[In the essay below, Hart assesses the function of the father-daughter device in Shakespeare's romantic comedies and the varied problems that arise from that relationship.]

Father and daughter relationships recur throughout Shakespeare's romantic comedies. He takes a common and a simple family relationship, recognizable immediately to his audience as emotionally powerful, and suggests variations upon that relationship until he has worked the vein as thoroughly as he can within that genre. He begins with father-daughter as a device for expounding plot in the early comedies, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, and A Midsummer Night's Dream; he develops it as a complicated contrast of ideal positions in The Merchant of Venice; and then in the later comedies, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night, he uses it to reflect upon and undercut the positions presented in The Merchant of Venice.

In The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Taming of the Shrew, father-daughter is purely plot device. In the former, conflict between the two is perfectly clear: the Duke of Milan wants his daughter Silvia to marry Thurio, an unattractive but wealthy suitor. She will have none of him; instead she loves Valentine and follows him into banishment, entirely against her father's wishes. At the end, in as sudden a flip-flop as Shakespeare ever presents, the Duke rejects Thurio as a coward and is completely won over to Silvia's choice. Father and daughter do not confront each other over their differences; the conflict becomes the cause for romantic and dramatic scenes rather than the occasion of them. It thus remains simply a device (one of several) for helping to keep the plot alive.

In The Taming of the Shrew, the relationship becomes a kind of framework within which the plot moves. Baptista is firm in his stand that his elder daughter Katherine should be given the chance to marry before her sister Bianca, even though the younger has all the suitors. There is in him a loyalty and a sense of propriety which neither the fractiousness of Kate nor the simpering hypocrisy of Bianca can change. In turn, they feel the authority behind their father's position, however much they chafe under it. The decree of the father is an accepted and unchanged thing upon which the real action of the play—the wooing of the girls—hinges.

At first glance the relationship between Egeus and Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream seems the same as the Duke of Milan's and Silvia's. Egeus wants his daughter to marry Demetrius; she will have no one but Lysander. But there are many ways in which variation is introduced. Egeus and Hermia face each other before a higher authority, Theseus, where the dispute is presented for decision. In this way the arguments for either side are given context, which they had not had in the earlier play. Egeus' argument is that Lysander has "filched my daughter's heart, Turned her obedience, which is due to me, To stubborn harshness" (I, i, 36-38). He implies some kind of underhandedness, some razzle-dazzle, some magic, which is the source of her behaviour. Hermia's resolution seems equally headlong and foolish. She will sacrifice everything, even her life, if she can not marry Lysander. Their plans for elopement take full account of the romance of a moonlit night and of the trials that true love will inevitably encounter but have no thought at all of her father's feelings or their own position in Athens or the harsh threats just made by Theseus.

Theseus' judgement of the case is more objective, less impassioned than either of these. In essence, he suggests that wise fathers must choose husbands for obedient daughters. When Hermia says, "I would my father looked but with my eyes," he replies, "Rather your eyes must with his judgement look" (I, i, 56-57). And his case is demonstrated by his description of the father-daughter relationship:

To you your father should be as a god,
One that composed your beauties—yea, and one
To whom you are but as a form in wax
By him imprinted and within his power
To leave the figure or disfigure it.

(I, i, 47-51)

In the world of Theseus, which is a world of reason and law, the father is a more reliable selector of a husband for his daughter than she is. The father has concern, love, maturity, and sense to guide him, whereas the daughter has only her emotions, her love, to rely on.

The difficulty of Theseus' position is that it assumes wisdom in the father. It is not clear that Egeus has any such wisdom. The young man he chooses is no better nor worse than the one Hermia chooses. What is emphasized is the likeness, the indistinguishableness, in fact, between them. The family background, the abilities, the confusion, the behavior in the wood—all are comparable. Egeus' superior judgement is not manifest in the way the young men behave.

