SOURCE: Novy, Marianne. “Shakespeare and Emotional Distance in the Elizabethan Family.” Theatre Journal 33, no. 3 (October 1981): 316-26.

[In the following essay, Novy probes the issue of emotional barriers between family members in Shakespeare's plays.]

One of the most startling ideas in Lawrence Stone's The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500-1800 is the claim that most people in sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century England “found it very difficult to establish close emotional ties to any other person.”¹ As he reconstructs it, the Elizabethan family was characterized by “distance, manipulation, and deference” (p. 117). Stone may overstate his case, but evidence suggests that he is onto something. Some of his harshest critics, like Alan Macfarlane and Randolph Trumbach, point to similar cultural traits in the England they describe in their own work, though they differ with him about origin, time span, and degree.² It seems that the Elizabethan aristocracy and middle class strove at least to appear in control of their emotional attachments, though the cost might be suspicion and loneliness.

The world Stone recreates and the world Shakespeare creates are in sharp contrast. Plays characterized by the “psychic numbing” (p. 102) Stone attributes to Elizabethan society could never have held the stage for centuries, but beyond this, as C. L. Barber has noted, “Shakespeare's art is distinguished by the intensity of its investment in the human family.”³ Are Shakespeare's plays evidence that Stone must be wrong about the Elizabethans?⁴ Or was Shakespeare simply ahead of his time in his portrayal of the family?⁵ Or is there another kind of relationship between Stone's picture and Shakespeare's?

The relationship I am proposing is not a photographic likeness. It is not enough to say that the warm affectionate families in Shakespeare show that Stone is wrong, or that cold families prove him right. Rather, I would suggest that Stone has identified a cultural ideal of Elizabethan society that generates conflicts pervasive in Shakespeare's plays.

According to Stone, most Elizabethan aristocrats were egocentric. Letters of advice from father to son, a popular genre among the landed classes, “normally express a thoroughly pessimistic view of human nature, full of canny and worldly-wise hints about how to conduct personal relations which leave little room for generosity, faith, hope, or charity” (p. 96). Diaries, correspondence, and legal records from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries show an extraordinary amount of casual violence at all levels of society (p. 93).

The mortality rate for all ages and classes was high (infant mortality did not drop significantly until 1750) and Stone emphasizes practices that can be viewed as treating people as easily replaceable. Aristocrats often used marriage to gain money or power, and remarriage was frequent. Upper-class children were sent out to a succession of wet nurses (who were separated from the children they had borne) and children of all classes lived apart from their parents for the years that they were in fosterage or apprenticeship (pp. 105-14).

What these facts meant emotionally is not easy to say, and some of the evidence could be interpreted differently. If aristocratic fathers told sons not to trust anyone, perhaps sons provoked the advice by trusting people. If sermons warned parents not to love their children too much, and threatened that God might take away a child whose parents were too fond, some parents must have grieved intensely for their children; Stone himself suggests that apparent coldness may have been a defense against the constant possibility of emotional bereavement. He notes too that some people married for emotional reasons, and that Reformation theology and practice placed more emphasis on companionship and love in marriage than had pre-Reformation Catholicism (pp. 135-7).⁶

