Six Lessons from the Fathers of the American Shakespeare Center's Spring Season

As opposed to mothers, fathers are quite easy to find in early modern drama. There are six father figures in our Spring Season plays and only four mothers (one of whom never appears on stage). The dads are a plot-driving mix of tyrannical authority figures, loving parents, and down right madmen. No matter their temperament, each has some lessons to offer, so here are six dos and don’ts of being a parent in early modern drama.

1) Do not kill, nor threaten to kill, your child. This mandate seems obvious, but three fathers in this season mess it up. In The Winter’s Tale, Leontes orders the death by abandonment of his newborn daughter, Perdita; he also indirectly leads to his son Mamillius’s death from a broken heart by separating him from his mother. Fortunately, Perdita survives and is instrumental in the play’s happy ending. Things resolve less neatly in John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, where Giovanni commits filicide by driving a dagger into his pregnant sister/lover’s womb. Finally, Egeus of A Midsummer Night’s Dream threatens his daughter, Hermia, with execution if she does not consent to marry Demetrius. Despite its popularity amongst father characters, the “impending death” tactic never works. Leontes realizes his error and suffers sixteen years in mourning, Giovanni meets his end less than 150 lines after his son, and Theseus, the Duke of Athens, eventually overrules Egeus.

2) Do not forbid your child’s romance out of hand. Another popular father-tactic of the renaissance stage is to forbid a son or daughter to marry their obvious love interest. This trope is so common that Prospero consciously invokes it in The Tempest to give his daughter Miranda and her love Ferdinand a more exciting romance. As with murder, it rarely works to the parent’s advantage. I have already mentioned Egeus, but Polixenes, the King of Bohemia in The Winter’s Tale, must also learn this lesson. Upon hearing that his son Florizel is courting Perdita, the shepherd’s daughter, Polixenes forbids the couple to see each other and threatens to disfigure Perdita. Fortunately, everyone learns that Perdita is a princess rather than a shepherdess and the lost daughter of Leontes, King of Sicilia and Polixenes’s former best friend. In other words, she is the perfect match for Florizel.

3) Pay attention to who your child is falling in love with. Unlike the aforementioned Egeus and Polixenes, ‘Tis Pity’s Florio insists upon his Daughter’s free agreement to any marriage. Though his “care is how to match her to her liking” (1.3), he is oblivious to his daughter’s affections for her brother. Freedom of choice is excellent, but some rules of conduct are necessary.

4) Leave your children out of spousal arguments. Act Two of A Midsummer Night’s Dream introduces Oberon and Titania’s supernaturally violent marital troubles. The couple’s dissension causes unseasonable weather, storms, floods, and plagues. Though each accuses the other of infidelity, the true crux of their argument is Titania’s newly adopted changeling boy. Oberon gains custody of the child by anointing Titania’s eyes with a love flower causing her to be enamored of the ass-headed Bottom. As soon as he has the boy, however, these antics, initially humorous, lose their savor for the fairy king, “And now I have the Boy, I will undo / This hateful imperfection of her eyes.” (4.1) The play ends with Titania and Oberon once again at peace and, I like to think, raising the changeling together.

5) Be prepared to learn something from your child. This advice is especially important if you are a character in one of Shakespeare’s Late Romance plays—The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and Pericles especially. All of those plays follow the emotional journeys of two generations, parents and their children. In each the conflict of the older generation are resolved by the younger. In The Winter’s Tale the love between Florizel and Perdita heals schism between their fathers Leontes and Polixenes. The reunion teaches them all that love and forgiveness are much preferable to hate and revenge.

6) Family is what you want it to be. My personal favorite father of the season is the Old Shepherd. He appears on the sea coast of Bohemia at the end of Act 3, just in time to save an infant Perdita from dying of exposure. He believes the child is a changeling and takes her into his home both in hopes of supernatural rewards and in fear of the fairies’ wrath. His motives for adoption are far from ideal, and the play seems to be setting Perdita up to be the wretched stepchild. Three scenes later, however, we see the now fully-grown and quite happy Perdita, her father, and her brother celebrating the sheep shearing festival. King Polixenes’s rather spoils the event with his death threats, but both Perdita’s adoptive and birth families partake in the play’s climatic reunions, proving that, in Sicilia and Bohemia at least, all a family needs is love.