Yet Hermia's defiant insistence on her own choice in love does not seem much more worthy. In the wood, there are no fathers, there is no reason and law, only imagination, magic, and irrationality; but the madness among the lovers demonstrates that they are not able to choose wisely if left to themselves. Eventually, since they have help from Oberon's magic, and since Theseus, when he finds the lovers happily paired off, overrules Egeus' objections and his own former position, the conflict between father and daughter is muted and disappears. Yet the dream of that conflict lingers, for somewhere underneath all the laughter at Bottom and his company of players lies the unnoticed reminder that this playlet is the story of Pyramus and Thisbe who defy their fathers' wishes and come to grief. The conflict of father and daughter is not resolved, only shunted aside. In the final analysis, it becomes a device for furthering the action, just as Baptista's insistence on the order of his daughter's marrying had been.

With The Merchant of Venice, the function of the father-daughter device changes. We find two situations contrasting with one another, both involving the wishes of daughters to marry and the attitudes their fathers have towards those wishes. Because of the contrast, the device may be said to deal not so much with plot as with the essential dramatic structure of the play. For the relationship between each father and daughter determines the nature of the love each girl finds and establishes each love as opposite to the other.

Jessica's break from her father Shylock is much sharper than Hermia's had been in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Whereas Hermia and Lysander presumably have tried to persuade Egeus, Jessica's elopement comes like a thunderclap to Shylock. It is with a hated Christian; it is carried out with the help and knowledge of Lorenzo's friends (as Shylock sees it, probably of most of Venice); it involves her masquerading as a boy and attending the same feast her father is attending; it includes taking as many valuables from her father as she can carry. The whole incident is a monstrous insult to him, treated light-heartedly by Lorenzo and as a great joke by his friends. For the most part, Jessica echoes this cavalier attitude, yet her shame at dressing as a boy may carry with it some residue of uneasiness at the way she is treating her father. Two statements, the first words we hear her speak and her last words in her father's house suggest some possible shades of remorse or at least regret. The first of these seems like an irrelevant comment to Launcelot Gobbo: "I am sorry thou wilt leave my father so" (II, iii, 1). She is more interested in the life the young servant provides around the house than she is concerned for her father's loneliness; but it suggests a dimension of her thought, for she is already making her own plans to leave. The other statement is a repetition of her father's final words to her. He has said, ".. . shut doors after you. Fast bind, fast find" (II, v, 53-54), words which she echoes as she leaves the house: "I will make fast the doors, and gild myself With some more ducats, and be with you straight" (II, vi, 49-50). The mixture of obedience and defiance suggests at least a little confusion on her part.

We must not overdo her concern for her father. But we can justly consider what her elopement means to him. He is so isolated from Jessica, so unlike her in nature and feeling, so little aware of her as a person, that we tend to feel that he deserves the heartache her elopement brings to him. Yet the lack of concern arises simply from his complete conviction that she is the girl he thinks her to be. When he speaks his foreboding to her, when he orders her to "Lock up my doors . . . Let not the sound of shallow foppery enter My sober house" (II, v, 29, 35-36), he is expressing an attitude towards the Venetians which he expects her to share. Whatever we read into their relationship, whether Shylock is to be considered villain or persecuted alien, the failure of understanding and feeling between father and daughter, except at some uncommunicable and unrealized level, stands out. And the fact of this failure helps to define the nature of the love between Lorenzo and Jessica as we observe it in Belmont later on.

When Bassanio and Gratiano and later Portia and Nerissa rush away to Venice, Lorenzo and Jessica are left in charge in Belmont. "Lorenzo," Portia says,

I commit into your hands
The husbandry and manage of my house
Until my lord's return.

(III, iv, 24-26)

The husbandry and manage of the house are very undemanding. Lorenzo orders dinner and music, contemplates going inside to greet the returning owners ceremoniously, and then gives up the idea and remains out in the night with Jessica; that is complete inventory of his "manage of the house." Yet his jesting chatter with Launcelot Gobbo and the love-talk with Jessica are significant pointers to the kind of love he knows, although they are not essential to the action. Launcelot is brazen and outspoken in his jests. He delays the serving of dinner; he makes a joking accusation that Jessica ought not to have become a Christian because it "will raise the price of hogs" (III, v, 26); he dismisses with a flip remark the counter accusation of Lorenzo that he is guilty of "getting-up of the Negro's belly" (III, v, 41-42). In the midst of these jests there is an aura of permissiveness, of carelessness between master and servant, which in turn suggests little interest or talent for the "manage of the house."

