SOURCE: Ford, Jane M. “The Triangle in William Shakespeare.” In Patriarchy and Incest from Shakespeare to Joyce, pp. 36-53. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998.

[In the following excerpt, Ford explores Shakespeare's resolution of the father-daughter incest threat in a number of his plays, particularly King Lear, Pericles, and The Tempest.]

Thou simular of virtue/
That art incestuous.

William Shakespeare, King Lear

Although variations on the father/daughter theme are central to at least twenty-one of Shakespeare's plays (Boose 1982, 325), the focus here is on four of the plays that illustrate basic patterns of resolution of the incest-threat for the father and the daughter through marriage to a suitor.

… [Relatively little] intimate detail is known about Shakespeare's family relationships. This has only served to stimulate endless speculation, usually based on the correlation between known historical facts found in public records and the sequence and content of the various plays. In this way critics have found grounds for conjectures regarding the man himself.

Born in 1564, the bard was eighteen when he was precipitously married to a woman eight years his senior. “But special circumstances attended this match. The groom was a minor, and his lady, pregnant.”¹ By the age of twenty he had three children but for most of the ensuing years, except for yearly visits to Stratford, Shakespeare lived and worked in London.² Hamnet, the only son, died at the age of eleven when his father was thirty-two—six years before the publication of Hamlet. His oldest daughter, Susanna, was married when she was twenty-four and her father was forty-three—one year after King Lear. Her daughter, Elizabeth, was born the following year (1608), the same year that Shakespeare's mother died and that Pericles was published. Hamnet's twin, Judith, married at thirty-one when Shakespeare was fifty-two—the year of his death—1616. This was five years after he wrote The Winter's Tale and The Tempest and three years after Henry VIII.

Shakespeare spent most of his final years, 1614-16, in Stratford, returning to London from time to time for short periods. In 1613, Susanna had brought suit against John Lane for defamation for having accused her of adultery and consequent gonorrhea; she was exonerated and he was excommunicated.³ Judith's marriage to Richard Quiney in February, 1616, was followed soon after by a legal scandal involving her new husband's adultery; both the illegitimate infant and the mother had died. Suit was brought against Quiney on March 26, Judith already pregnant with their first child. Schoenbaum conjectures that the resulting stress may have precipitated Shakespeare's death two months later on April 23 (292). Certainly having both daughters involved in unsavory lawsuits must have been a burden to their aging father. When he died, he left his wife the now notorious “second-best bed,” with the bulk of his estate going to Susanna, her husband, and their heirs, while also making provision for Judith.

Otto Rank was one of the pioneers in tying the artist's life to the work and [James] Joyce followed in his footsteps with Stephen Dedalus's elaborate discourse in the library. Both writers speculated on the implications of Shakespeare's having played the Ghost in Hamlet: “This suggests that at the time Shakespeare identified more closely with the role of the father. This conception gains in significance given that this role is generally said to have been Shakespeare's best performance” (Rank, 186). Jean Kimball has presented substantial evidence that Rank's work was available to and utilized by Joyce.⁴

Stephen Dedalus waxes poetic on the subject:

A player comes on. … It is the ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare who has studied Hamlet all the years of his life which were not vanity in order to play the part of the spectre. … To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince, young Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who has died in Stratford that his namesake may live for ever.

Is it possible that that player Shakespeare, a ghost by absence, and in the vesture of buried Denmark, a ghost by death, speaking his own words to his own son's name (had Hamnet Shakespeare lived he would have been prince Hamlet's twin) is it possible, I want to know, or probable that he did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those premises: you are the dispossessed son: I am the murdered father: your mother is the guilty queen. Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway?

(U [Ulysses], 9.164-80)

Stephen then elaborates on the potential damage to the male ego of loss of sexual initiative, perhaps telling us more about Joyce than it does about Shakespeare: “Belief in himself has been untimely killed. He was overborne in a cornfield first (a ryefield, I should say) and he will never be a victor in his own eyes after nor play victoriously the game of laugh and lie down” (U, 9.455-58). One of Joyce's listeners had raised the question which still plagues critics and critics of critics: “But this prying into the family life of a great man” (U, 9.181).

In addition to a lack of detail about his life, Shakespeare's corpus is distinguished by uncertainty regarding the exact sequence of his works; much of the dating remains speculative. Nevertheless, his prolific output resulted in an interesting chronological proximity for many of the plays. Although I have selected a play from his earlier years, A Midsummer Night's Dream (1596), one from his middle period, King Lear (1606), and two from his later period, Pericles (1609) and The Tempest (1611) for more intense focus, certain other plays are pertinent by virtue of their chronological proximity and the light this throws on their variations in treatment of the incest theme.

