[In the essay below, Frey examines the complex and timeless responses of daughters to familial pressures.]

Shakespeare's plays often open with generational conflicts that point up distressing consequences of patriarchy: fathers and husbands treating children and wives as mere property or appurtenances of themselves (for example, Duke of Milan in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Egeus in A Midsummer Night's Dream, fathers and husbands in The Taming of the Shrew and The Merry Wives of Windsor, the Capulets, Lear, Brabantio), children greedy for patrimony (Oliver in As You Like It, various characters in the Histories, and in Lear Edmund, Goneril, and Regan), or "lovers" greedy for dowry (suitors of Kate, and Portia, and Anne Fenton, Angelo in Measure for Measure, Burgundy in Lear). The elder generation often adheres, moreover, to a code of revenge or war in which it seeks to over-involve the younger generation (Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, I Henry IV, Hamlet, Lear), so that the procreative process becomes interrupted by misdefinitions of roles or unfortunate expectations of family loyalty and "inheritance." Sons, in particular, become tragic losers in this patriarchal overdetermination of loyalties, because they are, typically, used up in fighting feuds of their fathers; the desire for primogenitural progeny becomes thwarted when the male line is forfeited in parental wars. The particular conflict between values of war (or protection of family) and love (or extension of family) shows up most clearly in tragedies such as Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. In Lear, Othello, and Macbeth, plays shot through with sexual and familial confusion and unwholesomeness, we see the impotence of an authoritarian, martial, aggressive, hierarchical male to enter reciprocal, fruitful relations with women or to foster life or line.

Given such often-disastrous results generated by the system of near-absolute male authority, a major issue in Shakespeare's plays often becomes: What part may women play simply to survive, and then, beyond that, what part may women play to right at least some of the wrongs of patriarchy? In what follows, I shall examine Shakespeare's evolving depictions of daughters' responses to the familial pressures outlined here. I shall consider particularly the plights and flights of daughters in Shakespeare's later plays, daughters who respond to expectations of love and matrimony in surprisingly contradictory, complex, and modern, or perhaps timeless, ways.

To say, initially, that Shakespeare's women are to some degree victims of patriarchy is not to say that, among the range of Shakespeare's characters, one finds a dearth of spirited, sensitive, knowing, remarkably impressive women; one has but to think of Rosalind or Beatrice or Viola or Helena, or of Cordelia, Cleopatra, and Imogen. Such women manage to assert themselves, however in spite of the odds against them, as heroic exceptions to the more general rule of depressing male domination. Think of how often and how keenly Shakespeare concentrates, to take the most significant theme, upon the perversity of fathers' claims to direct their daughters' destinies in marriage. We hear throughout the plays of proprietary acts and attitudes taken by fathers in regard to or rather disregard of their daughters:

I beg the ancient privilege of Athens:
As she is mine, I may dispose of her;
Which shall be either to this gentleman,
Or to her death. . . .

(MND 1.1.41)

A' Thursday let it be—a' Thursday, tell her,
She shall be married to this noble earl.
Will you be ready? do you like this haste?

(Rom. 3.4.20)

This is for all:
I would not, in plain terms, from this time forth
Have you so slander any moment leisure
As to give words or talk with the Lord Hamlet.
Look to 't, I charge you. Come your ways.

(Ham. 1.3.131)

Thou must to thy father, and be gone from Troilus.1

(Tro. 4.2.91)

To the father's combined claims of legal and emotional interest in the daughter's marriage choice, the Elizabethans were, obviously, well-attuned. So intense, moreover, is the emotional investment of Shakespeare's fathers in their daughters' love that the thwarting of the fathers' expectations often brings forth imprecations and diatribes of surpassing bitterness:

I would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in her ear!

(MV 3.1.87)

Do not live, Hero, do not ope thine eyes,
For did I think thou wouldst not quickly die,
Thought I thy spirits were stronger than thy shames,
Myself would, on the rearward of reproaches,
Strike at thy life.

(Ado. 4.1.123)

Look to't, think on't, I do not use to jest.
Thursday is near, lay hand on heart, advise.
And you be mine, I'll give you to my friend;
And you be not, hang, beg, starve, die in the streets,
For, by my soul, I'll ne'er acknowledge thee,
Nor what is mine shall never do thee good.

