CRITICISM

Belsey, Catherine. “The Serpent in the Garden: Shakespeare, Marriage and Material Culture.” Seventeenth Century 11 (1996): 1-20.

Studies Shakespeare's complication of the Christian ideal of marriage in his late romances, particularly in Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale.

Berger, Harry, Jr. “Against the Sink-a-Pace: Sexual and Family Politics in Much Ado About Nothing.” Shakespeare Quarterly 33 (1982): 302-13.

Evaluates the patriarchal ideology of marriage demonstrated in Much Ado about Nothing.

———. “Text against Performance: The Gloucester Family Romance.” In Shakespeare's ‘Rough Magic’: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber, edited by Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn, pp. 210-29. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1985.

Centers on the sympathetic ethos of the family drama depicted in King Lear by studying the relations between Gloucester and his sons as they are played out in theatrical performance.

Boose, Lynda E. “An Approach through Theme: Marriage and the Family.” In Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's ‘King Lear,’ edited by Robert H. Ray, pp. 59-68. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1986.

Investigates the familial relations depicted in King Lear, noting the drama's patriarchal context and the mythic/archetypal patterns it invokes.

———. “The Family in Shakespeare Studies; or—Studies in the Family of Shakespeareans; or—The Politics of Politics.” Renaissance Quarterly 40 (1987): 707-42.

Surveys the contributions of contemporary feminist scholars to the broadening of critical discourse on such subjects as marriage, gender, and the family in Shakespearean drama.

Clare, Anthony. “Titus Andronicus.” In Shakespeare in Perspective. Vol. 2, edited by Roger Sales, pp. 308-16. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1985.

Contends that Titus Andronicus fundamentally concerns itself with family relationships, loyalty, honor, and the exploitation of family ties for violent ends.

Deer, Harriet A. “Untyping Stereotypes: The Taming of the Shrew.” In The Aching Hearth: Family Violence in Life and Literature, edited by Sara Munson Deats and Lagretta Tallent Lenker, pp. 63-78. New York: Plenum Press, 1991.

Maintains that Shakespeare questioned established systems of family value and the patriarchal assumptions underlying Elizabethan marriage customs in The Taming of the Shrew.

Fortier, Mark. “Married with Children: The Winter's Tale and Social History; or, Infanticide in Earlier Seventeenth-Century England.” Modern Language Quarterly 57, no. 4 (December 1996): 579-603.

Focuses on Shakespeare's critique of the nuclear family in The Winter's Tale.

Goldberg, Jonathan. “Fatherly Authority: The Politics of Stuart Family Images.” In Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, edited by Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers, pp. 3-32. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

Outlines the patriarchal formulas inherent in Renaissance conceptions of the family, drawing evidence from visual representations of family life produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Orgel, Stephen. “Prospero's Wife.” Representations, no. 8 (fall 1984): 1-13.

Uses the topic of Prospero's absent wife in The Tempest to consider other significant or problematic absences in the drama, as well its generally unstable representation of families.

Robinson, Randal. “Family by Death: Stage Images in Titus Andronicus and The Winter's Tale.” In From Page to Performance: Essays in Early English Drama, edited by John A. Alford, pp. 221-33. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995.

Compares similar visual sequences in The Winter's Tale and Titus Andronicus in order to elucidate the pathological family dynamics of the latter drama.

Schwehn, Mark R. “King Lear Beyond Reason: Love and Justice in the Family.” First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, no. 36 (October 1993): 25-33.

Concentrates on the figure of Edgar in King Lear in order to explore the link between themes of family, justice, love, and charity in the drama.

Wheeler, Richard P. “Deaths in the Family: The Loss of a Son and the Rise of Shakespearean Comedy.” Shakespeare Quarterly 51, no. 2 (summer 2000): 127-53.

Speculates on the consequences that the death of Shakespeare's son Hamnet may have had on the dramatist's representation of familial relationships in his subsequent plays.

Wiseman, Susan. “The Family Tree Motel: Subliming Shakespeare in My Own Private Idaho.” In Shakespeare, The Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, and Video, edited by Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt, pp. 225-39. London: Routledge, 1997.

Touches upon the connection between themes of paternity and family in Gus Van Sant's film My Own Private Idaho and examines the film's intertextual relationship to Shakespeare's Henry IV plays.