Shakespeare followed his first play in 1592 when he was twenty-eight with the writing of Love's Labour's Lost in 1593, in which the father's death imposes a period of enforced mourning before the marriages of his daughter and her friends can take place. In 1594, Shakespeare wrote three plays embodying a broad spectrum of treatments of the incest theme: Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Titus Andronicus, the least popular of Shakespeare's works, concludes with the father's slaying of his daughter, who has been sexually violated by others. The other two plays offer diametrically opposed resolutions. Susanna was only eleven when these plays were written, still very young, but old enough to cause her father to view himself as father of a maturing daughter. She was close to Mathilde's age when Freud had his erotic dream about her.

Romeo and Juliet (1594), while based ostensibly on the Montague/Capulet opposition, encompasses several components of the father/daughter theme. Capulet's preferred suitor for his daughter is closer to his double than the young Romeo, selected by the fourteen-year-old Juliet. Although her father is at first disposed to let her postpone any action until she is sixteen, he agrees to allow Count Paris to woo her and ultimately seems caught up in that frantic haste to get the daughter safely married off that characterizes other father/daughter plots—especially Shakespeare's. This dramatizes the father's necessity for a resolution of his own incestuous impulses through immediate marriage.

Juliet is shocked at the urgency: “I wonder at this haste, that I must wed / Ere he that should be husband comes to woo.”⁵ As Juliet's resistance becomes clear to her parents, the incestuous implications become evident in her father's violent reaction:

Hang thee, young baggage! Disobedient wretch!
I tell thee what—get thee to church a Thursday
Or never after look me in the face.
Speak not, reply not, do not answer me!
My fingers itch. Wife, we scarce thought us blest
That God had lent us but this only child;
But now I see this one is one too much,
And that we have a curse in having her.
Out on her, hilding!

(3.5.161-169)

As her father continues his tirade, Juliet concludes: “If all else fail, myself have power to die” (3.5.244), foreshadowing her father's later poignant realization: “Death is my son-in-law; Death is my heir” (4.5.38). The actions of the father, both in his haste to marry off the newly nubile daughter, and in his insistence on choosing a man he favors and she disdains, are prime factors in the rapid movement toward a tragic dénouement.

The contrast between Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream nicely illustrates the skirting of potential violence that is always a component when the suitor and the daughter are opposed by a possessive father. The tension in the latter play is established at the outset by the refusal of Hermia's father, Egeus, to allow her to marry Lysander, while making it clear that he wishes her to marry Demetrius instead. The father's autonomy, as established by Athenian law, is summed up by Egeus: “And what is mine, mine love shall render him. / And she is mine, and all my right of her / I do estate unto Demetrius.”⁶ Theseus, the supreme authority figure, has indicated that the penalty for disobedience to this injunction is either death or lifelong celibacy in a convent. There are no apparent age or attribute distinctions between suitors in this play, and one is free to infer that the restrictions are related to the father's own repressed motives. After listing the attributes they share in common, Hermia's favored suitor makes clear the single distinction between himself and Demetrius, “I am beloved of beauteous Hermia” (1.1.99-104).

Herein lies the rub. It is frequently one aspect of the incest motif that the father so involved can cope with the daughter's marriage only when her object-choice is a man other than the one she finds sexually attractive. The implication here is that although the father accepts the fact that he cannot retain her, he can only tolerate renunciation with the knowledge that she will not be happy or sexually satisfied. There is also a sadistic streak in the father's forcing marriage on an unwilling daughter in the name of authority.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the bulk of the action takes place in the forest, with the pairs of lovers ultimately happily aligned; every Jack has his Jill. The parodied production of Pyramus and Thisbe, the original of which foreshadows the bloody end of Romeo and Juliet, parallels the differences between the thwarted love of Hermia and Lysander and that of the scions of Capulet and Montague. This raises the crucial question of wherein lies the difference. Does Egeus differ from Capulet in his resolution of the dilemma? The difference lies in the avoidance of violence effected by the intervention of Theseus: “Egeus, I will overbear your will” (4.1.178); we never hear from Egeus again. Theseus can thus be viewed as a “good” father who by his imposed renunciation fosters love and prevents the bloodshed that occurs in Pyramus and Thisbe and Romeo and Juliet. What is more important is that Theseus contravenes Athenian law and takes power into his own hands. He thus serves as a successful contrast to the Prince of Verona who tries to put a stop to the violence and death but fails. This play then can serve as a prototype for other narratives in which the father renounces the daughter, but only after renunciation is imposed by an outside authority; sometimes it is the daughter who intervenes.

With The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1593), Shakespeare effected an important transition from the father's threat to impose his own choice of a friend and contemporary as his daughter's groom, to his voluntary relinquishment of control in favor of the daughter's choice. But by 1602 the productions of Hamlet and Othello exemplified a return to a dénouement of violence and destruction. Although Hamlet has been scrutinized much more extensively regarding the mother/father/son triad, in the Polonius/Ophelia/Hamlet triangle the suitor inadvertently destroys the father as a prelude to the ultimate destruction of the other two members of the triangle. But Polonius had already deterred his daughter from responding to Hamlet on the grounds of protecting her and it is her father's murder that precipitates her madness. “In Polonius is embodied the disdained and derided elderly father who wants to keep his daughters for himself” (Rank, 181).

