The most meaningful and benevolent force of Will in the world is that he touches on what it means to be human and ethical even at the cost of sacrifice. This is what makes him more contemporary and relevant than many other writers of the pre-Modern period.
For the rising numbers of women who are interested in issues of sexual politics and inequities of gender, however, as they investigate the Shakespearean canon, a concern for legitimacy and female chastity are the two major subjects under the lens. Many younger scholars wanting to understand the role of women underlying aristocratic ideology well into the Renaissance and up to the late Jacobean period, find Shakespeare’s feisty daughters in the Comedies and Tragedies rich sites for excavation.
Shakespeare’s fashioning and elaborate reworking of feminine characters from his sources in the context of a radical reshaping of women’s selfhood can be associated with, what Sheila Fisher and Janet E. Halley, editors of Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings: Essays in Feminist Contextual Criticism, term, ‘feminizing’ power that threatens male socio-political interests. In this way, perhaps, Shakespeare was attempting to give a tongue to highly intelligent women who were silenced and silent by their exclusion from patriarchal institutions.
Renowned Shakespearean academic and specialist Shormishtha Panja, who has shaped Shakespeare and Renaissance studies in India in the past few decades, points out: “Ania Loomba’s Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama put the Indian classroom clearly in the global spotlight and expressed what women students and readers of Shakespeare in India have had notions about for a very long time: the presence or absence of feminist ideas in Shakespeare’s works.
“The idea of female consent: why is this not an issue vis-a-vis Miranda, Caliban and Ferdinand in The Tempest? Lady Macbeth and Desdemona both speak out, the latter in public, about their own desires and ambitions and their right to fulfil them. Should Cleopatra be vilified for not choosing to commit suicide as soon as Antony does so?
“Rosalind, Viola and Portia rule the plots of the Comedies with their agency and determination, often in male disguise. Young women in India, dealing with matters of parental or social control in education, career choice, marriage and even sexuality can easily relate to the predicaments of all these female protagonists and their ways of extricating themselves so as to fulfil their ambitions”
Behind all the possible relationships between man and woman in Shakespeare’s plays, at once the most troubling and powerful is the elemental bond between father and daughter. Yet, perhaps in the annals of Shakespearean criticism, it is also one of the least visited subjects.
In the romances, the destinies of Cymbeline and Imogen, Leontes and Perdita, Prospero and Miranda, and Pericles and Marina, and even Shylock and Jessica, are shrouded in formulae of suffering and redemption, loss and restoration, pain and deliverance. In the tragedies, perhaps even more than the romances, the playwright’s deep concern with the distressingly complex equation between father and daughter is addressed. In his portrayal of women, Shakespeare has been attacked for faults ranging from ambiguity to chauvinism.
Shylock and his daughter Jessica from the play The Merchant of Venice as illustrated by Gilbert Stuart Newton. Picture: Google Art Project
Cordelia, who was deprived of her inheritance by her father King Lear, comes back to him when he is old and ill, as shown in a 1936 lithograph from an etching, printed in colour, with additional hand-colouring
In the 1980s, in particular, when feminist scholarship was at its vitriolic best (or worst, depending on which side of the fence the reader was located) the playwright would frequently fall prey to the tinkering of feminist deconstructionists who would infuse the readings with vested interest and portray the playwright as a promoter of a huge patriarchal project.
As Lisa Jardine, who was Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University of London, pointed out, this school of feminist critic paints Shakespeare as irredeemably sexist and makes it incumbent upon itself to uncover Shakespeare’s ‘prejudices’ to the reader, sometimes aggressively and erroneously denying Shakespeare the central place he occupies in English literary studies.
I align myself with the second school that also voices the feminist cause, but stands the ‘Shakespeare was a chauvinist’ theory on its head and employs the clues in the
Tragedies to reveal the exact opposite view about the playwright’s intent: that Shakespeare was, first, a highly astute judge and critic of patriarchy and engendered cultural inequalities; and, second, that the daughters in the Tragedies are mostly independent-minded, highly sensitive, savvy citizens, often acutely aware of their own sexual enclosure and final betrayal by those very figureheads of authority (their fathers) who should, in fact, be empowering them.
Lisa Hopkins writes in The Female Hero in English Renaissance Tragedy: “The rise of the strong female hero, who may be in some respects a victim but is also an initiator, emerges as a widespread phenomenon only in the period after 1610, when we find a rush of female tragic protagonists on the English stage, including [John] Webster’s Duchess of Malfi and Vittoria Corombona, [Thomas] Middleton’s Bianca and Beatrice-Joanna, and [John] Ford’s Anabella and Calantha, all of whom are the eponymous heroes of their plays.”
First, in these Tragedies there is a serious attempt by the fathers to establish ownership of their daughters: there is a particular anxiety to establish dominance over their “interiors”. The images that recur in this context carry a strongly-marked pattern of architectural spaces and include closets, chambers, beds, wombs, rooms, doors, latches and tombs.
Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet (as well as Troilus and Cressida and Othello) are particularly rich with these reiterative impressions. In Troilus and Cressida, for instance, Troilus has required the services of “bed, chamber, pander, to provide the gear”. In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet’s bedchamber, the bed and the tomb, all become signifiers of interior spaces of comfort and security, which mirror the private space within the woman’s body that is out of reach of paternal control. And, in Othello, the bed becomes the point of conflict between private and public spaces, and where contact, consummation and contagion all collide.
