4.4.43-50; Hamlet 1.3.52-54; King John 3.3.69-71. Despite current associations of “asking a parent's blessing” with asking for approval or permission, these requests by Shakespearean characters for a blessing before departure are not equivalent to asking permission, which has usually already been granted. Once “leave” is given, the blessing is then given as a source of protection, power, and love to equip the child, as it were, for the journey.

64. The parent-child bond is confirmed in Coriolanus 2.1.169-71, Cymbeline 5.5.352-56, 368-72, and elsewhere. Blessings emphasizing closeness of identity include Coriolanus 5.3.68-76; Cymbeline 5.5.264-66; Richard II 1.3.69-76; Pericles 5.1.213, 5.3.44-48; and Winter's Tale 5.3.42-46, 121-28.

65. But a blessing is not mentioned until mother and son have achieved some measure of reconciliation. Urging her to repent, to cleanse her heart, Hamlet says to Gertrude, “When you are desirous to be blest, / I'll blessing beg of you” (3.4.171-72). Here, the parental blessing is used to suggest the straining of the bond between mother and son, but even more to indicate that the bond, despite the strain, still exists.

66. If I were a director (or editor) I would want to make it clear that Bertram is to kneel as he says the words, “Madam, I desire your holy wishes”—he is asking for her blessing—and that his mother should use her hands, either holding them above him or placing one or both on his head, until she reaches her final phrase, asking that the blessings of heaven “fall on [Bertram's] head,” at which point we may consider the blessing finished, and Bertram will stand again. Though neither the original text nor the vast majority of editors specify through stage directions or other means what gestures are to be used, the situation and the characters' language should make it clear to those who know of the custom that a blessing is taking place. That the Countess is giving a mother's blessing, involving the usual gestures, is confirmed by the words she uses near the end of the ritual: “What heaven more will, / That thee may furnish, and my prayers pluck down, / Fall on thy head!” (1.1.68-70). (Compare similar imagery in Cymbeline 5.5.350-51; Winter's Tale 5.3.121-23; Tempest 5.1.178-81, 201-2; and Henry VIII 4.2.131-33.) Though The Riverside Shakespeare, among many others, gives no stage directions indicating a blessing at this point, G. Blakemore Evans has stated that he would add stage directions for kneeling and blessing if he were to edit the play again (Letter to the author, 20 April 1985).

67. For a fuller discussion of the blessing motif in Richard III and All's Well That Ends Well, see Bruce Young, “Ritual as an Instrument of Grace: The Parental Blessing in Richard III, All's Well That Ends Well, and The Winter's Tale,” in True Rites and Maimed Rites, ed. Linda Woodbridge and Edward Berry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992).

68. In these two plays, Shakespeare draws on the common association made in his time between the parental blessing and the giving of advice. See (among others) Nicholas Breton, The Mothers Blessing (1602), William Cecil, Baron Burghley, Certaine Precepts, or Directions, for the Well Ordering of a Mans Life (1617), Elizabeth Joceline, The Mothers Legacie, to Her Unborne Childe (1624), Dorothy Leigh, The Mothers Blessing, or the Godly Counsaile of a Gentle-woman (1616), John Norden, The Fathers Legacie; with Precepts Morall and Prayers Divine (1625), and Sir Walter Raleigh, Instructions to his Sonne and to Posterity (1632).

69. For other references to parents' deference to their children, see the discussion, below, of Belarius and Talbot, who yield to their sons' wishes (Cymbeline 4.4.44-50; 1 Henry VI 4.5.32-55).

70. An exactly similar use of the parental blessing is found in a letter by Agnes Paston (written about 1465) in which she gives her blessing to her son John on the condition that he show himself “kynde and wyllyng” to his brothers' welfare (Paston Letters, 1: 43).

71. The kneeling of a parent before a child is also alluded to in Addition III to Sir Thomas More (lines 8-12). Indeed, the kneeling imagery here has been used as evidence for Shakespeare's authorship of the passage.

72. Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage, 171; Kahn, Man's Estate, 16.