The primacy of the father/daughter theme in Othello is readily apparent and not surprisingly it is Iago's language that insinuates the idea of incest into the play. Dr. Robert Fliess points out: “Othello, much older than Desdemona, constitutes a kind of father to her in the special sense of a forbidden love relation, one surrounded with taboos.”⁷ Brabantio sums up for all these Shakespearean fathers the solution to the incest-threat that the suitor represents: “I here do give thee that with all my heart / Which, but thou hast already, with my heart / I would keep from thee.”⁸ Although the father's ambivalence remains, the situation has been taken out of his hands.

Since Shakespeare wrote his first play at twenty-eight, a representative play of his middle period can be found in King Lear (1606), written when he was forty-two, Susanna was twenty-three, and Judith was twenty-one. Neither daughter had yet married, but since Susanna did marry in 1607, it is likely that the event was anticipated. Kay cites Susanna's epitaph which praised her as “witty above her sex” and “wise to salvation,” concluding that she thus resembled her father (329).

One critic found the father/daughter theme so central to this play that he coined the term “Lear complex,” the complex that focuses on the “neglected” adult to define the attachment of the older member of the oedipal twosome.⁹ In spite of a wide variety of interpretations of Lear's initial decision to divide his kingdom, the most immediate result will be to force his periodic presence on his daughters, and Cordelia, whom “He always loved … most,”¹⁰ is the only one left unmarried. The Fool tells Lear: “[T]hou madst thy daughters thy mothers” (1.4.168-69).¹¹ Cordelia's declaration of independence precipitates her father's wrath and provokes him into banishing his youngest:

Happily, when I shall wed,
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty.
Sure I shall never marry like my sisters,
To love my father all.

(1.1.99-103)

Although the Fool had told Kent that “this fellow has banish'd two on's daughters, / and did the third a blessing against his will” (1.4.100,101), toward the end of the play, Cordelia returns to England to come to the aid of her father. And a short time later, her suitor/husband is bereft and alone as Lear joins his daughter in death. The originator of the “Lear complex” outlines briefly what has ensued: Lear “reaches the depths of human despair and endurance until he finds his peace in death as a ‘smug bridegroom’ in blessed union with his youngest daughter as the bride” (59). Lear's words at the height of the storm have suggested his sense of his guilt:

                    Tremble thou wretch,
That hast within thee undivulged crimes
Unwhipped of justice. Hide thee, thou bloody hand,
Thou perjured, and thou simular of virtue
That art incestuous. … I am a man
More sinned against than sinning.

(3.2.51-59, emphasis mine)

During this period, Shakespeare created many examples of the violence and destruction lying at the heart of the incest theme. Ophelia ends as a suicide, her father having been murdered by the suitor. Desdemona, an innocent victim, is murdered. As Cordelia and her father lie dead, only the suitor remains when the violence has spun itself out. Earlier versions of the play did not entail a tragic finale, nor did the folktales which served as its base end tragically (Dundes, 234-35). King Leir, performed in 1590, depicted a reconciliation between Leir and Cordelia (Kay, 313).

In those plays that end in the destruction of both father and daughter and frequently of suitor, the violence is precipitated by the refusal of the father to renounce the daughter. But Shakespeare also wrote a number of plays in which the father's renunciation of the daughter to a suitor avoids the potential violence and destruction. Focus on the theme of renunciation in these plays also provides guidelines for analysis of the theme in subsequent chapters. Joyce attributed this transformation to the birth of Shakespeare's granddaughter in 1608: “Marina, Stephen said, a child of storm, Miranda, a wonder, Perdita, that which was lost. What was lost is given back to him: his daughter's child” (U, 9.421-24).

Pericles (1609), the first of the late renunciatory series, embodies an array of plot possibilities in the father/daughter incest theme, establishing the basic motif in the opening story of Antiochus and his daughter who are living in incest. Although there are other literary examples of overt incest such as Shelley's The Cenci and Mary Shelley's Mathilda, this is one of the few in which the incest is sustained with apparent complacency on the part of both participants, as divulged early in the play by Gower:

This king unto him took a peer,
Who died and left a female heir,
So buxom, blithe, and full of face
As heaven had lent her all his grace;
With whom the father liking took
And her to incest did provoke.
Bad child; worse father! to entice his own
By custom what they did begin
Was with long use accounted no sin.

(1 Chorus 21-30)

By whom was it accounted no sin? Certainly by the participants, and probably by the king's subjects also. And this father does not enjoin celibacy upon his suitor/rivals who fail to guess the riddle; their heads are ranged for all to see—a classic castration symbol.