(Rom. 3.5.189)

The barbarous Scythian,
Or he that makes his generation messes
To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom
Be as well neighbor'd, pitied, and reliev'd,
As thou my soemetime daughter.

(Lr. 1.1.116)

Examples of such bitterness could be multiplied from other plays, and such multiplication would merely serve to support one's natural response and question: Why? Why do Shakespeare's fathers often hate their daughters so ambitiously, with a hate that borders on disintegration and madness? Part of the answer lies, no doubt, in the special relations between father and only or best-loved daughter. More important, I submit, is the concomitant absence, at least in the plays quoted above, of any sons.

Some of the fathers mention their reliance upon their daughters for comfort and security in old age. Thus the Duke in The Two Gentlemen of Verona says: "I thought the remnant of mine age / Should have been cherish'd by her child-like duty" (3.1.74), and Lear says, "I lov'd her most, and thought to set my rest / On her kind nursery" (1.1.123). Such considerations—of emotional and economic security and of political control and generational extension of line—help to dictate the father's interest in choice of the daughter's marriage partner. An absence of any sons not only may make plain the father's need for the daughter's support and thus for a congenial son-in-law, it also may turn the son-in-law into substitute son, the inheritor of family power and values. When the daughter chooses radically against her father's will, she effectively shuts him off from patriarchal domination of the son-in-law and consequent son-like extension of his power and values. In the earlier comedies, the daughter's choice does not really extend beyond the father's range. Who can tell a Lysander from a Demetrius? When the choice does extend vastly beyond the father's range, as in the case of Jessica and Shylock, the results, for the father at least, are tragic.

In the earlier comedies, the society with which we are presented at the opening does not need fundamental revision, and the daughter's choice of a partner, even if against her father's will, serves eventually to confirm existing values. In tragedies such as Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and Lear, where the order existing at the outset is often superficial, narrow, or grown archaic, the daughter marries far beyond her father's range, marries someone who challenges his sociopolitical security. Romeo's family is the age-old enemy of Juliet's family; Brabantio finds Othello repugnant as a son-in-law; France is inevitably under suspicion as rival or enemy of Lear's England, which he indeed invades later in the play. Fathers such as Capulet (though he may be on the brink of giving up the feud), Brabantio, and Lear cannot or will not think to extend their lines, given these special circumstances, through their daughters. Yet they have little alternative. Dreams they might have of patrilineal extension are shattered by their daughters' choice of marriage partners. Their resultant rage may be better understood in this light, as may its terrible consequences.

Terrible as the consequences are in terms of individual deaths, the revolts in the tragedies of daughters against their fathers' wills become essential elements in the whole process of loss and at least partial redemption that marks the tragic catharsis.² In Shakespeare's tragedies, as in his comedies, a daughter who defines herself against her father, who takes a husband, as it were, in spite of him, usually becomes associated with regenerative forces and outcomes. Where the problem, or part of it, is to break the death-dealing feud or prejudice of the father, the daughter manages to help, but in the tragedies she helps in a way that costs very dearly. Viewed in the most basic terms of patriarchal expectations, tragedies such as Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet portray fathers who employ sons to carry on their concerns, to enforce their continuing image in patrilineal succession but also to fight in the fathers' feuds. Where sons are denied to such patriarchal fathers, they may become resentful or seek substitutes. Macbeth may be analyzed usefully from this perspective. Macbeth, whose ambition to be king is threatened by Duncan's election of his son as successor, does manage to become king, but he himself has no son and remains threatened not only by Malcolm but by Banquo's line, prophesied to succeed to the throne. Macbeth becomes cast in the role of one who kills the sons of others. Unable to reach Malcolm, he attempts through hired killers to murder Banquo's son (as well as Banquo) and almost succeeds. His killers do kill, onstage, Macduff's son, and, finally, we see Macbeth himself hack down, near the end of the play, Siward's son, "Young Siward." The most significant fact about Macduff, who at last kills Macbeth, is that Macduff is "not of woman born," as if only such a person could get around Macbeth's malevolence against issue. Lear, too, has no son, but our first glimpse of him is in the act of arranging to acquire appropriate sons-in-law. He thinks to extend his line through daughters. Two of them, however, turn out to be his enemies, and the third marries France who becomes Britain's enemy, albeit in a war of "liberation." Still, as in Romeo and Juliet, the daughter's choice of a husband who is independent of her father's influence proves a catalyst, though a bitter one, for the changes necessary to a revitalization of the home society. Thus the tragedies rather insistently criticize the patriarch's attempt to manipulate sons or sons-in-law for his own interest.