In fact, Lorenzo and Jessica are completely absorbed in each other. In the outdoors of Belmont they reveal their love in several ways. They have a kinship with great lovers of the past; their understanding enables them to give a choral response when they speak of the beautiful night; they use language for play rather than for serious communication, mockingly accusing each other of faithlessness; they are mutually able to reach out to feel the harmony of the music of the spheres and to feel the Tightness of themselves in relation to the music of the musicians. Private understanding, beauty, music, harmony: these are the qualities which define the kind of love Lorenzo and Jessica experience. Any man who has no music in himself is not to be trusted. Yet their love has its limitations. The lovers whose names are so beautifully dropped by them—Troilus and Cressida, Pyramus and Thisbe, Aeneas and Dido, Jason and Medea—are finally tragic lovers, having rebelled in one way or another against parents or society or the state or all three. And the love of Lorenzo and Jessica is carefully kept out of any social context. They simply yield authority to Bassanio and Portia, content to live in their own dream, scarcely aware of the strange, alienated, obsessed father with whom we as audience have had so much to do. Their love has become a love of a special and ideal kind.

The love between Bassanio and Portia stands in complete contrast. There are very formal and strict requirements imposed by Portia's father for wooing her. And although her father is dead, she accepts the conditions and will abide by them: "If I live to be as old as Sibylla, I will die as chaste as Diana unless I be obtained by the manner of my father's will" (I, ii, 116-118). She seems to run a great risk in keeping her resolution. A whole catalogue of silly suitors makes itself available to her; and although they will not all go through with the conditions necessary for choosing, two suitors try to choose correctly and fail. Both suitors—Morocco and Arragon—are unacceptable to Portia, as we learn from her relief at their failure. But it is clear that she means to abide by the terms given; if the "wrong" man chooses correctly, he wins.

At the same time, the means are perfectly safe. Portia's father, setting these bonds on her at his death, knows exactly what he is doing. The man who chooses the lead casket will possess the qualities which are perfect for her and he will be the kind of man whom she will love, will always have loved. When Theseus pronounces to Hermia the words, "Rather your eyes must with his judgement look" he is in fact saying what Portia enacts. Though her father has died, though she has committed herself to conditions which theoretically endanger her happiness, yet her father's judgment is certain and trustworthy. The risk is great but Portia lives by it and triumphs.

She has won what Jessica has abandoned: social context for her relationship with her husband. This contrast between the girls is reinforced upon Portia's return to Belmont in Act V. Jessica is bathing in the beauty of the moonlight, she is enthralled by the music she hears. For Portia, however, reactions to moon and music are opposite to this. When she enters, the moon has gone; what is apparent to her is the little candle burning in her hall. Furthermore, she regards the music as sweet but not necessarily as always so: "Nothing is good, I see, without respect. . . . How many things by season seasoned are To their right praise and true perfection!" (V, i, 99, 107-108). If she is good and right, then the music is fine; but it does not depend on whether she has music in herself. It was like that when Bassanio was choosing: music did not determine but depended on his choice.

Let music sound while he doth make his choice,
Then, if he lose, he makes a swanlike end,
Fading in music. .. . He may win,
And what is music then? Then music is
Even as the flourish when true subjects bow
To a new-crowned monarch.

(III, ii, 43-45, 47-50)

She turns off the moon by entering; she stops the music that has been enchanting Lorenzo and Jessica. All actions turn toward her, seem almost to depend on her. She becomes again the center of the Belmont world and all things are subordinated to her and to her command. So the public Portia regains her husband and he his public reward.

Yet she and Bassanio lack the private understanding and intimacy exhibited so clearly by Lorenzo and Jessica. To Bassanio, she has always been the public Portia. When he first describes her to Antonio, it is Portia the valued prize he is thinking of:

her sunny locks
Hang on her temples like a golden fleece,
Which makes her seat of Belmont Colchos' strond,
And many Jasons come in quest of her.