Nevertheless, Stone's work and that of other historians suggest that there was an ideal personality type valued by many Elizabethans—an ideal that on one hand kept feelings of attachment and grief under strict control but on the other was more ready to express feelings of anger. The model was primarily a masculine ideal, a point I shall return to later but because masculinity was more valued than femininity, the emphasis on control could influence women as well, and their deviations from it could be seen as signs of typically feminine weakness. Attempts to follow this model would lead both sexes to difficulties in establishing and maintaining relationships; consequent frustration could fuel the anger expressed; throughout life one might be influenced by an emotional dependence that one constantly denied. If emotional distance was an ideal for self-fashioning, to borrow Stephen Greenblatt's term, it could coexist with hatred and with (denied) love.⁷ Thus I do not agree with Stone's suggestion that Elizabethan “familial emotive ties were so weak that they did not generate the passions which lead to intra-familial murder and mayhem” (p. 95). Strong passions may still exist when they are displaced or controlled. I would emphasize, rather, Stone's admission of exceptions to his generalizations and push further the implications of those exceptions. In his review, Macfarlane suggests that Elizabethan society included “some loving parents and some cruel parents, some people bringing their children up in a rigid way, others in a relaxed atmosphere, deep attachment between certain husbands and wives, frail emotional bonds in other cases.”⁸ The contrasting elements in this mix would not remain inert; at least some people would notice the differences and would be affected by them. Rather than seeing Elizabethan England as Stone's mass of “psychic numbing” dotted with exceptions, I would reconstruct a society in conflict about emotions and a constant interplay in the experience of the individual between emotions and the ideal of control—an interplay that we see enacted in Shakespeare's theatre. There attempts at control are constantly played off against underlying emotions; attempts at distance are played off against suggestions of underlying dependence. Analyzing almost any speech, we can focus on either emotion or control much as we can focus on either figure or ground in looking at a painting—except that the more we focus on the amount of control exerted, the more powerful become the hidden emotions, the subtext, that we imagine.

If establishing or admitting emotional ties was difficult for many in Shakespeare's audience partly because of their ideals of control, this ambivalence may have contributed to the appeal of his plays. In the tragedies, the cost of either denying or affirming connections can be mortal; in the comedies, more connections succeed. But in the background of both genres are distances—literal and psychological—between parents and children, and disguises—literal and psychological—that attempt control and dramatize the difficulties of trusting and understanding.

Coriolanus is the tragic hero whose behavior Shakespeare most explicitly links to a childhood training in ideals of emotional distance. His mother tells us:

When yet he was but tender-bodied and the only son of my womb …, I, considering how honor would become such a person, that it was no better than picture-like to hang by th'wall, if renown made it not stir, was pleased to let him seek danger where he was like to find fame. To a cruel war I sent him, from whence he returned, his brows bound with oak.

[I. iii. 5-6, 9-14]⁹

He tries, as he says, to “stand / As if a man were author of himself, / And knew no other kin” (V. iii. 35-7) to the point of threatening to destroy his own native Rome and his family along with it, but at his mother's pleas he finally relents and takes her hand.¹⁰ The ideal of distance proves impossible to maintain and Shakespeare suggests throughout the conflict between Coriolanus's emotions and his ideal. Even when he cites the proverbs of emotional control, it is as part of his mother's earlier admonitions:

                    You were used
To say extremities was the trier of spirits:
That common chances common men could bear;
… You were used to load me
With precepts that would make invincible
The heart that conned them.

[IV. i. 3-5, 9-11]

Coriolanus sounds like Stone's typical aggressive, egocentric aristocrat, molded by cold child-rearing practices; but unlike Stone, Shakespeare forces us to see the strength of the emotional bonds that remain underneath the cultural ideal; Coriolanus cannot simply keep on killing outside his family, but has to face his feelings toward them; has to face the anger behind his distance, and the dependence behind his anger.

King Lear also is about conflicts between distance and emotion in relations between parent and child. Lear cannot freely express his love for Cordelia, but must set up his intended gift as a reward for her performance in a contest he controls, and then disowns her for insisting on her autonomy and not playing her part properly. While his other daughters treat him cruelly, he strives to control himself and deny his emotional vulnerability; but these attempts break down in his madness. Only Cordelia can save him, and he breaks down again when she is lost forever; but in Lear's death, as he strains again for a word from her, it is clear they are inevitably bound to each other. With similar lack of insight, Gloucester dismisses Edmund with “He hath been out nine year, and away he shall again” (I. i. 31-2), and then doubts Edgar's love on the flimsiest of evidence manufactured by Edmund; he underestimates the anger of the one and the love of the other and the impact that both will have on his life. Edgar, his identity disguised, cares for his father in the blindness that his brother helped to cause. When Edgar reveals himself, Gloucester dies of mingled grief and joy, like Lear showing in his death the strength of his connection to his child.¹¹