—Jane Jongeward

A Real Life Conversion Experience

Recently, I made some new Staunton friends: young artists who asked me about my work at the American Shakespeare Center. They started by asking the standard "Do you think Shakespeare was a real person who actually wrote all those plays?" questions, to which I gave the standard "Yes, we know he was a real person who wrote those plays, and though he collaborated occasionally, the theory that somebody else wrote them is just an elitist mockery of everything I hold dear." (I love the authorship controversy because regardless of how ill-informed it is, people who don't care about Shakespeare find it interesting, so it's a gateway into a deeper conversation.) They were fascinated and polite, but confessed that they had no real knowledge, background, or specific interest in Shakespeare or his plays, despite living two blocks away from the world's only re-creation of the Blackfriars Playhouse. That's fine - it's not like I'm some sort of Shakespeare evangelist, determined to turn every social gathering into a treatise on why he's so amazing.

The conversation meandered away into discussions of art, literature, and then philosophy. One of my new friends started to expound on the ideas of fate, free will, and determinism. "None of these things matter, you know," he said. "The future doesn't matter because it hasn't happened yet, and you can't predict it anyway. The past doesn't matter because it's already over and can't be changed. All that really matters is this moment… and now this moment… and now this moment."

"I'm sorry," I interjected, "but I just have tell you about this moment in one of Shakespeare's plays, Hamlet." 

I ran down the basic plot ("It's kind of The Lion King") and then jumped into an explanation of my favorite quote from my favorite scene. "In 5.2, which is almost the end of the play, Hamlet is asked to fight a duel. He agrees, even though he knows it's a trap and that he'll die. His best friend Horatio tells him not to do it, and he says, 'Not a whit. We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come. If it be to come, 'twill not be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man knows of aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes? Let be.'" I stopped to "translate" since Shakespeare's language can be tricky at first blush, but my new friends waved me on - no translation needed.

"'The readiness is all.' That's my motto," I continued (and it is - I have "the readiness is all" tattooed on my back). "After that, Hamlet goes out to fight the duel and (spoiler!) dies. It's complete acceptance of fate or lack thereof: we don't know what's going to happen or not happen or maybe happen. You could get hit by a bus or win the lottery or die in a duel or spontaneously combust. Worrying and worrying and worrying, like Hamlet does throughout the play, won't do you any good. All you can do is be ready. You've heard the phrase 'to be or not to be,' right?"

They all nodded.

"Well that's the answer. Let be."

The friend who started this conversation blinked and said, "That's such an… obvious way to put it. A perfect way. That's amazing. I've thought about that exact thing, the exact idea of "the readiness is all," but never phrased so well. Tell me more."
We kept talking about Hamlet, but 10 minutes later, the conversation had veered away (as conversations tend to do) and my new friend started talking about the concept of "nothing." "Everything in this room is something," he said. "How can you have nothing? What is a thing that is no thing?"

"I'm sorry to do this again," I said, "but do you have any idea how obsessed Shakespeare is with that?"

Everyone laughed at my 500th repetition of the word "Shakespeare," but they let me continue anyway. "The word 'nothing' appears 580 times in the canon," I said. I ran through King Lear and Macbeth and parts of Much Ado about Nothing, telling them how the idea of "no thing" appears over and over again in ways that are baffling, tremendous, sorrowful, and amusing all at once. "I still don't know what, if anything, Shakespeare's trying to tell us about 'nothing'," I said. "I don't think anybody does. But it's a question that I love to ask and think and talk about."

"This is nuts," said my new friend. "I never knew about any of that. I always thought of Shakespeare like… well, no offense, but in a 'what's the big deal?' sort of way, you know? It was boring in school, and I didn't get it, and I didn't care. But I had no idea."

I live my life and work my job in order to hear those exact words from as many people as possible. I mentally fist-pumped the air. "Well, you do have a world-class Shakespeare theater right down the street," I said.

"That we do," he replied. "Looks like I'll be going to a show."

--Lia Razak