It appears that the issue of ownership of the daughter is closely linked to the rigidly demarcated borders of the private space of the daughter and the public space where the father resides; when they coalesce, there is enormous anxiety on the part of the patriarch because, due to societal taboos, he is unable to directly access the private spaces within the bodyscape of the daughter, and yet he has control over the daughter as a human being (and as his possession and charge) because of the power invested in him by society.
This contradictory construct of power and ownership creates a perceptible clash of interests between patriarch and daughter, ultimately leading to an unleashing of anger, frustration and even madness on the father’s part — Capulet’s violent outburst to daughter Juliet’s begging for mercy and understanding for not marrying Paris is well noted:
“But fettle your fine joints ‘gainst Thursday next/ To go with Paris to St. Peter’s Church,/ Or I will drag thee on a hurdle thither./ Out, you green-sickness carrion! Out, you baggage,/ You tallow-face.”
Second, what is stunningly apparent is that images of matriarch and motherhood are mostly missing from these plays — this is extravagantly clear in King Lear and is quite easily excavated in Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida and Othello.
Third, even though the latent sexuality of the unmarried daughter is a beacon of danger and promiscuity, it is evinced as a sterile force: there is no celebration of childbirth or marital ties and the daughters are all dead before they can hope to be mothers — each of the five plays under investigation corroborate this fact.
Fourth, in the causal link of the events that lead to the deaths of the daughters, the initiating principle that leads to their tragic endings is the father’s actions that either alienate or endanger the daughter by minimising her social agency and familial locus standi in her husband’s household.
Fifth, in its own way, each unmarried woman’s narrative dramatises what historians of the period have described as the aristocratic role of daughters as exchange objects in the absolute male dominance project, where fathers are often complicit in their alignment with the bridegrooms in a male-bonding ritual, raising issues of obedience and chastity in the context of their daughters with their daughters’ spouses.
In King Lear, Lear’s admonishment of the King of France about Cordelia’s questionable actions and, in Othello, Brabantio’s warnings and pejorative insinuations about Desdemona’s trustworthiness to Othello, are some of the troubling aspects of fatherhood.
Renowned Canadian academic Mary Nyquist explains female domination during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries in Britain as originating in the Graeco-Roman topos of individual ownership by the head of the household. “The father, therefore, by definition, was a tyrant,” she said, in an answer to a question I had raised at the Milton Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies colloquium at the University of Toronto.
According to Renaissance customary law, daughters fell under the legal jurisdiction of their fathers, and married women came under the guardianship of their husbands and had virtually no autonomous legal capacity. Roberta Krueger discusses the issue of the noblewoman or royalty and points out that a bride’s sexual fidelity was the responsibility, to a large extent, of her father.
Of course, the need to have complete control of the daughter’s body is a project that is central to both Ophelia’s and Juliet’s suicides and to a large extent the way the diabolic defector Calchas is able to trade Cressida as a piece of meat at a market, without having a single Trojan (including Troilus) coming to her rescue.
These episodes drive home the abject degradation of the daughter and the absolute power of the patriarch over her, rather disturbingly. Nowhere is this more ironically presented than in Hamlet, where it is the daughter’s lover who admonishes the father of the potential bride to monitor her chastity:
Hamlet: Have you a daughter?
Polonius: I have my lord.
Hamlet: Let her not walk i’ th’ sun. Conception is a blessing. But as your daughter may conceive — friend look to it.
Polonius: How say you by that? (Aside) Still harping on my daughter.
As Nyquist further explains in her discussion of female ownership in Seventeenth century Britain: “Fathers had a strange legitimacy (right through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, to the Eighteenth century) for despotic rule over female wards in the household. And like any despotic ruler they often robbed their subjects of their rights, industriously closing off their voices or relinquishing them of any rights to property or material ownership.”
When an irate Lear is confronted by Cordelia’s string of “Nothing”s (which he purposefully chooses to perceive as disobedience, disrespect and a lack of devotion) the first and most vicious blow he drives home to her is by cutting her off from his protection and then appropriating all the material gifts he had bestowed on Cordelia, turning her into a homeless, dispossessed waif.
Lear: “…Thy truth then be thy dower,/ …Here I disclaim all my paternal care,/ Propinquity and property of blood,/ And as a stranger to my heart and me/ Hold thee from this for ever. The barbarous Scythian/ Or he that makes his generation messes/ To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom/ Be as well neighboured, pitied and relieved,/ As thou my sometime daughter.”
Sociologist Lynda E. Boose, the author of The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare, echoes Nyquist’s argument that the patriarch’s consent over the dowry was a powerful psychological as well as economic weapon. She writes: “Fathers like Capulet, Lear, and Brabantio depend on threats of disinheritance to coerce their children. When their daughters nonetheless wed without the paternal blessing, the marriages are adversely affected not because any legal statutes have been breached but because the ritual base of marriage has been circumvented and the psychological separation of daughter from father thus rendered incomplete.”
By extending a level playing field to men and women in his plays, and confronting the issue of displacement of the marginal subject — the daughter — and the appropriation of her agency by the father (or surrogate patriarch such as a brother), Shakespeare became the trailblazer whom some of the greatest Jacobean dramatists such as John Webster emulated.
Julie Banerjee Mehta is an author of Dance of Life and co-author of the bestselling biography Strongman: The Extraordinary Life of Hun Sen. She has a PhD in English and South Asian Studies from the University of Toronto, where she taught World Literature and Postcolonial Literature for many years. She currently lives in Calcutta and teaches Masters English at Loreto College