In one sense, Hamlet's initial manner is already an acknowledgment of his bond to his family; his mourning is an attempt to maintain the tie to the father that death has removed. But in this attempt to cling to his father he seems distant from his mother, and we can trace something of an analogous pattern to the one we have seen in Coriolanus and Lear. At first Hamlet speaks to his mother only in laconic irony—“Ay, madam, it is common” (I. ii. 74). But later when he speaks to her in her room, it becomes clear how much anger underlies this distance, and how much longing for love underlies the anger.

However, the relevance to Hamlet of the emotional distance Stone has described in Elizabethan England is even clearer if we look at the larger structure of the play. Hamlet is built around a conflict between an unfeeling society and a hero with strong feelings, which he tries to control—a conflict that parallels both the conflicts I postulated for Elizabethan England—the internal one between defenses and emotions and the external one between cooler and more emotional people. The mood of the Danish court sounds much like that of the suspicious Elizabethan court—even Polonius's advice resembles that of the many cynical fathers found by Stone. Hamlet must live among detached, manipulative, and suspicious people, and he defends himself from them partly by trying to mask his emotional intensity with emotional distance. He speaks enigmatically from the very beginning—“A little more than kin and less than kind” (I. ii. 65)—and puts on a more elaborate antic disposition after the ghost's revelation widens the gap between him and the rest of the court. He can trust Horatio, but no one else, and it is only after Ophelia's death that he can admit his love for her.

When trust is created in the tragedies, it is a precarious achievement in a perilous world. Othello's relationship with Desdemona breaks down in the context of threats analogous to those Stone suggests—distrust resulting from ideals of emotional control. Living down the stereotype of the passionate African and the unease of the exile, he too is a hero of strong feelings he strives to control. Throughout, the cynical and manipulative worldview has its spokesman in Iago. Emotionally detached from his own wife, he can influence Othello partly because of the basic sense of insecurity and distance which makes it difficult for Othello to believe in the initial success of his love, and partly because of Othello's ideals of coolness.¹² From the beginning he has denied the presence of “heat” or “young affects” in his love. When his jealousy shows him his passionate attachment to Desdemona, he believes it is alien to his true character and plans to kill her to restore his self-control: “I'll not expostulate with her, lest her body and beauty unprovide my mind again” (IV. i. 200-2). When he discovers her fidelity, only his own death can restore that control, and his death is equally an attempt to reaffirm their relationship.

In the comedies, the conflicts between emotional distance and control do not require death for their resolution. Thus the distance between parent and child is often presented largely as geographic distance and physical disguise. Parent-child separation and parent-child rejection are kept apart (rather than being combined as they are in Othello and Lear). In The Comedy of Errors, Antipholus of Ephesus speaks movingly of his separation from his parents, caused by the romance plot conventions of tempest and shipwreck. Here, and in the romances as well, such externally enforced family separation could dramatize the frequent separation of Elizabethan families by death and standard child-rearing practices. Feeling separation as rejection probably alternated with feeling it as beyond human control like tempest and shipwreck. The reticence that the Antipholus brothers keep in their reunion—they never speak directly to each other—may show that the ideal of emotional control continues its claims even at the happy ending. At the corresponding point, the Menachmi twins of Shakespeare's source speak to each other with feeling, and we might expect even more eloquence at the father-son reunion not found in the source, but we do not get it.¹³ This inarticulacy allows the actors to fill in with gestures, of course, and the audience with imagination; nevertheless it is interesting that it is the mother who has almost all the words of joy at the resolution, and that her imagery turns on childbirth:

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

[V. i. 402-4]

The disguises in Shakespeare's comedies can be related to emotional distance in a number of ways. The self-control that masculine disguise imposes on women is an analogue of the control that the masculine ideal imposes on men; the disguise suggests, too, that the women may share in that ideal of control. Rosalind begins As You Like It grieving for her banished father, but when she meets him she does not at once reveal the identity behind her disguise. “He asked me of what parentage I was. I told him, of as good as he; so he laughed and let me go” (III. iv. 33-4). For all of her warmth, Rosalind maintains some freedom and distance from her father until the last scene. But unlike Edgar's analogous delay in revealing himself, this one has no mortal consequences.