In the Romances, these themes intensify. Here problems of sons as tragic victims of their fathers' feuds are largely eliminated (save, possibly, for the example of Mamillius in The Winter's Tale). In Pericles, Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, and Tempest, such sons are non-existent, lost, or killed, and only daughters are looked to for continuation of the central family. Pericles, Cymbeline, Leontes, and Prospero all have enmities in which they could tragically involve any sons of theirs, but when each such son appears to be eliminated (together with the wives of the fathers), then the relation between each father and his sole daughter becomes central. The function of each daughter is not to represent, as a son might, the father in the father's battles but rather to leave home, travel widely, perhaps marry the son of her father's chief enemy (as in Winter's Tale and Tempest), and return home to instill virtues of forgiveness and the lesson of pardon in the father. The solution for patriarchal overcontrol and quasi-incestuous inwardness thus seems to be a dramatic destruction of the progenitive center and an explosion outward through time and space that leads to regroupings at the end and visions of a wide incorporative harmony.

It seems apparent that Shakespeare in these four Romances celebrates a view of women as protectors and givers of life in a very special sense. Daughters such as Imogen, Perdita, and Miranda not only marry in ways that heal enmities but also they prove their love viable in settings that harbor lustful or permissive appetites, that is, they encounter in "nature" a rapacious Cloten or Caliban or a bawdy Autolycus but they remain chaste and eventually chasten the appetites of their true lovers. Marina, of course, chastens even the brothel. Often we see these daughters, moreover, rising from sleep and seeming death, as if to prove their miraculous power to awaken fresh life.

In all the Romances (as in other Shakespearean plays), lesser characters may be seen as representing in part components within the psyche of a central character. Each father—Pericles, Cymbeline, Leontes, Prospero—works out his emotional maturation partly through recognition of his daughter as she embodies life's powers to renew itself rhythmically and human powers to order and delay acting upon desires that else might confuse and blight themselves. Recognition of this sort is not easily won, however, and the Romances are notable for their repeated images of fathers trying to dominate their daughters as well as to learn from them. In Pericles, Antiochus commits incest with his daughter. Cymbeline berates Imogen and orders her locked in her chamber. Prospero admonishes Miranda to listen and to obey. In the instant before recognizing his daughter, Pericles pushes her back. Leontes, too, makes menacing gestures at the infant Perdita whom he denies is his, and later, still not knowing her, he makes in her direction a kind of romantic overture (5.1.223). All of the Romance fathers and daughters passionately interact, and it may be that dynamic which helps necessitate in psychic terms the far journey of each daughter away from home and her taking a husband in each case so clearly set apart from her father.

Despite these apparently happy solutions to problems of patriarchal domination, and though the Romance have witnessed in our supposedly liberated age a mounting tide of enthusiasm, they may be more patriarchal and patrilineal in perspective than Shakespearean interpreters have yet cared or dared to recognize. To ask the following question is to ask, in some respects, how many children had Lady Macbeth, but still: Is not the engendering of a daughter in each Romance taken implicitly as a guilty act which signals the impotence of the father or his receipt of divine displeasure? Else why should he have lost or in the course of the play lose wife and any sons he may have had? Kings need sons. When they produce daughters, in a patrilineal society, they do less than the optimum to further a secure succession. When their sons die or they produce a daughter or daughters alone, they become as vulnerable as Henry the Eighth who says, according to Shakespeare (2.4.187):

First, methought
I stood not in the smile of heaven, who had
Commanded nature, that my lady's womb,
If it conceiv'd a male-child by me, should
Do no more offices of life to't than
The grave does to th' dead; for her male issue
Or died where they were made, or shortly after
This world had air'd them. Hence I took a thought
This was a judgment on me, that my kingdom
(Well worthy the best heir o' th' world) should not
Be gladded in't by me. Then follows, that
I weigh'd the danger which my realms stood in
By this my issue's fail, and that gave to me
Many a groaning throe.

