The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare Author(s): Lynda E. Boose Source: PMLA, Vol. 97, No. 3 (May, 1982), pp. 325-347 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/462226 Accessed: 23-08-2014 18:12 UTC

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This content downloaded from 168.28.16.242 on Sat, 23 Aug 2014 18:12:43 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions LYNDA E. BOOSE

The Fatherand the Bride in Shakespeare

T HE ARISTOCRATIC family of Shake- in focusing on what would seem to have been speare's England was, according to social the least valued relationship of all: that between historian Lawrence Stone, "patrilinear, father and daughter. primogenitural, and patriarchal." Parent-child While father and son appear slightly more relations were in general remote and formal, often in the canon, figuring in twenty-three singularly lacking in affective bonds and gov- plays, father and daughter appear in twenty-one erned solely by a paternal authoritarianism dramas and in one narrative poem. As different through which the "husband and father lorded it as these father-daughter plays are, they have one over his wife and children with the quasi-author- thing in common: almost without exception the ity of a despot" (Crisis 271). Stone characterizes relationships they depict depend on significant the society of the sixteenth and early seventeenth underlying substructures of ritual. Shakespeare centuries as one in which "a majority of indi- apparently created his dramatic mirrors not viduals . . . found it very difficult to establish solely from the economic and social realities that close emotional ties to any other person" (Fam- historians infer as having dictated family be- ily 99)1 and views the nuclear family as a havior but from archetypal models, psychologi- burdensome social unit, valued only for its ability cal in import and ritual in expression. And the to provide the means of patrilineal descent. Sec- particular ritual model on which Shakespeare ond and third sons counted for little and daugh- most frequently drew for the father-daughter re- ters for even less. A younger son could, it is true, lationship was the marriage ceremony.5 be kept around as a "walking sperm bank in case In an influential study of the sequential order the elder son died childless," but daughters "were or "relative positions within ceremonial wholes," often unwanted and might be regarded as no Arnold van Gennep isolated three phases in rit- more than a tiresome drain on the economic re- ual enactment that always recur in the same sources of the family" (Stone, Family 88, 112).' underlying arrangement and that form, in con- Various Elizabethan documents, official and cert, "the pattern of the rites of passage": sep- unofficial, that comment on family relations sup- aration, transition, and reincorporation.6 The port Stone's hypothesis of the absence of affect.3 church marriage service-as familiar to a mod- Yet were we to turn from Stone's conclusions to ern audience as it was to Shakespeare's-con- those we might draw from Shakespeare's plays, tains all three phases. When considered by itself, the disparity of implication-especially if we as- it is basically a separation rite preceding the sume that the plays to some extent mirror the transitional phase of consummation and culmi- life around them-must strike us as significant. nating in the incorporation of a new family unit. Shakespeare's dramas consistently explore affec- In Hegelian terms, the ceremonial activities as- tive family dynamics with an intensity that justi- sociated with marriage move from thesis through fies the growing inference among Shakespearean antithesis to synthesis; the anarchic release of scholars that the plays may be primarily "about" fertility is positioned between two phases of rela- family relations and only secondarily about the tive stasis. The ritual enables society to allow for macrocosm of the body politic.4 Not the ab- a limited transgression of its otherwise universal sence of affect but the possessive overabundance taboo against human eroticism. Its middle move- of it is the force that both defines and threatens ment is the dangerous phase of transition and the family in Shakespeare. When we measure transgression; its conclusion, the controlled rein- Stone's assertions against the Shakespeare corporation into the stability of family. But be- canon, the plays must seem startlingly ahistorical fore the licensed transgression can take place- 325

This content downloaded from 168.28.16.242 on Sat, 23 Aug 2014 18:12:43 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 326 The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare the transgression that generates the stability and couple's willing consent was necessary for valid continuity of society itself-the ritual must sep- matrimony and however vociferously the official arate the sanctified celebrants from the sterile conduct books urged parents to consider the forces of social interdiction. The marriage ritual compatibility of the match, fathers like Cym- is thus a pattern of and for the community that beline, Egeus, and Baptista feel perfectly free to surrounds it, as well as a rite of passage of and disregard these requirements. Although lack of for the individuals who enact it. It serves as an parental consent did not affect the validity of a especially effective substructure for the father- marriage and, after 1604, affected the legality daughter relation because within its pattern lies only when a minor