For the lovers in the comedies, disguise can dramatize the difficulties of establishing emotional connections, although it also fosters such connections by giving less risky ones time to develop. Rosalind's disguise may express ambivalence about abandoning herself to her love for Orlando; in many of the comedies, the characters' inability to see through disguise suggests their mixed feelings about forming close ties. Sherman Hawkins has noted the internal obstacles to love in what he calls the comedies of the closed world (Comedy of Errors, Taming of the Shrew, Love's Labour's Lost, Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night); Orlando's initial inability to speak to Rosalind suggests an internal obstacle in him as well.¹⁴ Proteus, Berowne, Bassanio, Orlando, Claudio, and Orsino all make mistakes about the identity of the women they finally marry. These mistakes, and analogous mistakes made by Phebe and Olivia, are, in part, dramatic images of the postures of emotional distance that can remain even when falling in love; many of these characters are comically self-centered or fascinated with an idealized image—often unattainable—more than with a human being. Often the degree to which the characters grow is open to question, and the conclusion relies primarily on the literal removal of disguise for the sense of overcoming barriers to relationship.

Most of the conversations between comic lovers involve either literal disguise or hostility. Either alternative externalizes such ambivalence as an audience may have about emotional ties. For an audience with a veneer of defenses, Beatrice and Benedick, who begin as mockers of love, consciously cool and rational, or Viola and Rosalind, who in their disguise can never express their love directly, make ideal protagonists; their mockery or concealment of love makes it impossible to dismiss them as pretending to love insincerely. The combination of verbal rapport and concealment in the text permits the audience here, as in the reunions of Comedy of Errors, to fill in with whatever depth they can imagine.

The importance of such disguised conversations in mediating emotional distance becomes more evident if we observe the problems of the problem comedies. There the disguised contact that forms the basis for the final marriages is physical, not verbal, and cannot be played out for the audience. Angelo and Mariana don't meet onstage until the final scene of Measure for Measure. Angelo and Bertram are more clearly split than the heroes of the earlier comedies between the general coldness of their personalities and the sexual drives that trap them into marriages with women for whom they express no personal warmth. The women love, but the couples can't work out the marriages by themselves; men in authority must impose them.

The romances, like the tragedies, treat difficulties deeper than premarital caution, but present more possibilities for reconciliation. Leontes looks at Hermione's statue and says, “Does not the stone rebuke me, / For being more stone than it?” (V. iii. 37-8). But, as his own heart has lost its coldness to Hermione, the statue comes to life. Here, as in the other romances, the ideal of emotional control breaks down much sooner than in the tragedies; the older characters express emotions of familial attachment more readily and the young fall in love more quickly. The first half of The Winter's Tale provides an anatomy of familial rejection that ties together difficulty in husband-wife and parent-child relations. While Stone, drawing on Freud, suggests that distance from parents in childhood is one of the causes of distance in marriage, causality may work in the other direction as well—Leontes abandons his daughter and loses his son because of his suspicion of his wife. But, on the other hand, Leontes, from the beginning, is able to express his feeling of love for his son, and his grief at his son's death helps him to see his misjudgment of Hermione and mourn for her.