In Pericles, Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, and Tempest, each leader of the state is threatened with like "issue's fail." The plays might seem to strike at patriarchal chains when they take up the device of extending a family not through sons but through a daughter's adventure in finding a son-in-law. Through this infusion of fresh male blood, the plays seem to say, a king can more truly revitalize his kingdom. And, given the English experience with Henry the Eighth and his children, the pattern of the saving daughter might well be regarded as much more than an anomolous and irrelevant residue of folktale origins of the Romances. Shakespeare could be saying, in the style of Lear's Edmund, "Now, gods, stand up for daughters!" Still, assuming that Shakespeare (who himself lost a son and, judging from the terms of his Will, looked wistfully to his daughters for continuance of his line) has raised in the Romances a kind or argument for daughters otherwise demeaned by patriarchalism, are not the daughters exalted more as potential wives and father-comforters than as persons in their own right? Marina, Imogen, Perdita, and Miranda are, to be sure, spirited and, at times, independent. Consider Marina speaking to Boult in the bawdy-house:

Thou art the damned dook-keeper to every
Custrel that comes inquiring for his Tib.
To the choleric fisting of every rogue
Thy ear is liable; thy food is such
As hath been belch'd on by infected lungs.

(Per. 4.6.165)

Or Imogen speaking of Posthumus and Cloten:

I would they were in Afric both together,
Myself by with a needle, that I might prick
The goer-back.

(Cym. 1.1.167)

Or Perdita:

I was about to speak, and tell him plainly
The self-same sun that shines upon his court
Hides not his visage from our cottage, but
Looks on alike. Will't please you, sir, be gone?
I told you what would come of this.

(WT 4.4.443)

Or Miranda: calling Caliban "abhorred slave" to his face, breaking her father's command that she not tell her name to Ferdinand, and accusing Ferdinand of false play at chess. Despite such displays, however, the chief function of the daughter in each Romance is to bring home a husband and to teach or permit her father a new found love and forgiveness made possible and believable amid the restored patriarchal security. At the end of each Romance, the daughter's father explicitly rejoices over the presence of his son-in-law. Pericles says to his wife: "Thaisa, / This prince, the fair-betrothed of your daughter, / Shall marry her at Pentapolis" (5.3.70). Cymbeline says: "We'll learn our freeness of a son-in-law: / Pardon's the word to all" (5.5.421). Leontes' last act is to introduce Florizel to Hermione: "This' your son-in-law, / And son unto the King, whom heavens directing / Is troth-plight to your daughter" (5.3.149). Prospero tells Alonso of his "hope to see the nuptial / Of these our dear-belov'd solemnized" (5.1.309).

In terms of what their worlds and plays obviously expect of them, Shakespeare's daughters of Romance have done well, and Shakespeare has, in a sense, "solved" problems of over-controlling fathers and over-rebellious daughters that appeared in tragedies such as Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and Lear. In place of patrilineal succession, we have a new procreative process in which direct male issue are bypassed—perhaps as too competitive, aggressive, promiscuous, or deathdealing—in favor of virginal daughters who promise to win reinvigoration of the family through outside stock which is now more readily accepted by the fathers than it was before. The daughters themselves, however, are hardly permitted the alternative of not choosing a mate. To do so would be unthinkable. They must take mates to save and extend the families of their fathers, their fathers who remain so much in evidence. After working out this "solution" in the Romances, Shakespeare went on, nonetheless, to consider the matter further (as was his custom) and even to question the solution.

In Henry VIII, we find the familiar Romance patterns of ostracized queen, restorative daughter, and great hopes for the younger generation, but now the daughter, Elizabeth, becomes exalted in virginal radiance (5.4.32):

Good grows with her;
In her days every man shall eat in safety
Under his own vine what he plants, and sing
The merry songs of peace to all his neighbors.
God shall be truly known, and those about her
From her shall read the perfect ways of honor,
And by those claim their greatness, not by blood.
Nor shall this peace sleep with her; but as when
The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix,
Her ashes new create another heir
As great in admiration as herself,
So shall she leave her blessedness to one
(When heaven shall call her from this cloud of darkness)
Who from the sacred ashes of her honor
Shall star-like rise as great in fame as she was,
And so stand fix'd.