(I, i, 169-172)

He knows how to win her, by ignoring "ornament" and considering the inner qualities of the caskets; but when he wins her, it is the beauteous exterior which he is aware of, the "official" Portia. He admires the perfection of the picture he finds in the lead casket but finds that "this shadow Doth limp behind the substance" (III, ii, 129-130), that is, Portia herself. Though she is seen by Bassanio in this way, Portia is far from being mere facade. We hear her shrewd and witty comments on her suitors, we feel excitement at the approach of Bassanio and her dismay at the thought that he might choose incorrectly, we understand her attempt to communicate a sense of her girlhood and her inexperience to him:

But the full sum of me
Is sum of something which, to term in gross,
Is an unlessoned girl, unschooled, unpracticed,
Happy in this, she is not yet so old
But she may learn. Happier than this,
She is not bred so dull but she can learn.

(III, ii, 159-164)

The latter part of the play demonstrates that he does not know her in the way Lorenzo knows Jessica. When she appears as a lawyer in the court of Venice, there is no recognition at all, nor afterwards when he gives her ring to the lawyer. In fact, the whole episode of the rings reinforces this. Though the end of the story deals amusingly with the problem, both Bassanio and Portia realize that he is able to recognize the Lady of Belmont but not the girl he married. The potential is there, we know. Portia has revealed herself to be a charming and fascinating woman; Bassanio, by the wisdom he shows in choosing the least ornamental casket, has demonstrated his capacity to look beyond the surface. He simply has not yet had the time to get to know her well.

Thus, each pair of lovers suggests a different kind of love. Portia and Bassanio are perfect in their social compatibility, Jessica and Lorenzo are perfect in their intimacy and understanding. In the context of the play, both love relationships arise out of the relationships of the daughter with the father. Shylock, defied by Jessica, makes impossible a love which is socially responsible; the love of Lorenzo and Jessica must be built on their own intimacy and understanding. The Duke, obeyed by Portia, makes possible a love which is publicly and socially responsible; but the love which Bassanio and Portia have has not yet had time to achieve intimacy and understanding. Each love seems an ideal, a kind of perfection of what it is, but limited to what it is.

Yet Shakespeare asks us to pause as he puts forward the father and daughter of Much Ado About Nothing; and he does this in two ways, one of these incidental and digressive and the other basic to the play. First of all, in a way which is incidental and causal and obviously a mistake or an earlier version or the fault of the printers, he makes us consider the absence of mothers in these plays. He raises the question which no one has ever been able to answer: whatever happened to Innogen?

She is advertised as entering with her husband Leonato and his household at the beginning of Much Ado About Nothing; she is also said to appear at the beginning of Act II with her husband and others among her family and guests. She is never given a line to say; she is never spoken to by any of the characters; she is never spoken about by any of them either. Occasions arise in the course of the action which might well demand her attention: her daughter Hero is wooed by a highly eligible Claudio; their marriage is arranged with the dispatch of a young man who knows what he wants; the bride is dressed for the church ceremony (will ever a mother be kept silent on such an occasion?); Hero is then denounced in public as faithless by her intended and falls into a faint, only to be denounced further by her father when she returns to consciousness. On any or all of these occasions, a mother would attend to and probably support her daughter in her joys and sorrows. But Innogen is nowhere to be found. Editors in shame and embarrassment have relegated her to a couple of footnotes and they uniformly mumble that Shakespeare left her out of the final version of the play but forgot to strike her name from the stage directions.

And indeed it may be so. For we can imagine the impulses which prompted Shakespeare both to put in a wife to Leonato and to take out a mother to Hero. For Leonato, so deferential in his behavior toward outside authority as it is represented in Don Pedro, is commanding where he can be in his family. His niece Beatrice he can control very little, nor does he show much inclination to try. But his daughter Hero he will direct and order about, for her own good, naturally:

Daughter, remember what I told you. If the Prince do solicit
you in that kind, you know your answer.