was involved,7 the family the paradigm of all the conflicts that define this control over the dowry was a powerful psycho- bond at its liminal moment of severance. The logical as well as economic weapon. Fathers like ceremony ritualizes two particularly significant Capulet, Lear, and Brabantio depend on threats events: a daughter and a son are being incorpo- of disinheritance to coerce their children. When rated into a new family unit, an act that explicitly their daughters nonetheless wed without the pa- breaks down the boundaries of two previously ternal blessing, the marriages are adversely af- existing families; yet, at the same time, the bonds fected not because any legal statutes have been being dissolved, particularly those between fa- breached but because the ritual base of marriage ther and daughter, are being memorialized and has been circumvented and the psychological thus, paradoxically, reasserted. In early come- separation of daughter from father thus rendered dies like The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare incomplete. For in Shakespeare's time-as in followed the Roman design of using the father of our own-the ceremony acknowledged the spe- the young male lover as the senex iratus, a cial bond between father and daughter and the blocking figure to be circumvented. The mature need for the power of ritual to release the daugh- comedies, tragedies, and romances reconstruct ter from its hold. the problems of family bonds, filial obedience, As specified in the 1559 Book of Common and paternal possessiveness around the father Prayer, the marriage ritual enjoins that the fa- and daughter, the relation put into focus by the ther (or, in his absence, the legal guardian)8 marriage ceremony. When marriage activities are deliver his daughter to the altar, stand by her in viewed from the perspective of their ritual impli- mute testimony that there are no impediments to cations, the bride and groom are not joined until her marriage, and then witness her pledge hence- the transitional phase of the wedding-night con- forth to forsake all others and "obey and serve, summation; before that, a marriage may be an- love honor and keep" the man who stands at her nulled. What the church service is actually all other side. To the priest's question, "Who giveth about is the separation of the daughter from the this woman to be married unto this man?"-a interdicting father. question that dates in English tradition back The wedding ceremony of Western tradition to the York manual (Book of Common Prayer has always recognized the preeminence of the 290-99; 408, n.)-the father must silently father-daughter bond. Until the thirteenth cen- respond by physically relinquishing his daughter, tury, when the church at last managed to gain only to watch the priest place her right hand control of marriage law, marriage was consid- into the possession of another man. Following ered primarily a private contract between two this expressly physical symbolic transfer, the families concerning property exchange. The father's role in his daughter's life is ended; validity and legality of matrimony rested on the custom dictates that he now leave the stage, re- consensus nuptialis and the property contract, a sign his active part in the rite, and become a situation that set up a potential for conflict by mere observer. After he has withdrawn, the cou- posing the mutual consent of the two children, ple plight their troths, and the groom receives who owed absolute obedience to their parents, the ring, again from the priest. Taking the against the desires of their families, who must bride's hand into his, the groom places the ring agree beforehand to the contract governing on her finger with the words, "With this ring I property exchange. However true it was that the thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with

This content downloaded from 168.28.16.242 on Sat, 23 Aug 2014 18:12:43 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Lynda E. Boose 327 all my worldly goods I thee endow," thus sol- intransigent father Egeus, supported by the king- emnizing the transfer in its legal, physical, and father figure Theseus, poses a threat that must material aspects.9 be converted to a blessing to ensure the comic Before us we have a tableau paradigmatic of solution. In Love's Labor's Lost, the sudden the problematic father-daughter relation: decked death of the Princess' father, who is likewise the in the symbols of virginity, the bride stands at king-father figure for all the French ladies, pre- the altar between her father and husband, pulled vents the necessary blessing, thus cutting sharply as it were between the two important male fig- across the movement toward comic resolution ures in her life. To resolve the implied dilemma, and postponing the happy ending. In plots con- the force of the priest and the community pre- structed around a daughter without a father, the sides over and compels the transfer of an un- absent father frequently assumes special dra- touched daughter into the physical possession of matic prominence. This absence felt almost as a a male whom the ceremony authorizes both as presence may well contribute to the general un- the invested successor to the father's authority ease and unresolved tensions emanating from and as the sanctified transgressor of prohibitions the three "problem plays," for Helena, Isabella, that the father has been compelled to observe.'1 and Cressida are all daughters severed from By making the father transfer his intact daughter their