If we compare Elizabeth to the heroines of the preceding four Romances, we find that the Romance pattern is transcended. Though the father's search for male issue remains important, is never more important than here, the daughter need now elect no husband to fulfill her function. She becomes herself a "pattern to all princes," and this, it seems stressed, is "not by blood" but by "honor," meaning, among other things, her sexual purity. Cranmer continues (5.4.59):

Would I had known no more! but she must die,
She must, the saints must have her; yet a virgin,
A most unspotted lily shall she pass
To the ground, and all the world shall mourn her.

Praise of woman beyond or even in opposition to the supposed virtues of marriage and childbearing seems to be Shakespeare's purpose not only in his depiction of Elizabeth but also in his treatment of Katherine in Henry VIII. Katherine, who "failed" to give Henry the male issue he so desperately wanted, follows the lead of Buckingham and Wolsey by converting her secular fall into spiritual ascent. On her sickbed, she learns to forgive Wolsey; mediatating on "celestial harmony," she falls asleep and sees a heavenly vision that promises "eternal happiness." She asks that, when she is dead, she be used with "honor" and strewn with "maiden flowers." All this fits the general tenor of the play as it suggests the vanity of earthly pageantries, the paltriness of bodily appetites, and the insufficiency of love's whole enterprise. Reminiscent of The Tempest, and reaching perhaps beyond, is the strange power of Henry VIII to associate bodily and earthly life, especially in the getting of children, as somehow inconsequential, even petty. In its revelation of brave but diaphanous masques, of vain attempts to solidify the stage and state of earthly shows, the play is like a great finger pointing heavenward. Miranda's admirable chastity evolves toward Elizabeth's sacred virginity.

In The Two Noble Kinsmen, Shakespeare makes his heroine, from the outset, one of Diana's great devotees.³ Emilia describes her affection for a childhood companion in these terms (1.3.66):

The flow'r that I would pluck
And put between my breasts (O then but beginning
To swell about the blossom), she would long
Till she had such another, and commit it
To the like innocent cradle, where phoenix-like
They died in perfume. On my head no toy
But was her pattern, her affections (pretty,
Though happily her careless wear) I followed
For my most serious decking. Had mine ear
Stol'n some new air, or at adventure humm'd one
From musical coinage, why it was a note
Whereon her spirits would sojourn (rather dwell on)
And sing it in her slumbers. This rehearsal
(Which, ev'ry innocent wots well, comes in
Like old importment's bastard) has this end,
That the true love 'tween maid and maid may be
More than in six dividual.

Asked later to choose as husband either Arcite or Palamon, Emilia decides, momentarily, that her "virgin's faith has fled" (4.2.46), she loves them both, but, still later, when the two kinsmen are about to fight for her hand, she prays at the altar of Diana (5.1.137):

O sacred, shadowy, cold, and constant queen,
Abandoner of revels, mute, contemplative,
Sweet, solitary, white as chaste, and pure
As wind-fann'd snow, who to thy female knights
Allow'st no more blood than will make a blush,
Which is their order's robe: I here, thy priest,
Am humbled 'fore thine altar. O, vouchsafe,
With that rare green eye—which never yet
Beheld thing maculate—look on thy virgin,
And, sacred silver mistress, lend thine ear
(Which nev'r heard scurril term, into whose port
Ne'er ent'red wanton sound) to my petition,
Season'd with holy fear. This is my last
Of vestal office; I am bride-habited,
But maiden-hearted.

We could say that Shakespeare simply took his plays and themes in no special order, as they came to him. The evolution of his heroines toward virgin faith would remain, nonetheless, to be accounted for. The entire action and atmosphere of The Two Noble Kinsmen help account for Emilia's lack of love. Arcite and Palamon are made to seem simple-minded, outer-directed followers of Mars and Venus, respectively, but the best exposure of the post-Romance attitude occurs in two prayers which Arcite and Palamon give just before Emilia's. Arcite prays to a Mars of destruction and waste, the "decider / Of dusty and old titles," whose "prize / Must be dragg'd out of blood." Palamon prays to a Venus who commands the rage of love throughout man and woman unkind, whose "yoke / As 'twere a wreath of roses, yet is heavier / Than lead itself, stings more than nettles," who incites gross geriatric lusts, and "whose chase is this world, / And we in herds thy game." Through these debased, decadent visions of chivalric and courtly ideals, Arcite and Palamon develop further Shakespeare's critique of patriarchalism and the potential murderousness and sterility that often accompany its political, social and sexual hierarchies. Small wonder that Emilia, faced with two such votaries, chooses to remain "maiden-hearted."