(II, i, 69-71)

His role as petty tyrant would be reinforced and supported by having a timid, quiet, subservient wife. It would suggest that his word was law within his immediate family, however reliant he was on others' opinion outside that family.

But such reinforcement would not do much for the relationship between Innogen and Hero. The scene at the church would be even more awkward than it is, if both father and mother rejected their child. It is one thing to have the foolish Leonato side with the Prince against his daughter and accuse her of loose behavior. But it would be quite another to have her mother, either out of fear of Leonato or out of a comparable lack of trust in Hero, join in the accusation. And if she sided with her daughter against her husband, the picture of the happy little family doing Leonato's every bidding would be destroyed. On some such grounds, the character of Innogen may have been abandoned.

And in fact, the conceivable functions she might have in the play have been filled by other characters. Where Leonato needs support in his foolishness, it is supplied by the old man Antonio, his brother, who can be a confidant and a strong backer of Leonato's and at the same time intensify the tendencies toward folly exhibited by Leonato. He is the first to announce to his brother the Prince's plan to woo Hero; he behaves foolishly during the dance, trying to conceal his identity while Ursula mocks his age; after the church scene he appears to comfort his brother and then to outchallenge him in the quarrel with Pedro and Claudio. As part of the final reconciliation, he plays the father of a child much like Hero, who is to become Claudio's bride instead. Antonio provides support for Leonato such as Innogen might give, but he offers a dimension of humor that would not be appropriate in her.

The other function imagined for her, that of supporting her daughter when she is slandered, is more than made up for by Beatrice and the Friar. Beatrice has from the beginning established her own independence of her uncle Leonato. She would never think of marrying on his mere recommendation and she tries to persuade her cousin to be as free in her choosing. Though she is courteous and mannerly, her basic choices are going to be her own. It is easy, then, for her to insist on Hero's innocence and to utter her indignation at the accusations made by Claudio and Pedro. She does not accuse her uncle of being a dupe for believing Claudio and not Hero; she is silent through most of the accusation scene. But her belief in Hero is never shaken and her fury at the accusers is unbounded. She is so powerful a spokesman that she needs no other character to express injustice; and Innogen's expression of the same position might be complicated by the loyalty expected toward her husband, which could in effect cause her to be silent.

The Friar also is important in clearing Hero's name and regaining her father's respect for her. He thinks of the device of declaring Hero dead, which is supposed to soften her accusers (and doesn't), but far more importantly he represents a voice to which Leonato can attend. Leonato, being the man that he is, needs to rely on an outside authority to do his thinking for him. He falls in with Pedro's proposal of Claudio as husband for Hero; he believes the accusation which Claudio makes against his daughter; and now Friar Francis persuades him of the innocence of his daughter, a conclusion which he would have difficulty coming to by himself. To imagine Innogen performing such a function would be to reconceive the kind of character Leonato is and to inject into the play a complicated marital problem that might well overshadow the rest of the action.

By positing the dramatic functions that might be performed by Innogen and by seeing how much more satisfactorily they have been taken care of by characters already in the play, we can see why Innogen seems to have been dropped from the play by Shakespeare. But the dropping of Innogen reinforces the use of the father-daughter device in the other romantic comedies I have discussed. The conflict between the "wise" father and the "emotional" daughter is simply and straightforwardly presented in each of them without the inevitable complications which a mother would introduce. And the very simplicity of the device makes it possible to resolve the conflict in a number of different, satisfactory, comic ways, culminating in the two detailed instances of The Merchant of Venice. Having made the Duke and his daughter Portia emerge as triumphant instances of a happy combination of father and daughter, Shakespeare proceeds to render their success ideal and improbable by the relationship suggested in the next three romantic comedies—Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night.

What happens, for instance, if you have a daughter who is a model from her father's point of view, only the father lacks the wisdom of a Duke of Belmont? What happens is what we find in the qualities and relationship of Leonato and Hero in Much Ado About Nothing.