Pericles guesses that the riddle spells an incestuous relationship and his life is immediately endangered. But a more crucial factor is involved, both in Pericles' guessing of the riddle and in the effect that this has on his subsequent behavior. His intuitive response to the riddle marks him as an early “secret sharer” since the proclivities of Antiochus are his own. We are never told precisely what ideas are aroused in Pericles by the riddle which is stated in the daughter's voice:

I am no viper, yet I feed
On mother's flesh which did me breed.
I sought a husband, in which labour
I found that kindness in a father.
He's father, son, and husband mild;
I mother, wife, and yet his child:
How they may be, and yet in two,
As you will live, resolve it you.

(1.1.65-72)

This disclosure makes Pericles “pale to read it” (1.1.76), and he evades making a direct answer to the king with: “Few love to hear the sins they love to act” (1.1.93), concluding with an oblique incest reference: “All love the womb that their first being bred. / Then give my tongue like leave to love my head” (1.1.107-08). Does knowledge of the relationship between Antiochus and his daughter perhaps suggest to Pericles his own love of the “womb that first their being bred” since the father/daughter attachment can operate as a reversal of the mother/son? Ostensibly to flee possible death at the hands of Antiochus, Pericles leaves Tyre and is soon again the third party in another father/daughter/suitor triangle.

King Simonides is the complete antithesis of Antiochus. On his daughter's birthday (always significant in the incest motif narrative), he is parading before her a series of knights for her selection; in the array, Pericles seems an unlikely choice due to his recent shipwreck. He becomes, however, the chosen love-object of Thaisa and she uses the subterfuge of total withdrawal for one year to rid herself of all other suitors. Simonides weighs his own autonomy against his daughter's:

She tells me here, she'll wed the stranger knight,
Or never more to view nor day nor light.
'Tis well, mistress; your choice agrees with mine;
I like that well: nay, how absolute she's in't,
Not minding whether I dislike or no!
Well, I do commend her choice,
And will no longer have it be delayed.
Soft, here he comes: I must dissemble it.

(2.5.16-23)

Again, there is that sense of urgency on the part of the father to see the daughter safely in the arms of the suitor once the decision to renounce has been made. But Shakespeare's fathers are sometimes good psychologists and also realize that what comes too easily may not prove very attractive. Obstacles enhance desire, but when agreement is finally reached, there is again that sense of urgency: “It pleaseth me so well that I will see you wed; / And then, with what haste you can, get you to bed” (2.5.91-92).

Before this marriage takes place, the audience has learned that Antiochus and his daughter have been destroyed in a terrible death. Although Simonides has “dissembled” his opposition to the marriage, it also reflects his true ambivalence toward this usurper of his fatherly rights. The marriage is short-lived (just short of nine months) since Thaisa ostensibly perishes in childbirth and is buried at sea to be resuscitated on land five hours later, unbeknown to Pericles. Subsequently, Pericles deposits his daughter with another pair of surrogate parents. Cleon, the father, is fond of his foster daughter whom he has “trained / In music's letters” (4 Chorus 7, 8).

Comprising another plot variation on the theme, the true daughter of Cleon and Dionyza is quite outshone by the foster daughter, and the mother plans Marina's murder. In this oedipal plot, the second daughter is a double for the mother and it is really the usurpation of the mother by the daughter that leads to Dionyza's decision to have her murdered—by yet another father figure, Leonine. This is a fairly rare literary instance in which there is open conflict between the mother and daughter for the father, in this case displaced onto a daughter surrogate. Leonine, reluctantly faced with Marina's murder, is saved from action by her abduction by pirates who sell her to a brothel owner, thus setting up the fourth oedipal configuration. The confrontation between Cleon and Dionyza, followed by the supposed murder, reinforces the oedipal reading that was added to the Gower version by Shakespeare.¹²

The Pander/Bawd/Boult (father/mother/brother) triangle is perhaps one of the least recurrent paradigms in terms of future literary patterns. It is significant that Shakespeare added a character not in the Gower version: “[I]n the brothel scenes he has no female Bawd, only a pandar and a servant.” Shakespeare also “cuts to a minimum” the story of Antiochus's incest.¹³ But possibly the most interesting change made by Shakespeare in the Gower materials was the more prominent role given to Marina (xvii). In this plot variation, the daughter's sexuality becomes a commercial commodity for the father who, in a sense, acts as her pimp. The father figure in this “family” is simply called “Pandar,” but he is not Chaucer's benign, lovable Pandarus. The “mother” allies herself with the father to exploit the daughter. Marina's stubborn refusal to submit culminates in a further incestuous elaboration, as the surrogate mother suggests to the surrogate brother that he deprive her of her virginity, thus paving the way for her future exploitation: “Boult, take her away; use her at thy pleasure. / Crack the glass of her virginity, and make the rest malleable” (4.6.141-43). But Marina manages to escape the brothel due to her ability to gain the respect of a perceptive Lysimachus who then refrains from using her as a prostitute. In effect, a father-surrogate saves Marina and eventually marries her with her own father's blessing. In Gower, this character never enters the brothel (xv).

