University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Supervised Undergraduate Student Research Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects and Creative Work 8-2013 Reading Parenthood and the Pregnant Body in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Titus Andronicus Martha Elaine Goddard
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_chanhonoproj Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Goddard, Martha Elaine, "Reading Parenthood and the Pregnant Body in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Titus Andronicus" (2013). Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_chanhonoproj/1804 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Supervised Undergraduate Student Research and Creative Work at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Meg Goddard Advisor: Dr. Anthony Welch May 2013 Reading Parenthood and the Pregnant Body in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Titus Andronicus In both A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1594-6) and Titus Andronicus (1592), Shakespeare explores themes related to parenthood, particularly in regard to sexual violence, pregnancy and fertility, maternity and paternity, and patriarchal control of the female body. The motifs of parenthood and pregnancy connect with themes that extend across both plays – for example, as a symbol of female mystery removed from male influence, as a metaphor for the “anxiety of influence” of a playwright painfully aware of his illustrious literary predecessors, as a metaphor for impending new beginnings of unknown potential, and, by its relation to birth and the cyclical pattern of life, a feature of human existence intimately linked with death.