fathers. to the priest in testimony that he knows of no Within the father-daughter plays, the daugh- impediments to her lawful union, the service not ter's association of father with husband is so only reaffirms the taboo against incest but im- strong that even when a woman as independent plicitly levels the full weight of that taboo on the as Rosalind or Viola first thinks about the man relationship between father and daughter. The she will eventually marry, her thoughts immedi- groom's family does not enter into the arche- ately call to mind her father. Her movement typal dynamics going on at this altar except toward conjugal love unconsciously resuscitates through the priest's reference to marriage as the a mental movement back to the father to whom cause why a man "shall leave father and mother she will remain emotionally as well as legally and shall be joined unto his wife." The mother bound until the ritual of marriage transfers her of the bride is a wholly excluded figure-as in- loyalties from one domain to the other. The lack deed she is throughout almost the entire Shake- of narrative logic in the association emphasizes speare canon. Only the father must act out, must its subconscious quality. When Viola first hears dramatize his loss before the audience of the the governor of Illyria named, she responds: community. Within the ritual circumscription, "Orsino! I have heard my father name him. / He the father is compelled to give his daughter to a was a bachelor then" (TN 1.2.28-29). When rival male; and as Georges Bataille comments: Rosalind meets Orlando she instantly tells Celia, "The Duke my father lov'd his father dearly," The gift itself is a renunciation. . . . is a Marriage making a connection that Celia pointedly ques- matter less for the partners than for the man who tions in her response, "Doth it therefore ensue gives the woman away, the man whether father or that you should love his son (AYL brother who might have freely enjoyed the woman, dearly?" 1.3.29-32). Once inside Arden Forest-osten- daughteror sister, yet who bestows her on someone on a to find her else. This gift is perhaps a substitutefor the sexual sibly journey father-Rosalind act; for the exuberanceof giving has a significance pays scant attention to her purpose, instead ask- akin to that of the act itself; it is also a spendingof ing Celia, "But what talk we of fathers, when resources.11 (218) there is such a man as Orlando?" (3.4.38-39). But at the conclusion of the play, when Rosalind By playing out his role in the wedding cere- prepares to become Orlando's wife, she seeks the father mony, implicitly gives the blessing out her father as the necessary figure who must that licenses the daughter's deliverance from ritually enable her to do so. Whereas she can bonds that family might otherwise become a freely don male clothing and shift her identity kind of Hence in A bondage. Midsummer back and forth between Rosalind and Ganymede a on Night's Dream, play centered marriage, the without the assistance of ritual, marriage is not

This content downloaded from 168.28.16.242 on Sat, 23 Aug 2014 18:12:43 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 328 The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare merely the transposition of assumed roles but At the same moment as Romeo and Juliet con- the actual transition from daughter to wife. And summate their wedding upstairs, downstairs the the movement must be ceremonialized through father figuratively gives his daughter's hand to its distinct, sequential phases. Having spent the the County Paris. Although Capulet earlier tells play testing various roles and disguises, Rosalind Paris, "My will to her consent is but a part" at the end chooses a fixed identity as wife; but (1.2.17), he now presumes his paternal au- that identity depends on her first having re- thority: "I think she will be rul'd / In all re- entered the role of daughter. To be incorporated spects by me; nay more, I doubt it not" into a new stasis, she must have one from which (3.4.13-14). Here, at the structural center of to be separated; she must be reunited as child to the play, where Romeo and Juliet are momen- her father before she can be joined to her tarily joined only to be separated until death re- "child's father" (1.3.11). Thus in ritual lan- unites them, Shakespeare has drawn on inverted guage she repeats the vow of incorporation first marriage ritual as the vehicle for the tragic to her father and then to Orlando: "To you I peripeteia. Scenes 4 and 5 of act 3 dramatize give myself, for I am yours" (5.4.116, 117). two phases of the matrimonial rite, featuring two The play itself becomes paradigmatic of the rit- bridegrooms: the one downstairs to whom the ual movement that concludes it: Rosalind's father gives his consent and the one upstairs search to be reunited with her father meta- with whom the daughter consummates hers. morphoses into a journey to be united with the While the separation ritual of scene 4 is legit- husband who replaces and supersedes him. And imizing Paris as bridegroom, the incorporation instantly on completion of the ceremony, having rite of scene 5 is legitimizing Romeo; both first been rejoined with his daughter and having young "grooms" consequently come to the then fully performed the father's formulaic role, Capulet monument to lie with Juliet, both con- Duke Senior is miraculously reinstated in his vinced of their right to claim her. In these two dukedom, regaining the paternal authority over scenes, disjunct phases of the rite