As Pericles is reunited with his daughter, but is still unaware of her identity, the function of the daughter as a double of the mother is made clear: “My dearest wife / Was like this maid, and such a one / My daughter might have been” (5.1.106-08). A short time later he tells her: “thou look'st / Like one I lov'd indeed” (5.1.124-25). Pericles and Marina are here placed in the position described by Masters in which separated relatives, when reunited, are more prone to incest (5). Marina calls up immediately the earlier love-object, and one might surmise that if Pericles doesn't find out who she really is, a sexual involvement is imminent. The transfer of paternal desire from mother to daughter is embodied in Marina's words to her father: “Thaisa was my mother, who did end / The minute I began” (5.1.210, 211). Again, Joyce comments: “‘My dearest wife,’ Pericles says, ‘was like this maid.’ Will any man love the daughter if he has not loved the mother?” (U, 9.423-24). Joyce echoes this with “Molly. Milly. Same thing watered down” (U, 6.87). The Chinese box metaphor also holds since Joyce's daughter was an adolescent while he was writing Ulysses.

The function of the father/daughter relationship as a reversal of the mother/son is succinctly stated in the words of Pericles to the daughter he now recognizes: “O, come hither, / Thou that beget'st him that did thee beget” (5.1.194-95). As in some of the later literature, there is an element of ambiguity in the suitor in this play, since Lysimachus, as governor, is really a father-surrogate who has first encountered the undefiled Marina in the brothel. The transfer of the daughter to this suitor is very low-key compared to other plays as Pericles says: “You shall prevail, / Were it to woo my daughter; for it seems / You have been noble towards her” (5.1.259-61). In an ironic parody of the series of suitors in other plays, such as The Merchant of Venice, and of the competition arranged by Simonides in which Pericles was chosen, Marina has been besieged by “suitors” in the brothel, but has successfully fended them off. Lysimachus, the sole authority-figure who visits the brothel, has played the “good” father by not exerting his authority. As in the other plays, age is significant. Marina “Was nurs'd with Cleon, who at fourteen years / He sought to murder” (5.3.8,9).

At this point, not only is the incest-threat resolved by marriage and by restoration of the mother to the father; the couples are to be permanently separated as rulers of two kingdoms due to the death of Thaisa's father. Lest there be any doubt that this dénouement is above all the resolution of the incest threat, the Epilogue returns to Gower and to the original incest-plot in the play:

In Antiochus and his daughter you have heard
Of monstrous lust the due and just reward;
In Pericles, his queen, and daughter, seen,
Although assailed with fortune fierce and keen,
Virtue preserved from fell destruction's blast,
Led on by heaven, and crowned with joy at last.

(Epilogue 1-6)

What “virtue preserved” has meant for Pericles is more subtly stated, but I feel that it is quite clearly his refusal to succumb to the fatal “crime” of Antiochus, the understanding of which first made him so uneasy and nearly cost him his life. The play can then be read as both an allegorical and an archetypal resolution of the father/daughter incest-threat with a full range of possible solutions set out in a series of related plots. The incestuous attraction that Marina holds for her father is much more explicit in the Gower version.

The cluster of plays that began with Pericles (1608) and ended with The Tempest (1611) all deal with the father/daughter theme. One critic points out that “critical opinion is at last recognizing that the same ideas, preoccupations, situations, devices, and themes inform Shakespeare's comedies from the very earliest to the latest.”¹⁴The Winter's Tale (1611), while reversing the tragic resolution of Othello, is also an extrapolation of one of the plots from Pericles. Although the causal factors are different, the same components are present: the disappearance of both mother and daughter immediately following the daughter's birth, reunion with both when the daughter reaches puberty, resolution in the reunions of father/mother and daughter/suitor. The recurrent exile theme is embodied both in Hermione's simulated death and in Perdita's removal by ship. In contrast to Shakespeare's transformation of a nontragic Leir into a tragic one, the incest theme in The Winter's Tale reverses the earlier presentation in Robert Greene's Pandosto (1588), in which the theme is more explicitly stated: “[T]he queen dies, and the king, despite the happy reunion with his daughter, commits suicide in a fit of melancholy.”¹⁵ In Shakespeare's version, Hermione only seems to die and Leontes survives his period of penance to be reunited with his wife. It should be noted that Leontes has arranged to urge Florizel's suit to Polixenes while still unaware of the identity of the girl. The joy has become a loss, and “Perdita” becomes an oxymoron, summed up by Paulina: “Our Perdita is found”¹⁶.