Earlier I suggested that emotional control was more clearly an ideal for men than for women in Elizabethan society. Stone gives largely unexplored hints that patterns and norms of emotional warmth differed for males and females. The parents quoted as sounding distant from children are mostly fathers; furthermore, Stone sees fathers as colder to daughters than to sons, more likely to consider daughters as only a drain on their money. He also provides some evidence that women often wanted more emotional involvement in marriage than did men (p. 105). In this context, the emphasis on distance and manipulativeness in father-son advice letters looks different. Rather than expressing a general norm, it suggests an attempt to initiate the son into standards of coldness required by the conventional adult male.¹⁵

How much was this a conscious rejection of qualities associated with women? Popular thought often identified women with passion and men with reason, with an emphasis on the necessary subordination of the first to the second; since women, whether nurses or mothers, had primary responsibility for child-rearing, they were associated with everyone's first discovery of emotions.¹⁶ Many documents suggest that Elizabethan men were often suspicious of women, and this suspicion may also be connected with suspicion of feelings of attachment in general.

More historical research needs to be done on how the ideal of emotional distance in the Elizabethan family relates to distrust of women and qualities associated with women—how much it coalesces with emotional distance as a conventional ideal for Elizabethan men. In Shakespeare the connection is often explicit. His characters use language that associates women with expressions of emotional attachment; such language is especially frequent in bereavement. Laertes says of his tears for Ophelia's death, “When these are gone, / The woman will be out” (IV. vii. 187-8). When Sebastian thinks his sister Viola is dead, he says, “I am yet so near the manners of my mother that, upon the least occasion more, mine eyes will tell tales of me” (II. i. 35-7), and Claudius censures Hamlet's mourning by saying ‘“Tis unmanly grief” (I. ii. 94). When Lear struggles to deny the pain he feels at his daughters' rejection, he cries, “O, how this mother swells up toward my heart! / Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow” (II. iv. 54-5). Later he prays

Touch me with noble anger,
And let not women's weapons, water drops,
Stain my man's cheeks.

[II. iv. 271-3]

This pattern of associations often goes beyond words. Most of the rejections of children are rejections of daughters by fathers. Let us recall Leonato and Hero, Old Capulet and Juliet, Brabantio and Desdemona, Cymbeline and Imogen. Furthermore, fathers' rejections of daughters, like husbands' rejections of wives, usually result from suspicion of female sexuality—in one case (Perdita) the daughter is thought to be conceived adulterously, in the others, the fathers object to their daughters' wishes, real or apparent, to love men other than their fathers or their fathers' choices. By contrast, neither mothers nor fathers reject sons because of their sexual behavior.¹⁷ And on the other hand, verbal attacks on a mother's sexuality may suddenly appear in any threat of rejection from the family, even if the mother herself never appears in the play. Lear says to Regan: “I would divorce me from thy mother's tomb / Sepulch'ring an adult'ress” (II. iv. 126-7), and Isabella to Claudio: “Heaven shield my mother played my father fair, / For such a warpèd slip of wilderness / Never issued from his blood” (III. i. 141-3).

In general, attempts at self-control that inhibit relationships are more central to Shakespeare's male characters than to his female ones. This does not mean that all the women are warm and compassionate while all the men are cold and controlled, as the passage from Isabella's tirade should remind us; but the characters often speak as if such qualities have each an appropriate sex. Almost all Shakespearean tragic heroes and several heroes in the romances and problem plays distrust both female characters and qualities in themselves that they consider female.¹⁸ Yet they do love those characters and possess those qualities. They ultimately find it necessary to express their emotions beyond the cold ideals of their society. They learn, like Lear, that they must weep. Thus the plays implicitly criticize the view of manhood as opposed to feeling. Occasionally the characters themselves hint at different ideals, as Macduff does in his bereavements when he answers “Dispute it like a man” with “I shall do so; / but I must also feel it as a man” (IV. iii. 220-1). And in the romances a few of the men learn to reverse the disparagement of female characteristics, and can welcome family reunion with the imagery of childbirth that in The Comedy of Errors only a woman could use: Cymbeline says, on finding his children again, “O, what am I? / A mother to the birth of three? Ne'er mother / Rejoiced deliverance more” (V. v. 368-70).