of passage are his domain that he had lost at the same time as enacted in isolation. But although each scene in- he had lost that over his daughter. In King Lear cludes a groom, each is missing a crucial figure and The Tempest, Shakespeare uses the same -either the father or the bride-and a crucial pattern, making the King's ability to govern his sequence, the daughter's transition from one state depend on his ability to enact his ritual role male domain to the other. The juxtaposition ob- as father. In Lear, however, the dual restitution viously increases the tension of the narrative by of paternal roles that concludes the two come- making us aware, as Romeo and Juliet celebrate dies is reversed into an opening scene staging the their union, of the unexpected threat that will dual divestiture of daughter and kingdom. irrevocably separate them, a threat emphasized In tragedies like Lear, Othello, and Romeo by the lovers' intuition of a growing darkness and Juliet, the father's failure to act out his re- that invades the ecstasy of their morning aubade quired role has a special significance, one that (3.5). The threat that they metaphorically imag- we can best apprehend by looking not at the ine as darkness is to us, however, a great deal logic of causal narrative progression but at the more specific. Specifically, it is Juliet's father, threat implied by the violation of ritual. Even who comes, as we know he will, to invade his when marriage is sanctified by the presence of a daughter's bridal chamber, assert his paternal priest, as it is in Romeo and Juliet, the absence prerogative to invalidate her right to choose a of the father becomes crucial. In Romeo, the sig- future, and conclude that, since she is his prop- nificance is dramatically projected through ritual erty, he has the ineluctable right to dispose of structures in which Capulet repeatedly "gives her as he will: "And you be mine, I'll give you away" his daughter without her consent and to my friend; / and you be not, hang, beg, Juliet is repeatedly "married" without the bless- starve, die in the streets" (3.5.191-92). The ing of her father, a father who ironically has central conflict in the play, projected in mi- been "a careful father" in choosing a harmoni- crocosm through these two scenes, mirrors the ous match compatible with the best interests of archetypal conflict in the daughter's life. The the daughter he obviously cherishes. altar ritual likewise mirrors it, for the threat to

This content downloaded from 168.28.16.242 on Sat, 23 Aug 2014 18:12:43 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Lynda E. Boose 329 the marriage and the daughter's future is always with the bride's father and the figure of state embodied in the person of the father, the charac- authority secreted where they can overhear the ter propelled into the role of tragic nemesis in vows. Ophelia, who even holds the prayer book Romeo and Juliet by the substructuring logic of that the bride traditionally carries, is dramati- marriage ritual. cally positioned between her concealed father on After the crucial scenes in act 3, the re- the one side and Hamlet on the other. But in- mainder of Romeo progresses as a series of in- stead of the groom's awaiting the entrance of the verted and disordered epithalamia.12 When the bride and her father, the hidden father and the priest, the groom, and the musicians organized nervous Ophelia await Hamlet; instead of having by old Capulet enter Juliet's chamber to take the the groom give the bride a ring, this scene in- bride to church, Capulet finds that she has al- verts the model by having Ophelia return Ham- ready been wedded and the festival has gone on let's gifts, which she says she has "longed long to without him. He can thus only lament that redeliver" (3.1.93). The awkward phrase is an "Death is my son-in-law, Death is my heir, / My appropriate one. For the scene presents, not a daughter he hath wedded" (4.5.38-39) and deliverance of a daughter to a new family, but a that "All things that we ordained festival / turn redeliverance to her father. When Hamlet sud- from their office to black funeral" (4.5.84-85). denly demands of Ophelia "Where's your fa- In a parody of the father's due expectations on ther?" (129), he is essentially asking her to entering the bridal chamber the morning after a choose, to declare just where her obedience and wedding, Capulet exclaims when he discovers service, her love and honor, are bound. In her Juliet's bleeding body lying with her husband: response, "At home, my lord" (130), not only does she lie but, more importantly, she chooses: ... 0 wife, look how our daughterbleeds! the words she desperately seizes This dagger hath mista'en,for lo his house through very on, she indicates her own to break Is empty on the back of Montague, inability away from the bonds of home and father. In And it mis-sheathedin my daughter'sbosom! weighty (5.3.202-05) making such a choice Ophelia violates the ritual. And Hamlet responds in savage parody by giv- The play ends in a final reversal, concluding ing her the dowry she has indeed received from with the scene that should traditionally have Polonius: to be as chaste as ice and as pure as preceded the wedding: the two fathers bargain- snow and yet not escape calumny. He then shat- ing over the bridal portion, Capulet initially ters the mock ceremony with his injunction that asking for Montague's "hand" as all he feels there shall be no more marriages. When Ophelia able to demand as a widowhood entitlement for later sings her