‘Bring forth men-children only,’ exclaims Macbeth as his formidable wife persuades him that the murder of King Duncan can be accomplished successfully: ‘for thy undaunted mettle’ he explains, ‘should compose nothing but males’. But in practice it’s much more common in Shakespeare’s plays for ‘women-children’ to be brought forth, and for the relationships these daughters strike with their fathers to be a continual source of anxiety, confusion, frustration and – occasionally – delight.
I say ‘fathers’ because strangely, perhaps, mothers are in short supply in Shakespeare’s plays. No mention is made of Desdemona’s mother in ‘Othello’ for example, though in Brabantio she has a very prominent father; Jessica in ‘The Merchant of Venice’ is much the same – her mother Leah is mentioned once only, though Shylock is again a domineering presence; Miranda in ‘The Tempest’ seems to have no mother living, and has only just (at the age of 14) thought to ask her father about her: ‘Thy mother was a piece of virtue,’ Prospero tells her, and she isn’t mentioned again.
So how do these various fathers cope with the trials and consolations of leading, in effect, one-parent families? Fortunes vary. Many of the fathers Shakespeare presents in his 38 plays do undoubtedly have their daughters’ best interests at heart, and provide helpful stepping-stones for coping with adult life: Helena in ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’, for example, is able to heal the ailing King of France because she has access to her late father’s unrivalled medical techniques and can apply them. The King recovers, and Helena is granted the hand of the man of her dreams as reward.
Paternal support of this type is pretty rare, however. True, there is the occasional father who sets his daughters up with everything they could wish for. In ‘King Lear’ the ageing monarch divides his kingdom equally between his two older daughters to govern in his stead while he takes a step back. The scheme is not a success, however: it results in the exile of his third daughter and ultimately, the death of all three and Lear too. Better, surely, to err on the side of caution.
The conservative approach is certainly more common than the liberal among Shakespeare’s fathers: when Shylock goes out in the evening, he instructs his daughter Jessica to lock the house up with herself inside: she obeys the first command but not the second. Other fathers drawn to imprisoning their daughters include The Duke of Milan in ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona’, whose daughter Silvia is attracted to a suitor not favoured with her father’s approval. The Duke locks her up but, like Jessica, she gets away. A number of fathers look to dominate events from beyond the grave: Portia’s late father has foisted on her a means of finding a husband – by a lottery, in effect – that is a kind of incarceration by other means, while Olivia (in ‘Twelfth Night’) and the Princess of France in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ are both reluctant to engage in romance while in mourning for fathers recently deceased.
Even when space does not permit a daughter to be restricted to a room or (in Jessica’s case) a house, other restraints can be imposed. Ophelia in ‘Hamlet’ is told by her father Polonius to steer well clear of Hamlet (‘Think yourself a baby’, he advises her), and she is as good as his word. When Hamlet invades her space by appearing in her room in a less than princely condition, she reports back to her father (‘O my lord’, she tells him, ‘I have been so affrighted!’), who in turn reports back to the King and Queen.
Where some fathers look to contain and restrain their daughters, others threaten them with the opposite fate: when Capulet informs the 13 year-old Juliet that she is to be married to Count Paris, she is mortified, as her heart lies elsewhere. Capulet is not impressed: you’ll do as you’re told, he informs her, or ‘Graze where you will, you shall not house with me’. It’s a different approach to that favoured by Shylock, or the Duke of Milan, and perhaps it’s only rhetoric, but it springs from the same mentality: do as I tell you, he warns, or you will ‘hang, beg, starve, die in the streets’.
Juliet has motives for rejecting marriage to Paris that Capulet can’t imagine, prominent among them the fact that she is already married to Romeo. This is a further recurring theme – that fathers never seem to know what their daughters are up to. Take the opening scenes of ‘Othello’, when Iago, at his mischief-making best (or worst), alerts the sleeping Brabantio to the fact, though it’s the dead of night, his daughter is not at home. He couches this alarming information in characteristically racist terms, telling Brabantio that ‘an old black ram is topping your white ewe’. For Brabantio this is all alarming news, which he might perhaps have preferred to hear first from his wife, but this is Shakespeare, and he has a daughter but apparently no wife.
Brabantio finds it hard to accept that Desdemona has fallen in love with Othello – ‘she is abused, stolen from me, and corrupted by spells and medicines’ he claims – and he accuses Othello of witchcraft. But the younger man is able to argue his corner persuasively, and allegations of supernatural manipulation are easily dismissed. Other fathers, however, are quite happy to employ a touch of magic over their daughters’ affections. In ‘The Tempest’, for example, Prospero controls events almost as if he were writing a novel (or, indeed, a play), and Miranda’s intensifying feelings for Ferdinand are all part of his plan. True, he admits at one stage that events are moving faster than he meant, but there are many fathers in Shakespeare’s plays – Shylock, Capulet, the Duke of Milan – who would envy him his control.
The relationships that develop between fathers and daughters, the love they share and the white lies they sometimes tell each other, seem to have fascinated Shakespeare as he sat alone in London, composing plays that would resonate for four hundred years and, indeed, as was once said of him, ‘for all time’. But what of real life? Shakespeare had two daughters of his own, who were perhaps as mysterious to him as Jessica to Shylock or Juliet to Capulet – not least because they lived in Stratford with their mother, a hundred miles to the north.
It’s reckless to believe that we can piece together the biography of an author from reading their novels or watching their plays. But it is a striking fact that Shakespeare’s dramas are significantly less engaged by the relationships of daughters (or indeed sons) with their mothers. Shakespeare himself is remarkable (among a host of other reasons) for concealing himself in his work, so that though he is among the most famous men in history, he remains in many ways inscrutable and opaque. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion, reading over the plays, that at least one autobiographical element has crept into his work as he wondered from his rented room in London how those daughters of his were faring, three days’ travel away.