Much of this could be observed by critics whose interest is not primarily historical.¹⁹ But much of the new social history shows that conflicting trends in marriage and the family are not simply a twentieth-century imposition on Shakespeare; it provides a cautionary note for any critic who would look for a psychopathology for Shakespeare in isolation from his society. Stone's view of Elizabethan England is one-sided, as other historians have shown, but he does help us see one side of a conflict important in Shakespeare's plays. Unfortunately, Stone himself does not see many connections between those plays and the patterns he discusses. He is more inclined to deny connections and make statements like, “Neither Othello, Oedipus, nor Cain were familiar figures in fourteenth-century England any more than they were, so far as is known, in the sixteenth century” (p. 95). He bases this statement on statistics of murders within the family, and in that literal sense it is of course true, though rather uninteresting. But surely Othello, Cain, and Oedipus have been meaningful figures to many people who have not killed their wives, brothers, or fathers—familiar to their dreams if not to their waking moments.

Living out the ideal of emotional control is a matter of degree, not of all or nothing. Under defenses, the potential for feeling still remains. Literature, and perhaps especially drama, can permit the vicarious experience of emotions latent but too threatening to acknowledge in everyday life.²⁰ Eric Bentley has suggested that we go to the theatre to watch “human beings in living contact with each other”—whether in love or in hate.²¹ Art is a protected zone where we can afford a greater range of feelings of sympathy because we don't have to be torn about how far to act on them. At least one of Shakespeare's contemporaries wrote about this very phenomenon. In the forty-fifth sonnet of Sidney's Astrophel and Stella, Astrophel tries to break through Stella's emotional distance from him by reminding her how she weeps at literary characters and pleading:

Then think, my dear, that you in me do read
Of lovers' ruin some sad tragedy.
I am not I, pity the tale of me.

As a communal art form, the theatre lends itself especially to the emergence of submerged attachments. So perhaps the same people who strove to control their own feelings at the loss of their children could drop their defenses while watching Lear, could listen to his accusation, “O, you are men of stones. / Had I your tongues and eyes, I'd use them so / That heaven's vault would crack” (V. iii. 258-60), and understand his self-reproach, “I might have saved her; now she's gone forever” (V. iii. 271). Franz Kafka, another writer preoccupied with family, once declared, “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”²² I believe that when watching Shakespeare's plays Elizabethan audiences, like modern ones, could feel frozen seas breaking.²³

Notes

1. (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 99. Further references to Stone will be indicated by page numbers incorporated within the text. Others who make some similar observations about English Renaissance society include Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York: Basic Books, 1975), and Zevedei Barbu, Problems in Historical Psychology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960).

2. Macfarlane's review appears in History and Theory 18 (1979), 103-26, Trumbach's in Journal of Social History 13 (1979), 136-42. In The Origins of English Individualism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978), Macfarlane says that “the majority of ordinary people in England from at least the thirteenth century were rampant individualists, highly mobile both geographically and socially, economically ‘rational,’ market-oriented and acquisitive, ego-centred in kinship and social life,” (p. 163) and notes the “loneliness, insecurity and family tensions which are associated with the English structure” (p. 202). In his review, Trumbach agrees with Stone that the quality of parental attachment improved in the eighteenth century, although he emphasizes that it was not absent earlier (p. 139); in his book, he postulates that the male aggressiveness and female hysteria that he finds more pronounced before 1750 result from lack of sufficient attachment to a primary mother figure: The Rise of the Egalitarian Family (New York: Academic Press, 1978), pp. 230-5. Other critical reviews are E. P. Thompson, “Happy Families,” New Society, No. 20, Sept. 8, 1977, Vol. 41, No. 779, pp. 499-501, and Keith Thomas, “The Changing Family,” TLS [Times Literary Supplement] (21 October 1977) pp. 1226-7.

3. C. L. Barber, “The Family in Shakespeare's Development: Tragedy and Sacredness,” in Representing Shakespeare, ed. Murray Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. 188.

4. Stone's dismissal of Shakespeare and other Elizabethan drama and literature is noted in the reviews by Thomas (p. 1226) and Macfarlane (pp. 113-4).