bawdy songs and distributes her his "daughter's jointure" (5.3.297); Montague symbolic flowers with an insight born of derange- insisting that "I can give thee more / for I will ment, thoughts of her father and Hamlet entan- raise her statue in pure gold" (298-99); and gle in her mind like the fantastic garlands she Capulet countering with his matching offer of as wears. To both the unfaithful Gertrude and her- rich a statue for Romeo.13 Appropriately, this self she gives rue. She also gives Gertrude a play, so controlled by the problems of time and daisy, symbolic of dissembling; but, as she says, timing, ends with the ritual elements scattered she has no violets to give away, for these flowers out of sequence and the fathers participating in a of faithfulness "wither'd all when my father futile attempt to validate the spousals retroac- died" (4.5.184). The fidelity that should have tively, finally playing out their correct but now been given to Hamlet is inextricably entwined untimely paternal roles as reciprocal gift givers with thoughts of her father, the male from whom vying to give countergifts that surpass each other she has never ritually transferred her obedience in sumptuousness (see Levi-Strauss).14 The or her loyalty. barrenness implicit in their action is projected on Through the use of ceremonial substructures, stage through the subtext of parodic ritual. Shakespeare invokes a sacramentality, a context The famous "nunnery scene" in Hamlet is an- of sacredness, for a certain moment and space other such inverted marriage ceremony, fur- within the play. Such structures temporally and nished as it is with the couple themselves and spatially set the ritualized moments away from

This content downloaded from 168.28.16.242 on Sat, 23 Aug 2014 18:12:43 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 330 The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare the undifferentiated profane events of the drama. fool were married to her grave" (3.5.140). Such But once a ritual has been invoked, has in effect merely verbal references only allude to ritual drawn a circle of archetypal reference around structures without actually invoking them; Lady the moment and space, any events from the non- Capulet's juxtaposition of incompatible cere- sacramental surrounding world that interrupt or monies serves as a tragic foreshadow. In scenes counter its prescribed direction take on special, from other plays, however, the collision of portentous significance.15 By interrupting or modes incipient in the words is converted to a converting the invoked ritual to parody, such presentational dramatization. One of the finest profane invasions rupture its sacramental con- examples of this collision of rituals is Ophelia's text. Ritual structure is explicitly invoked, for funeral. example, in Othello 2.2, a twelve-line scene Hamlet 5.1 begins as a scene of profaned staged only to allow a "Herald" to proclaim that ceremony: an inverted funeral of maimed and "every man put himself into triumph" for "the truncated rites presided over by a "churlish celebration of [Othello's] nuptial." When next priest" who refuses the brother's plea for tradi- Iago-earlier identified by Brabantio as a "pro- tional ceremonies, instead asserting that "Shards, fane wretch" (1.1.114) and by Desdemona as flints, and pebbles should be thrown on her," "a most profane and liberal counsellor" of for "We should profane the service of the dead / "lame and impotent conclusion" (2.1.163, 161) To sing a requiem" (230-31, 236-37). -then converts the epithalamion outside Othel- Through Gertrude's action of strewing flowers, lo's chamber into a drunken, violent rout that returning them as it were to Ophelia, the ritual interrupts the bridal pair within, our intuition of moment is suddenly expanded to present us with an ominous significance attached to the action an image associated not only with funerals, but derives from a half-conscious awareness of ritual with weddings: violation. The matter is not one of direct causal- I hop'd thou shouldst have been my Hamlet's wife. No one is to infer, for ity. reductively example, I thought thy bride-bedto have deck'd, sweet maid, that Othello murders his wife because the revel- And not have strew'dthy grave. (5.1.243-45) ers got drunk or that Romeo and Juliet come to a bad end just because her father did not par- The double context harkens back to one of the ticipate in the wedding. Shakespeare's inverted major disturbances of the play. It echoes the rituals are a matter, rather, of violated sacra- paradigm of colliding sacred rituals already al- mentality, the transgression of a sacred enclo- luded to in Hamlet's bitter description of the sure, the disruption of a hallowed sequence by conjunction of his mother's marriage and his fa- incongruous actions penetrating from the pro- ther's funeral feasts, where "the funeral bak'd- fane world. meats / Did coldly furnish forth the marriage When Shakespeare wants to create a height- tables" (1.2.180-81). The coincidence of the ened aura of harmony, he will periodically blend two ceremonies desecrates the ritual sacramen- ritual references, incorporating our associations tality of each. This collision of significations is with the "rite of May" and "Saint Valentine" enjoined when Laertes, playing out his role as into the festival already evoked by the title of A his sister's natural guardian, leaps into her grave Midsummer Night's Dream. Conversely, to in- to assert the seemingly unchallengeable primacy tensify a tragic moment, he will-rather