In The Winter's Tale, then, the basic resolution occurs with the father momentarily attracted to the nubile daughter who is a double of the mother, but the incest-threat is contained by the restoration of the mother and the simultaneous availability of a suitor for the daughter. The oedipal configuration is again stabilized and equilibrium restored—until next time. Joyce summarizes: “There can be no reconciliation … if there has not been a sundering” (U, 9.397-98).

Shakespeare begins The Tempest with a recurrent narrative companion to the incest theme in several other plays …—the tempest. Although in both Pericles and The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare introduces such ambiguous and unnatural actions as Thaisa's burial and recovery from the sea and Hermione's retrieval from a statue, in The Tempest, he further abandons the semblance of reality by introducing Ariel and presenting the tempest as a contrivance of the father himself. Since these final plays all depend on unrealistic devices—mothers who survive presumed death to be ultimately reunited with the renunciatory father at the end of the play, or contrivances such as Ariel—suggests that Shakespeare needed to resort to extraordinary dramatic measures to effect a nonviolent resolution of the incest-threat for the father.

The total autonomy represented by Prospero is an essential aspect of the resolution of the incest-threat by the father. Very early in the course of the action we are told three things: that the storm has done “no harm,”¹⁷ that Prospero is in control, and that what has happened has some as yet undisclosed connection with Miranda, his daughter:

I have done nothing but in care of thee,
Of thee my dear one, thee my daughter, who
Art ignorant of what thou art, naught knowing
Of whence I am! nor that I am more better
Than Prospero, master of a full poor cell,
And thy no greater father.

(1.1.16-21)

Again, the recurrent components of the father/daughter/suitor theme occur: Miranda and her father have been exiled by themselves since she was three and they have been on the island for twelve years, until she has attained the magic age of fifteen (1.2.54). Although as the play opens, Prospero is about to divulge to Miranda that he is indeed the usurped Duke of Milan, he has had other fatherly authority roles: “and here / Have I, thy schoolmaster, made thee more profit / Than other princess' can, that have more time / For vainer hours, and tutors not so careful” (1.2.171-74). And Miranda asks her father his “reason / For raising this sea-storm?” (1.2.176-77).

Although the machinations of Prospero will effect the resumption of control of his dukedom, the primary solution the tempest brings is that of a suitor for the daughter in the person of Ferdinand. The disclosure of a parallel father/daughter subplot sheds light on the importance of the solution to the incest-threat contained in the main plot. The shipwrecked group is returning from a wedding which has all the elements of the incest theme, with exile in this instance serving as an additional means of resolution, as described by Gonzalo: “Methinks our garments are now as fresh as when we put them on first in Afric, at the marriage of the King's fair daughter Claribel to the King of Tunis” (2.1.66-68).

But Claribel's father is having second thoughts: “Would I had never / Married my daughter there! for, coming thence, / My son is lost; and, in my rate, she too, / Who is so far from Italy removed / I ne'er again shall see her” (2.1.103-07). The designation of this marriage as a form of banishment becomes clearer as Sebastian reminds Alonso that he has only himself to blame:

SEBASTIAN.
Sir, you may thank yourself for this great loss,
That would not bless our Europe with your daughter,
But rather loose her to an African,
Where she, at least, is banish'd from your eye,
Who hath cause to wet the grief on't.
ALONSO.
Prithee peace.
SEBASTIAN.
You were kneel'd to and importun'd otherwise,
By all of us; and the fair soul herself
Weigh'd, between loathness and obedience, at
Which end o' th' beam should bow. We have lost your son,
I fear, for ever.

.....

The fault's your own.
ALONSO.
So is the dear'st o' th' loss.

(2.1.118-32)

The greater loss has been that of Alonso's daughter, who torn “between loathness and obedience” has been banished to Africa. Prospero, isolated on an island with his daughter and that projection of his own potential, uninhibited sexual impulses, Caliban, creates a “tempest” which produces a suitor for his daughter. It is the onset of Caliban's desire to possess Miranda sexually (which we may assume to have coincided with her menarche) that has totally altered Prospero's attitude toward Caliban:

PROSPERO.
Thou most lying slave,
Whom stripes may move, not kindness! I have us'd thee
Filth as thou art, with human care, and lodg'd thee
In mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate
The honour of my child.
CALIBAN.
O ho, O ho! would't had been done!
Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else
This isle with Calibans.

(1.2.346-53)

Not only is the appearance of a suitor contrived, but the actual attraction between Ferdinand and Miranda is manipulated through the magic of Ariel:

MIRANDA.
I might call him
A thing divine; for nothing natural
I ever saw so noble.
PROSPERO.
[Aside] It goes on, I see,
As my soul prompts it. Spirit, fine spirit, I'll free thee
Within two days for this.

(1.2.420-23)

This aspect of Ferdinand's immediate attraction to Miranda is again commented upon:

PROSPERO.
[Aside] The Duke of Milan
And his more braver daughter could control thee,
If now 'twere fit to do't. At the first sight
They have chang'd eyes. Delicate Ariel,
I'll set thee free for this.