Leonato is interested in providing for his daughter's future, but he has no such wisdom as the Duke of Belmont. He can look for a suitable son-in-law among the titled, among the favorites of the titled, among the exteriorly attractive; but he knows nothing about the interior qualities and he lacks any means of finding out. He will rejoice if Don Pedro, Prince of Arragon, is rumored seeking his daughter's hand; but he will be if it is Claudio, the Prince's protege, instead. He expects and finds an obedient response from his daughter, Hero; and she is just as compliant as ever Portia is. But the deep feeling Portia has for Bassanio is missing. She makes no protest when her father mistakenly prepares her for Pedro's wooing; she exhibits none of Portia's excitement when she accepts Claudio (although she is described as whispering in his ear); she agrees to re-accept Claudio after he has so shamefully disgraced her. There is a passivity in Hero that is a reduction to absurdity of Portia's loyalty to her father; there is a fawning before authority in Leonato that suggests that not every father has the judgment to decide properly for his daughter. The whole argument for wise fathers that had been demonstrated brilliantly in The Merchant of Venice comes crashing down in Much Ado About Nothing. In a world where facade means everything, where feeling is only tentatively and timidly present, the father and daughter roles can lead to tragedy and disgrace. The scene in the church epitomizes their pitiful dilemma. Hero, whose private feelings are either absent or never known, is condemned publicly as unfaithful by her lover. Leonato, who has placed so much reliance on the infallibility of the great Pedro and the youthful Claudio, can only join in their condemnation. Both father and daughter are helpless before the mistake, and they must be rescued by others with more resources than they. Leonato and Hero represent the bankruptcy of the "wise" father and the "obedient" daughter.

Beatrice has no father and is far better off for it. She and Benedick have a private feeling for each other which must be reconciled to their public selves by the agency of Pedro's plot to bring them together. In a sense, they are like Jessica and Lorenzo but they have no father to consider.

Rosalind and Orlando in As You Like It are rather like this too. Rosalind has a father for whom she mourns, when she is in Frederick's court. But when she is in the Forest of Arden, the whole world changes for everyone. She becomes not Rosalind but Ganymede playing Rosalind, and Ganymede has no father. She and Orlando can articulate private love games at their leisure, as earlier private lovers could not. Lorenzo and Jessica have their moment, but they must yield to Bassanio and Portia; Benedick and Beatrice scarcely can admit even to each other the depth of their feeling, for depth of feeling is a subject for mockery in the world of Much Ado About Nothing. But in a world where there is no clock and there are no jobs or duties, and the fool is not a fool but a courtier and a lover, and the Duke is without a dukedom, and there is no possession, and the world ages with the deliberate slowness of Nature's moving, in such a world, love can be free and delightful and playful and serene. And fathers (both Rosalind's and Celia's) are forgotten about until the end when reunion takes place and seriousness in life and love resumes its role and the father and his daughter and her husband all prepare to leave the Forest.

Thus, after the triumph of the father in the Belmont world of The Merchant of Venice, he is given his comeuppance in the next two plays. The last of the romantic comedies, Twelfth Night, removes fathers altogether. Olivia's has died over a year before and Viola's long ago. The chief quality of Illyria is instability, whether from over-emotionalism (like the Duke's) or pleasureseeking (like Sir Toby's), or puffed-up ambition (like Malvolio's). Both Olivia and Viola share in this instability, Olivia by falling in love with a girl dressed as a boy and marrying that girl's twin without knowing any better, Viola by falling in love with a Duke who doesn't know how he feels or who his love is. A steadying hand is absent. Toby, who is "consanguineous" to Olivia, assumes neither responsibility nor concern for Olivia's future, so busy is he about his fooling and his drinking; Malvolio, who would like to assume both responsibility and sovereignty, lacks the respect of anyone in Olivia's household, though he has her affection. The implication is that a wise father would have made a difference for both daughters, and that his absence places a greater burden on fortuitous circumstances to produce a happy ending.

The romantic comedies have other relationships which are explored in some such sequence—ruler and subject, master and servant, wise fool and foolish wit—but none with more delicate balance than the device of father and daughter and the varied problems arising from that relationship.