than of his bond (5.1). But his claim of authority is blend ceremonial structures-bring two incom- challenged and the sullied funeral recast into the patible rituals into collision, most frequently bizarre image of a superimposed parodic wed- those of wedding and funeral.16 When the tech- ding when Hamlet, fulfilling the role earlier de- nique works, the consequent explosion infuses fined by his mother, steps forward to this mock the scene with the energy released by the viola- altar to assert his own claim to Ophelia's body. tion of two sacred spheres, each shattered by its Again the tableau at the altar is invoked as the convergence not with something of a lesser energy two claimants struggle over possession of the but with something of equal sacred intensity. In mock bride, Laertes refusing to relinquish the Romeo we often encounter dual ritual refer- "fair and unpolluted flesh" of his sister (239) ences, as in Lady Capulet's line "I would the and Hamlet asserting that "Forty thousand

This content downloaded from 168.28.16.242 on Sat, 23 Aug 2014 18:12:43 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Lynda E. Boose 331 brothers / Could not with all their quantity of the ritual archetype of the father's bringing the love / Make up my sum" (269-71). The stage bride to the altar or the folktale pattern of the image of the two men competing for possession groom's kidnapping her from her father's for- of Ophelia's shrouded body is the more sugges- tress, Shakespeare here stages an inverted model, tively dual in ceremonial reference when we re- with the father storming the groom's quarters and call the wedding custom-alluded to in Robert attempting to recapture the bride. Herrick's "Nuptial Song on Sir Clipsby Crew Brabantio's action dramatizes the emotional and His Lady"-of sewing the bride up in a and psychological problem that the marriage rit- white sheet before laying her on the flower- ual seems implicitly designed to control and pre- strewn bed to await the groom's entrance.17 The vent. For consciously or unconsciously, overtly violent rivalry of the two competing claimants or implicitly, the father of the bride in most of pulling the sanctified body back and forth be- Shakespeare basically wants, like Brabantio, to tween them reflects the structural principle un- retain, withhold, lock up, and possess his daugh- derlying the scene: the violent collision of two ter. Prevented by law, custom, and ritual injunc- mutually exclusive rituals, funeral and wedding, tion from taking any of these actions, the only each struggling to claim the sacramentality it satisfaction available to him is to arrogate to unwittingly pollutes by its own parodic enact- himself the choice of her husband, most often ment, the two competing claims forced by simul- insisting on someone she does not want, lest a taneity into the fusion of energies that releases desired husband usurp the father's primary posi- the scene's dramatic explosion. tion in the daughter's life. But in spite of the In Othello, the father-daughter rupture is paternal preference for Cloten over Posthumus dramatized as a structural parody of the church Leonatus, Burgundy over France, Demetrius service. As in most of the father-daughter plays, over Lysander, Paris over Romeo, or Saturninus the father here is apparently a widower with over Bassianus, Shakespeare always stages the only one child, a daughter whom he loves pos- defeat of the father's choice, in both comedy and sessively and has denied to several suitors. When tragedy. he is awakened in the first scene by Iago's vividly Brabantio's defeat in the Duke's chamber is pornographic pictures of "your daughter cover'd played out against the set sequential movement with a Barbary horse," "your daughter and the of the church ceremony. Hoping to persuade the Moor . . . making the beast with two backs," Duke that there are impediments to the mar- "your daughter . . . in the gross clasps of a las- riage, Brabantio alleges that "Sans witchcraft" civious Moor" (111-12, 115-17, 122, 126), Desdemona could not "fall in love with what she Brabantio's odd response, "This accident is not fear'd to look on" (1.3.64, 98). He is here al- unlike my dream, / Belief of it oppresses me luding to a specific impediment recognized by already" (142-43), suggests the repressed voy- canon law as an impedimentum dirimens, one eurism of the father's incestuous projection seep- that, if proved, would indeed prevent a marriage ing into the unconscious world of his dreams. or could nullify it retroactively. Specifically, In his brief moment alone on stage, the father Brabantio is claiming the impediment of vis et speaks of the isolated sense of loss that his sub- metus, or a condition of fear, duress, and con- sequent rage and denial attempt to supplant: straint overruling the will-a general category "... gone she is; And what's to come of my de- that included the more specific accusation of spised time / Is nought but bitterness" (160- witchcraft.18 The Duke's rejoinder to Braban- 62). Although Brabantio voices a bitterness that tio, "To vouch this is no proof" (106), reflects has been purged from Prospero's response in a the appropriate procedure for such a charge, for later play, both men express an unassuageable an alleged impediment would prevent a marriage emptiness. Like that other Venetian father Shy- only when accompanied by substantive proof lock (who also tries to lock his daughter inside (Wheatly 491, Rathen 34-35). his house), Brabantio sets off through the city When Othello then refutes the charge of coer- streets determined to reclaim his stolen treasure cion by denying that he seduced Desdemona by before it has been "possessed" by the claimant any "indirect and forced courses" (111), the he has never authorized. Instead of using either Duke accepts the validity of Othello's story and