5. Conversation with Alvin B. Kernan, 1975. At this time Stone had written about the Elizabethan family in The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), “The Massacre of the Innocents,” New York Review 21, (November 14, 1974), 25-31, and “The Rise of the Nuclear Family in Early Modern England: The Patriarchal Stage,” The Family in History, ed. Charles E. Rosenberg (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), pp. 13-57.

6. Macfarlane's review notes also that anthropologists have found no correlation between child mortality rates and parental affection, that Stone omits evidence of grief in the passages from The Diary of Ralph Josselin that he cites, and that even 14th-century writers sometimes describe marital love and affection (pp. 107, 115).

7. Stephen J. Greenblatt, “Marlowe and Renaissance Self-Fashioning,” in Two Renaissance Mythmakers: Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, ed. Alvin B. Kernan, English Institute 1975-76, new ser. 1. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977) pp. 41-69.

8. Macfarlane, review, p. 125.

9. All quotations from the plays are taken from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, gen. ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969).

10. Greenblatt contrasts Coriolanus's attempt at self-fashioning with those of Marlowe's heroes on p. 55 of his essay. My view of Coriolanus has been much influenced by Janet Adelman's essay “‘Anger's My Meat’: Feeding, Dependency, and Aggression in Coriolanus,” in Representing Shakespeare, pp. 129-49.

11. See Stanley Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Scribners, 1969), pp. 310-53. I discuss these and other aspects of Lear in “Patriarchy, Mutuality, and Forgiveness in King Lear,” Southern Humanities Review 13 (1979), 281-92.

12. Cf. Stephen J. Greenblatt, “Improvisation and Power,” in Literature and Society, ed. Edward W. Said, English Institute 1978, new ser. 3 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 78-89.

13. In V. ix of Plautus, The Twin Menaechmi, trans. Richard W. Hyde and Edward Weist, in Anthology of Roman Drama, ed. Philip Whaley Harsh (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1960), p. 46, the following exchange occurs:

    MENAECHMUS I.

    Oh, welcome, beyond all hope, after all these years!

    MENAECHMUS II.

    Welcome, dear brother! Sought with such misery and toil, and found with joy at last!

14. Sherman Hawkins, “The Two Worlds of Shakespearean Comedy,” Shakespeare Studies 3, ed. J. Leeds Barroll (Cincinnati: J. W. Ford, 1967), 65-9.

15. Trumbach discusses related issues in his review and in Rise, pp. 237-85. See also Joseph E. Illick, “Child-Rearing in Seventeenth Century England and America,” in The History of Childhood, ed. Lloyd DeMause (New York: Harper, 1975), p. 312. For “the role of traditional patriarch” as a “false self,” see David Leverenz, The Language of Puritan Feeling (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1980), p. 105.

16. See Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur (New York: Harper, 1976).

17. For example, when the Duchess of York curses Richard III (IV. iv. 195-6) and Volumnia says to Coriolanus, “This fellow had a Volscian to his mother” (V. iii. 178), the rejections are because of the sons' destructiveness, not their sexuality.

18. See Madelon Gohlke, “‘I wooed thee with my sword’: Shakespeare's Tragic Paradigms,” Representing Shakespeare, pp. 170-87.

19. Related points have been made, for example, by Edward Hubler, The Sense of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), pp. 106-7, and Maynard Mack, “Engagement and Detachment in Shakespeare's Plays,” in Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama in Honor of Hardin Craig, ed. Richard Hosley (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1962), pp. 275-96.

20. See, for example, Simon Lesser, Fiction and the Unconscious (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), pp. 81, 133-4; Norman Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response (New York: Norton, 1975), pp. 92, 98; Cavell, pp. 332-3.

21. Eric Bentley, Theatre of War, abridged ed. (New York: Viking Compass, 1973), p. 216.

22. Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken, 1977), p. 16.

23. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the session on “Marriage and the Family in Shakespeare” at the 1979 MLA convention. I am grateful to comments from participants there, especially Carol Neely, and from Coppélia Kahn and Richard Vann.