(1.2.442-45)

But Prospero, like Simonides, feels he must put artificial barriers in the way in order to enhance the romance:

PROSPERO.
[Aside] They are both in either's pow'rs: but this swift business
I must uneasy make, lest too light winning
Make the prize light.

(1.2.452-54)

Prospero proceeds to accuse Ferdinand of being a spy and a traitor, and as Miranda pleads for gentle treatment of her newfound love, her father's language burgeons with phallic imagery: “Put thy sword up, traitor, / Who mak'st a show but dar'st not strike, thy conscience / is so possess'd with guilt: come, from thy ward, / For I can here disarm thee with this stick / And make thy weapon drop” (1.2.472-76). Like Simonides, Prospero is able to give vent to his very real ambivalence toward his daughter's suitor, and his deep awareness of the sexual implications are voiced when he says of Ferdinand: “To th' most of men this is a Caliban” (1.2.482).

Prospero enjoins upon Ferdinand a “trial” in which he must remove thousands of logs and pile them up in another place. The logs serve as a sexual symbol of the transition from Prospero to Ferdinand as well as from the unbound sexual impulses of Caliban, whose duties the prince is performing. As the unseen Prospero watches and listens to the two lovers, he indicates his acceptance of the match in another aside: “Fair encounter / Of two most rare affections! Heavens rain grace / On that which breeds between 'em! (3.1.74,76). Prospero's musings as he hears the two promise to marry and watches them exit is fully ambiguous, again suggesting his deep ambivalence:

So glad of this as they I cannot be,
Who are surpris'd with all; but my rejoicing
At nothing can be more. I'll to my book.

(3.1.92-94)

The father acknowledges his limited joy in the event, but “rejoicing / At nothing can be more,” can either indicate that nothing would make him happier, or that nothing will ever make him happy again.

After telling Ariel that he is about to “visit / Young Ferdinand,—whom they suppose is drown'd,— / And his and mine lov'd darling” (3.3.91-93), Prospero turns his daughter over to the suitor with strict injunctions about the forms which must be adhered to:

Then, as my gift, and thine own acquisition
Worthily purchas'd, take my daughter: but
If thou dost break her virgin-knot before
All sanctimonious ceremonies may
With full and holy rite be ministr'd,
No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall
To make this contract grow; but barren hate,
Sour-ey'd disdain, and discord shall bestrew
The union of your bed with weeds so loathly
That you shall hate it both: therefore take heed,
As Hymen's lamps shall light you.

(4.1.13-23)

But Prospero is an anxious, worried father indeed, and further instructs them, as though no assurance Ferdinand can give him can allay his fears:

Look thou be true; do not give dalliance
Too much the rein: the strongest oaths are straw
To th' fire in' th' blood: be more abstemious,
Or else, good night your vow!

(4.1.51-54)

One can only conclude that he knows whereof he speaks. His abdication of any possible sexual inclination is again symbolically expressed: “I'll break my staff, / Bury it certain fadoms in the earth, / And deeper than did ever plummet sound / I'll drown my book” (5.1.54-57).

That Prospero has deliberately instigated the tempest to produce a suitor as soon as his daughter has reached puberty, and that renunciation has been a traumatic experience, is made clear in his exchange with Alonso who still believes his son lost. Again the ambiguity of “oozy bed” suggests the father/son rivalry already explored in The Winter's Tale:

PROSPERO.
Than you may call to comfort you, for I
Have lost my daughter.
ALONSO.
A daughter?
O heavens, that they were living both in Naples,
The King and Queen there! that they were, I wish
Myself were mudded in that oozy bed
Where my son lies. When did you lose your daughter?
PROSPERO.
In this last tempest.

(5.1.147-53)

That this play is characterized by the condensation typical of dreams is pointed up by the fact that Ferdinand and Miranda have only known each other for three hours (5.1.186). Prospero's Epilogue, regarded as the artist's renunciation of his art, is again fraught with meanings that can refer back to the incest theme:

And my ending is despair
Unless I be reliev'd by prayer,
Which pierces so, that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

(Epilogue, 15-20)

Lear too has spoken of “undivulged crimes” and “virtue / That art incestuous” (3.2.52-55). The widely varied critical interpretations of the Epilogue omit the view of it as a statement of the guilt over incest wishes and fantasies, and the acceptance of the resolution of that guilt. Ariel (superego), Caliban (id), and Prospero (ego), in which the first two are contained, are reunited at the end, and Prospero is once more a unified whole: “What strength I have's my own, / Which is most faint” (Epilogue, 2,3).