This content downloaded from 168.28.16.242 on Sat, 23 Aug 2014 18:12:43 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 332 The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare gently advises Brabantio to "Take up this man- infused with the additional tension of colliding, gled matter at the best" (173). But the sadly incompatible ritual structures: the attempt of the stubborn father orders Desdemona to tell the man who is both king and father to substitute congregation "Where most you owe obedience" the illegitimate transfer of his kingdom for the (180). Desdemona answers with what is essen- legitimate one of his daughter. tially the recitation of her wedding vow to obey In King Lear, the father's grudging recogni- and serve Othello, forsaking all others, including tion of the need to confer his daughter on her father: younger strengths while he unburdened crawls toward death should be understood as the basal I do perceive here a divided duty: structure his divestiture of his To you I am bound for life and education; underlying king- dom. Lear has called My life and education both do learn me his court together in the How to respect you; you are the lord of duty; opening scene because he must at last face the I am hithertoyour daughter.But here's my husband; postponed reckoning with Cordelia's two And so much duty as my mother show'd princely suitors, who "Long in our court have To you, preferringyou before her father, made their amorous sojourn, / And here are to So much I challenge that I may profess be answer'd" (1.1.47-48). But instead of justly Due to the lord. Moor, my (1.3.181-89) relinquishing his daughter, Lear tries to effect a substitution of divestitures: he The nine-line passage is rhetorically arranged paternal portions out his as his several to reflect the "divided duty" of the bride poised kingdom "daughters' at the altar. Its structure is a balance of two dowers," attaching to Cordelia's share a stipula- tion to thwart her In sub- separate sentences, each one made up of four designed separation. and one-half lines, the structural "volta," or diffi- stituting his public paternity for his private one, the indivisible for the one that cult turn, from father to husband occurring at inherently entity must divide and Lear the midpoint of the fifth and longest line, the full biologically recombine, violates both his role in the hierarchical stop in midline reflecting the attempt to ter- kingly universe and his domestic one in the Nor minate one status and begin a new one. The family. is it accident-as it was in Hamlet 5.1-that important fifth line is given added weight these two rituals into colli- through alliteration, which emphasizes the turn brings incompatible sion in Lear 1.1. It is the willful action of the to "husband." Following this transition, the and the and of terms "lord" and "duty" are transferred from king father, lawgiver protector the first to the second rhetorical domain of the both domain and family, that is fully responsible for this of chaos. passage. In the final line, which conveys Des- explosion Yet of course Lear's of his realm is in demona's determination through its brevity and bequest no an unconditional transfer of the its emphatically monosyllabic construction, the way kingdom from one to another. Lear "duty" in question metamorphoses to "due," the rulership Instead, wants to retain the dominion he proscriptive stasis of "duty" in the first line con- theoretically casts off and to those verting to the vitality of "due" in Desdemona's "manage authorities/ That he hath Like- concluding speech-act pledge. Desdemona's re- given away" (1.3.17-18). the of his sponse accords with the ritual; Brabantio's wise, bequest daughter is actually an to a motive the parodies it. Instead of presenting his daughter as attempt keep her, betrayed by words he uses. When he disclaims "all a consecrated gift, the possessive and now dis- very my care" and orders Cordelia "as a possessed father hurls her across the stage at paternal Othello with the words stranger to my heart and me / Hold thee from this for ever" (113, 115-16), his verb holds to I here do give thee that with all my heart his heart rather than expels from it the daughter Which but thou hast already, with all heart my he is to our hate" (203), another I would keep from thee. (1.3.193-95) says "adopted verbal usage that betrays his retentive motives. The Desdemona-Brabantio scene and the His disastrous attempts to keep the two domin- Lear-Cordelia confrontation, two versions of the ions he sheds are structurally linked through the same ritual model, have obvious similarities.19 parodic divestiture of his kingdom as dowry. In The opening scene of King Lear, however, is recognition of the family's economic interest in