Shakespeare's post-Romance has moved far beyond the paradigmatic plot of Pericles, Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, and Tempest in which the needs of a society for restoration, needs embodied in its leader, are answered by the restorative instincts of his daughter. For Emilia, as for Elizabeth the Queen, choice of a marriage partner is not dictated by a father's will or by resistance to a father's will. Remote from the dynamics of patripotestal interests, left to her own devices, Emilia displays no sense of familial drive. Lacking in evidence a father, a brother, or other male to define herself against, the daughter tends perhaps to resist marriage or to see it as specially troublesome. Countered over against Emilia, moreover, we find in The Two Noble Kinsmen the earlier filial pattern represented in the Jailer's Daughter whose father wants her to marry her Wooer but who loves her father's prisoner (Palamon) and even frees him from her father's prison. Irony descends again, however, as the Jailer's Daughter loses Palamon and goes mad. In this late stage in his career, Shakespeare enters a specially problematic zone in his conception of our romantic instincts and their functioning.

In the tragedies, Shakespeare's lovers—Juliet, Desdemona, Cleopatra—exercise free and vivid imaginative powers and make real, in some sense, the vigorous wide-embracing males with whom they flee, fight, and die. In the Romances, the daughters no longer display the tragic force of will that finds and loses itself in an all-consuming love. They become subordinated to the pattern of generational renewal prompted by needs of their inescapable fathers. Their husbands, too, are conceived in terms of function rather than given an independence of being. They lack, consequently, the splendid wilfulness and freedom of self-definition possessed by Romeo, Othello, and Antony. Lysimachus, Posthumus Leonatus, Florizel, and Ferdinand become, like the societies they inhabit, chastened and subdued by redemptive responsibilities their betrotheds place upon them. This is a typical pattern in such dramatic Romances as Alcestis, The Beggar's Opera, When We Dead Awaken, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and The Cocktail Party.⁴ Women are made to undertake journeys that will redeem their families and societies from some version of sterility, but the redemptive journey and return renders both husband and society strangely quiet, meditative, less lusty and more spiritual. For Antony and Cleopatra—and perhaps even for Romeo and Juliet or Othello and Desdemona—one could almost substitute Mars and Venus, their heterosexuality and the vigor of their interchange is so strong, but for Ferdinand and Miranda and other Romance couples one would prefer, at best, Apollo and Diana.

In Shakespeare's post-Romance, Diana appears to win. After the womanizing excesses of Henry the Eighth, the virgin faith and phoenix-project of Elizabeth sound persuasive, and, given the unconvincing, fatuous romanticalities of Arcite and Palamon, Emilia's chaste reserve appears appropriate. But societies are not renewed by chaste reserve, and Shakespeare, whose great subject has always been the renewal of family and society, is unlikely to settle, finally, for so sterile a solution. Emilia is made, at the end, to accept Palamon, the devotee to Venus, and, though the ending is hardly celebratory in tone, what makes the union of Palamon and Emilia acceptable, I submit, is the preceding incident of the Jailer's Daughter. Her idealizing eagerness for Palamon in part subjects him to ironic scrutiny but also in part marks the preservation in the play of an essential, sincere, and effective romantic imagination. That is, in the Jailer's Daughter and, through her in Palamon, we see that a creative passion of this romantic or romance-ic sort must be heeded and welcomed. The Jailer, Doctor, and Wooer give in to the Daughter, humor her passion, and try their best to shape her world to her liking. She responds well and takes the Wooer for Palamon. The Doctor promises, convincingly, that by these means the Daughter will in three or four days become "right again."

