There’s a curious, rather awkward scene in “Henry VI Part Three” where the King is pictured sitting on a molehill wishing he were a shepherd. Meanwhile, in the background, civil war spreads across England. In the foreground, oblivious to the presence of the King, a young man discovers that the enemy soldier he has killed is someone he knows: “O God!” he exclaims, “it is my father’s face”.
As the young man beseeches God to forgive him for his unwitting offence (“Pardon me, God, I knew not what I did!”), an older man appears, also a soldier, also dragging his victim’s corpse, and he too has a bitter discovery to make: “Ah, no, no, no, it is mine only son!” Divided in loyalties but united in grief, the two warriors bemoan their fate, before leaving the stage to Henry to describe himself as “a king more woful” than either. Whereupon his own son appears, to hurry him to safety: “Fly, father, fly! For all your friends are fled”.
As Shakespeare’s Comedies are underwritten by a seeming compulsion to explore the father / daughter relationship, so his Histories are drawn time and again to its corollary, the interaction between father and son. Is this simplistic, too neat a dichotomy? I don’t think so. Consider the father / son relationships explored in the three Henry VI plays alone: Talbot and his son, York and his sons Edward, Richard and George, Clifford and his son, York and his youngest son Rutland, Edward and his new-born son, and of course Richard and his son Edward, the heir to the throne whose inheritance he gives away.
A similar compulsion seems to drive Shakespeare’s second historical tetralogy, especially in its exploration of the fractious relationship between Henry IV and Prince Hal. At first the King is exasperated by his wayward son, and compares him unfavourably with the “gallant Hotspur”. Later, when Hotspur rebels and Hal defeats him on the battlefield, the King will have cause to revise his opinion. Meanwhile, Hal’s story is punctuated with a succession of father-figures: from the King to Falstaff, and from Falstaff to the Lord Chief Justice.
Relations between fathers and sons are not the sole preserve of the Histories. The Tragedies have plenty to say on the subject too. In “Macbeth” the thinking is perhaps more subtle than in the Histories: Macbeth kills Duncan but not his son Malcolm; later he kills Banquo but not Fleance. So he murders those who belong to the present tense but not those whose prime is still to come. Yet it is Malcolm and Fleance that he needs to kill: in this case, sons represent the future, and Macbeth’s fate is sealed.
In “Lear” – a play dominated by daughters – a contrast is drawn between Edgar and Edmund. Edgar is Gloucester’s son and heir, and he remains faithful to his father for the duration of the play. Edmund by contrast is illegitimate, and his contempt for his father emerges in the play’s second scene, in which he deceives him into thinking that Edgar is not to be trusted. Edmund, it seems, has hitherto been something of a guilty secret in his father’s eyes, and the play suggests that (as Auden puts it) “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return”.
Further exploration of the theme emerges in “Hamlet”. Two relationships are presented, more or less in parallel: first that between Hamlet and his father, whose shadow permeates the play, leaving the young man with the burden of avenging his father. The same fate awaits Laertes, who on his return from Paris to Elsinore is charged with the responsibility of avenging the death of his father Polonius. Here, the shadows of the past fall across the present, blighting the lives of the young. It may be co-incidence that this play was written in 1600, around the time Shakespeare’s own father died.
In all these examples it is hard to discern a pattern. Naturally Shakespeare believes that fathers have obligations to sons – of the kind that Henry VI abandons when he promises the throne to his enemies after his own death. And he accepts the logic of revenge, at least as a dramatic convention, so it is natural that Malcolm avenges Duncan’s murder and that Laertes takes up arms against Hamlet to avenge murdered fathers.
But one pattern that emerges intermittently might be called a distance between father and son, a breakdown in the intimacy they might otherwise share. In “Romeo and Juliet”, for example, Montague implies early in the play that he knows his son pretty well: Romeo has spent “Many a morning” walking alone in a local wood “With tears augmenting the fresh morning dew”. But when Benvolio asks him whether he “know[s] the cause”, Montague is stumped: “I neither know it nor can learn from him”, he admits. It’s a striking fact that Montague doesn’t speak to Romeo once in the entire play – though in Friar Lawrence, Romeo finds a father-figure of his own.
A similar distance emerges in “The Winter’s Tale”. After the death of young Mamillius – killed it seems by his father’s cruelty to his mother – his sister Perdita is abandoned in Bohemia, where she falls in love with Florizel, the heir to the throne. Florizel has not confided in his father Polixenes on this budding romance, but the King’s curiosity is perhaps more acute than Montague’s, and he disguises himself in order to ask the boy about his plans. But does your father, he asks his son, know you intend to marry this shepherd girl? “He neither does nor shall” replies the young man robustly, eliciting an equally uncompromising response from the King. Later, when Polixenes pursues the young couple to Sicilia, other relationships take priority, and in a denouement designed to mend fences, it is striking that he and his son do not speak to one another.
This kind of distance is rather different from the kind of separation experienced by Alonso in the play written immediately after “The Winter’s Tale”. “The Tempest” opens with a storm that wrecks the ship on which Alonso and his party are sailing home to Italy, marooning them on a remote island. Alonso’s son Ferdinand is separated from the royal party, and though he was spotted swimming strongly, the logical conclusion is that he has drowned. In practice, however, he has been separated from the royal party by the magician Prospero as a suitable husband for his daughter Miranda, and the play is structured around their magical romance and a more general reconciliation as the curtain falls.
Other relationships are more successful. Launcelot Gobbo’s friendly interaction with his father is constructive and good-natured, with none of the rancour or mistrust that seems to infest those born to a higher station in life. One thinks of Titus Andronicus killing his own son Mutius, or of Coriolanus, being told by his own young son (also, inevitably, named Coriolanus) that he will not be permitted to “tread on me; / I’ll run away till I am bigger, but then I’ll fight”. Hostility between father and son belongs, it seems, to those who are born great.
Shakespeare himself was both a son and a father to a son. His twins Hamnet and Judith were born in 1585, but the boy died at the age of 11, possibly a victim of the plague. Around this time Shakespeare was writing “King John”, a play whose most poignant moment is surely the death of young Prince Arthur, who meets his fate jumping (as he hopes) to freedom from the castle where he’s confined. His mother Constance surely speaks here with the grief of the real father behind the writing: “Grief fills the room up of my absent child”, she laments, “Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me”. One can hear the authentic voice of Shakespeare’s agony in this haunting speech.
