![]() ![]() The plays “take up the stories at the point at which the daughter is moving away out of the sphere of her father’s control and influence and sets out on her own” (Gierstae 2). These literary works provide four different father-daughter relationships (Cymbeline and Innogen – Polonius and Ophelia – King Lear and Cordelia – Brabantio and Desdemona). By focussing on Shakespeare’s dramas Cymbeline, Hamlet, King Lear and Othello, I will try to examine the complex and provocative relationship between fathers and daughters. Since the relationship between fathers and daughters is a powerful source of Shakespeare’s plays which he chose to explore in far greater depth, this seminar paper is an attempt to explore this theme. While “the daughters demand more emotional freedom, their fathers express the increased rigidity and self-righteousness” (Dreher 5). As Shakespeare rarely mentioned the paternal authority over a son’s marriage-choice, he offers by contrast various occasions with the situation of a young woman’s lack of freedom (cf. Their “developmental needs clash violently with those of their offspring” (5). At the same moment, the fathers are hurt and shocked by what they experience as personal rejection. The daughters had to “break the emotional strings that tie them to childhood, defying paternal authority to assert emotional independence” (5). For Shakespeare’s fathers and daughters, “the tensions of transition are multiplied” (Dreher 5). He uses this relationship “to discredit the practice of possession and the attitude of cupidity which was under attack in the Renaissance” (Mehta 176). Shakespeare “consistently explore affective family dynamics” (Boose, “The Father and the Bride” 235) by focusing especially on the relationship between fathers and daughters. In Shakespearean plays, the ultimate authority merges usually with the authority of a father. ![]() Family relationships undergo considerable stress as individuals must accept new roles and a new distribution of power and authority. ![]() Traditionally, it leads young women from childhood to adulthood, representing a no less difficult transition for parents from middle life to old age, with its final demands of retirement, reflection, and integration. Marriage has always been a crucial moment of transition, a rite of passage. 2 Elizabethan Society as a Patriarchal SocietyĢ.2 Parents and children in this period of timeģ Family Relationships in Shkaespeare’s playsģ.1 The reactionary father in Cymbeline and Othelloģ.4 The jealous father in Hamlet and Othello ![]()
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