The Two Noble Kinsmen, then, simultaneously attacks and defends romantic imagination, attacks the moribund mythologising of Arcite and Palamon as embodied in their prayers to Mars and Venus, purges their conception of humanity as passive and powerless before secret forces of hate and love raging in the blood, even to senility. The play first substitutes Emilia set on contemplative purity and blamelessness, praying to her sacred mistress, Diana, the "constant queen, / Abandoner of revels." Then the play celebrates more positively and warmly the laughable but vital madness of the Jailer's Daughter who makes the world try to create her imagined love before her eyes. Love is thus purged and renewed. The perverse and uncreative passions must yield to shadowy cold "Diana." Emilia is never a shining vital heroine. She seems to represent a stage in the development of successively more chaste, virginal heroines away from, say, Cleopatra through the likes of Imogen, Perdita, and Miranda, to Margaret, Elizabeth (as imaged in Henry VIII), and beyond. But Emilia, unlike Elizabeth, does marry. And her marriage is made possible and believable, I suggest, because its aim and function are supported by the warmer eagerness of the Jailer's Daughter toward Palamon and love.

Further investigation into Shakespeare's treatment of these acts and themes might seem foreclosed at this point by the absence of any more plays to contemplate. There are, however, significant links or overlaps between The Two Noble Kinsmen and the Cardenio episode in Don Quixote, the episode upon which, almost certainly, the lost play, Cardenio, attributed to Shakespeare and Fletcher in a significant "blocking entry" of the Stationers' Register and acted by the King's Men in 1613, is based.⁵ Cardenio falls in love with Lucinda, but Cardenio's friend Ferdinand (who had betrothed himself to Dorothea and jilted her), by a series of stratagems, contrives to marry Lucinda in Cardenio's supposed absence. Lucinda, at any rate, submits to a marriage ceremony with Ferdinand, and Cardenio, who returns just in time to spy upon the ceremony, is so horror-struck that he flees to the wilds where he meets Don Quixote and relates his misfortunes. It turns out that Dorothea, Ferdinand's betrothed, also comes to the wilds. She meets the friends of Don Quixote, and they persuade her to help them humor his madness by pretending to be a damsel in distress whom Don Quixote can aid. After elaborately playing up to Don Quixote's chivalric whims, Dorothea, Cardenio, Sancho Panza, the Barber, and the Curate bring Don Quixote to an inn where, eventually, arrive also Ferdinand and Lucinda. After the inevitable recognition, Lucinda is restored to Cardenio and Dorothea to Ferdinand. . . .

"I saw her first," says Palamon to Arcite (2.2.160) concerning Emilia. Cardenio saw Lucinda first. But both "first" lovers appear to lose out in dramatic fashion to their more active, scheming rivals. In each case the rival's intervention appears institutionally-sanctioned as when Arcite wins the battle at the pillar and is given Emilia by Theseus and, similarly, Ferdinand marries Lucinda in a church ceremony. Then there is the eventual return of the heroine to her first love but not before he is aided in each case by a mad romantic. The Jailer's Daughter frees Palamon and brings him food in the forest; Don Quixote, meeting Cardenio in the wilds, embraces him, gives him food, and vows to serve him. In each case the mad romantic's passionate desire to serve a disconsolate lover is finally gratified by friends who, through impersonations, humor the mad fancies and change the world so as to satisfy their intention.

When Palamon asserts his prior claim to Emilia, saying to Arcite, "You must not love her" (2.2.161), Arcite replies:

I will not, as you do—to worship her
As she is heavenly and a blessed goddess;
I love her as a woman, to enjoy her.
So both may love.

In The Two Noble Kinsmen and the conjectural Cardenio, the first lover is relatively passive, a worshipper of woman rather than an enjoyer. The second lover, more lusty-active, "wins" the woman but has less right and is presented with less sympathetic interiority of love. The mad romantics, the Jailer's Daughter and Don Quixote, intervene and support with intensity of conviction the worth and quest of the first lover. Both Emilia and Lucinda, moreover, are represented as rather passive and shrinking, tossed between extremes of ineffective spiritual esteem from one man and primarily physical lust from another. In each story the development of the main plot lies secretly in the hands, or minds, of the subplot characters—Jailer's Daughter and Don Quixote—who must, as it were, dream the main plot onward, substituting their creative faith, their active idealizing eagerness, for the split love of the main characters.