The tempest itself has served as a metaphor for sexuality that, like all violent action, has a life of its own, once it has been set in motion. Ella Sharpe comments: “Prospero and Lear are alike, and different. In Prospero omnipotence becomes benign. Prospero's storm saves, Lear's destroys.”¹⁸ Lear renounces his daughter to the suitor, but reluctantly and filled with rage, instigating a chain of violence as he sends her into exile. Prospero too renounces the daughter to a suitor, but with control and love, albeit also reluctantly. Claribel's father's renunciation has been voluntary and although the tragic dénouement is avoided, one can only speculate on Claribel's plight, both as victim of her father's incestuous impulses and her own submission to his will. Desdemona was at least a willing participant in her marriage.

Shakespeare's Tempest, written toward the end of his life, is a condensation of the renunciation of the daughter by the father, involving his own control in the production of a suitor. Bernard J. Paris tells us: “The Tempest is one of only two Shakespearean plays whose plot, as far as we know, is entirely the author's invention. It is, more than any other play, a fantasy of Shakespeare's.”¹⁹ …

Notes

1. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life, 76.

2. Chambers, Sources for a Biography of Shakespeare, 62.

3. Kay, Shakespeare: His Life, Work and Era, 395.

4. Kimball, “James Joyce and Otto Rank: The Incest Motif in Ulysses.”

5. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 3.5.119-20.

6. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1.1.96-98.

7. Quoted in Norman Holland, Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare, 255-56.

8. Shakespeare, Othello, 1.3.193-95.

9. Pauncz, “The Lear Complex in World Literature,” 52.

10. Shakespeare, King Lear, 1.1.288-89.

11. I am indebted for this observation to Norman Holland, Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare, 112.

12. Introduction to Shakespeare, Pericles, xv.

13. Introduction to Shakespeare, Pericles, xv.

14. Thorne, “Pericles and the Incest-Fertility Opposition,” 44.

15. Mueller, “Hermione's Wrinkles, or, Ovid Transformed: An Essay on The Winter's Tale,” 226.

16. Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale, 5.3.121.

17. Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1.2.13.

18. Sharpe, “From King Lear to The Tempest,” 237.

19. Paris, “The Tempest: Shakespeare's Ideal Solution,” in Shakespeare's Personality, ed. Norman Holland, 210.

Works Cited

Boose, Lynda E. “The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare.” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association] 96 (1982): 325-47.

Chambers, E. K. Sources for a Biography of Shakespeare. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946.

Dundes, Alan, ed. Cinderella: A Folklore Casebook. New York: Garland, 1982.

Holland, Norman N. Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966.

Joyce, James. Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition. 1922. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. 3 vols. New York: Garland, 1984.

Kay, Dennis. Shakespeare: His Life, Work and Era. New York: Morrow and Co., 1992.

Kimball, Jean. “James Joyce and Otto Rank: The Incest Motif in Ulysses.” James Joyce Quarterly 13, no. 3 (1976): 366-82.

Mueller, Martin. “Hermione's Wrinkles, or, Ovid Transformed: An Essay on The Winter's Tale.” Comparative Drama 5, no.3 (1971): 226-39.

Paris, Bernard J. “The Tempest: Shakespeare's Ideal Solution.” In Shakespeare's Personality, ed. Norman Holland et al., 206-25.

Pauncz, Arpad. “The Lear Complex in World Literature.” American Imago 40 (1954): 51-83.

Rank, Otto. Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage (The incest theme in literature and legend). Leipzig and Vienna: Franz Deuticke, 1912.

Schoenbaum, Samuel. William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Shakespeare, William. King Henry VIII. c. 1613. Ed. R. A. Foakes. Arden Shakespeare. London: Methuen, 1968.

———. King Lear. c. 1605. Ed. Kenneth Muir. Arden Shakespeare. London: Methuen, 1972.

———. Love's Labour's Lost. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Cambridge Edition Text. Ed. William Addis Wright. New York: Garden City Pub., 1936.

———. The Merchant of Venice. 1596. Baltimore: Penguin, 1959.

———. A Midsummer Night's Dream. c. 1595. Ed. Madeleine Doran. Baltimore: Penguin, 1967.

———. Othello. c. 1604. Ed. Oscar James Campbell et al. New York: Bantam, 1962.

———. Pericles. c. 1608. Arden Shakespeare. Ed. F. D. Hoenigar. London: Methuen, 1969.

———. Romeo and Juliet. c. 1596. Ed. J. A. Bryant, Jr. New York: New American Library, 1964.

———. The Tempest. c. 1611. Ed. Frank Kermode. Arden Shakespeare. London: Methuen, 1972.

———. The Winter's Tale. 1611. Ed. J. H. P. Pafford. Arden Shakespeare. London: Methuen, 1978.

Sharpe, Ella Freeman. “From King Lear to The Tempest.” In Collected Papers on Psycho-Analysis, ed. Marjorie Brierley, 214-41. London: Hogarth Press, 1950.

Thorne, W. B. “Pericles and the Incest-Fertility Opposition.” Shakespeare Quarterly 22, no. 1 (1971): 43-56.