73. A piece of traditional stage business would have old Gobbo stand behind, not in front of, his kneeling son, so that when he reaches toward him to give the blessing he mistakes the hair hanging from Launcelot's head for a beard. See Arthur Colby Sprague and J. C. Trewin, Shakespeare's Plays Today (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1970), 22. Old Gobbo's “mistake” would explain his lines, “What a beard hast thou got! Thou hast got more hair on thy chin than Dobbin my fill-horse has on his tail” (2.2.93-95) and would further emphasize his connection with the biblical Isaac, who hoped to recognize his son Esau by feeling him (Genesis 27:21).

74. Performances of Lear do not always have Cordelia kneel in this scene, either because of the director's failure to know that she would kneel for a blessing or because of a desire to avoid “the disastrous blunder of the two kneeling together or the one after the other” (King Lear [London: Samuel French, 1967], 188). In the BBC video production (directed by Jonathan Miller, BBC-TV/Time-Life Inc., 1982), Cordelia gives no sign of kneeling or wishing to kneel. George Ian Duthie and John Dover Wilson, in their edition of King Lear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 258 n. 57, note a stage tradition in which “Lear only kneels.” J. L. Styan, on the other hand, assumes that Cordelia kneels and argues in favor of Lear's kneeling (Shakespeare's Stagecraft [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967], 61). Olivier's television production of Lear (directed by Michael Elliott, Granada Television International, 1983) demonstrates the emotional power of having Lear and Cordelia both kneel.

75. Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 2: 321.

76. The Good Wife, 170. I have partly modernized the spelling.

77. Mayer, A Commentary upon the Whole Old Testament, 260. The association of parental blessings with biblical precedents is also made by Bentley, The Monument of Matrones, “The Sixt Lampe,” 31; Erondell, The French Garden, sig. E8v; John Richardson, Choice Observations and Explanations upon the Old Testament (1655), sig. H2v; Gervase Babington, Certaine Plaine, Briefe, and Comfortable Notes, upon Every Chapter of Genesis (1596), 204, 211; and Shakespeare himself (Merchant of Venice 2.2.77-95).

78. The True Chronicle History of King Leir, in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, vol. 7 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 394.

79. James I, Basilicon Doron (1603), 76. STC 14354. Compare Mayer, 268: “it is a thing imprinted in nature, and confirmed by often experiments, that the Parents blessing or cursing are of great force.” Mayer and others distinguish, however, between the truly prophetic blessings of the ancient patriarchs and the “ordinary blessings” of contemporary parents (Mayer, 260; Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 438).

80. William Ames, A Fresh Suit Against Human Ceremonies in God's Worship, 94.

81. For non-Shakespearean representations of women's solidarity, expressed through a mother's blessing, see the fourteenth-century poem The Good Wife and the seventeenth-century dialogue The French Garden (Erondell, sigs. E7v, E8v). For representations of mothers instructing their children, including sons, see Nicholas Breton, The Mothers Blessing; Elizabeth Joceline, The Mothers Legacie, to Her Unborne Childe; and Dorothy Leigh, The Mothers Blessing, or the Godly Counsaile of a Gentle-woman. Non-Shakespearean representations of a child's power to renew a parent include Misogonus, where, after giving his son a blessing, a father says, “Thou art the length'ner of my life, the curer of my care” (p. 233). When Margaret Roper showed “daughterly love and dear charity” to her father, Sir Thomas More, by requesting his blessing and then kissing and embracing him, she seems to have had a heartening effect on him similar to that felt by Lear and Hermione in the scenes in which they are “reborn” (William Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More, 251-52).

82. See Houlbrooke, The English Family; Alan Macfarlane, The Family Life of Ralph Josselin (New York: Norton, 1977); and many Renaissance documents, including letters and diaries. Excerpts from some of these may be found in English Family Life, 1576-1716, ed. Ralph A. Houlbrooke (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989) and A Lasting Relationship: Parents and Children over Three Centuries, ed. Linda Pollock (London: Fourth Estate, 1987).