Both The Two Noble Kinsmen and the Cardenio story are, in one sense, satires. The state of mind that overcomes the impasse of love which is split into effete worship and Mars-like rapacity is a state of mind represented as madness, an unthinkable dedication of unified mind and heart, spirit and flesh. But behind the satire, in each case there lies, I suggest, the secret project of resuscitating the romance-ic spirit. Shakespeare, like Cervantes, may have seen ahead in his very last works to an age of satire looming up on the horizon, but he also honored, as did Cervantes, the unquenchable desire of romantic will to purge and renew itself toward some version, no matter how strangely won, of ongoing and productive love. Ever since All's Well and Measure for Measure, if not before, Shakespeare had honored the beleaguered maiden's often-instinctive retreat to Diana, to the purer precincts of that shadowy Queen, and never was this honor made more telling than in The Two Noble Kinsmen, but Shakespeare made Emilia—wrought even beyond Diana with impossible longings ("Were they metamorphis'd / Both into one," 5.3.84)—yield, finally, to her fated marriage. As Emilia exits hand in hand with Palamon, there linger still the singsong cracked remarks, the deepest hopes and fears of the Jailer's Daughter:

Daugh. We shall have many children. . . .
Wooer. Come, sweet, we'll go to dinner,
And then we'll play at cards.
Daugh. And shall we kiss too?
Wooer. A hundred times.
Daugh. And twenty?
Wooer. Ay, and twenty.
Daugh. And then we'll sleep together?
Doct. Take her offer.
Wooer. Yes, marry, will we.
Daugh. But you shall not hurt me.
Wooer. I will not, sweet.
Daugh. If you do, love, I'll cry.

Shakespeare understood and made vivid, as have few artists before or since, the spirit of the maiden phoenix that flutters up periodically in women, if not in men as well, and he traced with surpassing skill the intricacies of that endless dance where daughters escape and follow, reject and recreate, their once and future fathers.

Notes

¹ See also, e.g., Wiv. 4.6.23; Oth. 1.3.192; Lr. 1.1.113; Cym. 1.2.131. Quotations are from the Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. B. Evans (Boston; Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

² One may observe that in a tragedy where a daughter, such as Ophelia, fails to assert herself against her father's dictate, the sense of nature redeemed, of human nature and society revitalized, may be diminished, as when the relatively limited Fortinbras takes over at the end of Hamlet.

³ Just what portion, if any, of The Two Noble Kinsmen John Fletcher may be responsible for is as yet undetermined. Shakespeare is generally credited with the following scenes—1.1-2.1, 3.1, 5.1.34-173, 5.3-5.4—which include the scene introducing the Jailer's Daughter and the addresses of Arcite, Palamon, and Emilia to Mars, Venus, and Diana. Paul Bertram, Shakespeare and the Two Noble Kinsmen (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1965), argues at length that the entire play is by Shakespeare. For present purposes, I treat the play as dominated by Shakespeare's conception and handling.

⁴ These plays are collected, together with The Tempest, in Dramatic Romance: Plays, Theory, and Criticism, ed., Howard Felperin (New York: Harcourt, 1973). I am indebted to Howard Felperin for this collocation and for thoughts it has fostered.

⁵ In discussing Cardenio, I refer to the plot of the Cardenio story as contained in the first part of Cervantes' novel, translated by Thomas Shelton in 1612. The Court Chamber Account and Court (Greenwich) Account indicate that Cardenio was presented twice by the King's Men in 1613. E.K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (Oxford: Clarendon, 1930), 2.343. On 9 September 1653, the publisher Humphrey Moseley registered "The History of Cardennio, by Mr. Fletcher and Shakespeare" in the Stationers' Register. See Chambers, 1.538-42. Lewis Theobald published a play, Double Falsehood, in 1728, and alleged that it was based upon manuscripts of a play by Shakespeare that dealt with the Cardenio story. Opinions vary as to whether Theobald really could have adapted or did adapt his play from such a manuscript; see John Frechafer, "Cardenio, by Shakespeare and Fletcher," PMLA, 84 (1969), 501-12, and Harriet C. Frazier, A Babble of Ancestral Voices: Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Theobald (The Hague: Mouton, 1974). Theobald's play excludes Don Quixote.