This content downloaded from 168.28.16.242 on Sat, 23 Aug 2014 18:12:43 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Lynda E. Boose 333 marriage, the terms of sixteenth-century dowries wretch whom Nature is asham'd / Almost t'ac- were required to be fully fixed before the knowledge hers" (212-13), Lear implies by wedding, thus making the property settle- innuendo the existence of some unnatural im- ment a precondition for the wedding (see n. pediment in Cordelia that would make her unfit 13).20 But Lear the father will not freely give to marry and would thus prevent her separation. his daughter her endowment unless she pur- Effectively, the scene presents an altar tableau chases it with pledges that would nullify those much like that in Much Ado, with a bride being required by the wedding ceremony. If she will publicly pronounced unfit for marriage. In Lear, not love him all, she will mar her fortunes, lose however, it is the father rather than the groom her dowry, and thus forfeit the symbolic separa- who defames the character of the bride, and his tion. And yet, as she asserts, she cannot marry if motives are to retain her rather than to reject she loves her father all. The circularity of Lear's her. In this violated ceremony, the slandered proposition frustrates the ritual phase of separa- daughter-instead of fainting-staunchly denies tion: by disinheriting Cordelia, Lear casts her the alleged impediments by demanding that her away not to let her go but to prevent her from accuser "make known / It is no vicious blot . . . going. In Levi-Strauss' terms, Lear has to give No unchaste action, or dishonored step, / That up Cordelia because the father must obey the hath deprived me of your grace and favor" basic social rule of reciprocity, which has a (226-29). And here the groom himself takes necessarily communal effect, functioning as a up the role implicit in his vows, defending Cor- "distribution to undo excess." Lear's refusal is delia's suborned virtue by his statement that to likewise communal in its effect, and it helps cre- believe Lear's slanders would require "a faith ate the universe that he has "ta'en too little care that reason without miracle / Should never plant of." in me" (222-23). The physical separation of the Insofar as Burgundy's suit is concerned, daughter from the father is finally achieved only Lear's quantitatively constructed presumption by France's perception that "this unpriz'd works. Playing the mime priest and intentionally precious maid . . . is herself a dowry" (259, 241); desecrating the sacramental ritual question he France recognizes the qualitative meaning of the imitates, Lear asks the first bridegroom-candi- dowry that Burgundy could only understand date: quantitatively. In Cordelia's almost definition of a Will you, with those infirmitiesshe owes, archetypal (1.1.95-104), Unfriended, new adopted to our hate, daughter's proper loyalties uses a to link the fundamental Dow'r'd with our curse, and stranger'dwith our Shakespeare pun oath, predicament of the daughter-held under the Take her, or leave her? (1.1.202-05) aegis of the father-to its only possible resolution in the troth: "That lord whose hand is what Lear antici- marriage Burgundy's hedged response must take shall / Half love suitor will "take Cordelia my plight carry my pates-this gladly by with him" (101-02), says Cordelia. When the hand" only if Lear will give "but that portion France later addresses his bride as "Fairest Cor- which yourself propos'd" (243, 242). Shrewdly delia, that art most rich Most that France cannot be dissuaded so being poor,/ intuiting by choice forsaken, and most lov'd a reason as "her is despis'd" quantitative price fallen," (250-51), he echoes the husband's traditional Lear then a based on adopts strategy qualitative pledge to love "for richer, for poorer" the assumptions in his attempt to discourage the who has "forsaken all others." And rival he daughter most greatly fears. Insisting to France France himself then endows Lear's "dow'rless that daughter" with all his worldly goods by making For you, great King her "queen of us, of ours, and our fair France" I would not from your love make such a stray (256-57). His statement "Be it lawful I take To match where I hate; therefore beseech you you up what's cast away" (253) even suggests a T'avertyour liking a more worthierway (208-11) buried stage direction through its implied al- Lear tries to avoid even making the required lusion to the traditional conclusion of the con- ritual offer. By calling his own daughter "a sensus nuptialis as explained in the Sarum and

This content downloaded from 168.28.16.242 on Sat, 23 Aug 2014 18:12:43 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 334 The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare York manuals: the moment when the bride, in tion messes / To gorge his appetite" (1.1.116- token of receiving a dowry of land from her 18). The definition is opposite to the very char- husband, prostrates herself at her husband's feet acter of ritual. It precludes the possibility of and he responds by lifting her up again (Rathen transformation, for the father devours the flesh 36, Legg 190, Howard 306-07). he begets. Here, generation becomes primarily The visual and verbal texts of this important an autogamous act, a retention and recycling of opening scene allude to the separation phase of the procreative energies, which become mere ex- the marriage ritual; the ritual features are em- tensions of private appetite feeding on its own phasized because here, unlike the similar scene production. The unnatural appetite of the father in Othello, the daughter's right to choose a hus- devouring his paternity is implicit even in the band she loves is not at issue. Because the ritual motive Lear reveals behind his plan to set his is sacred, Cordelia dispassionately refuses to fol- rest on Cordelia's "kind nursery" (124), an low her sisters in prostituting it. Lear, in con- image in which the father pictures himself as an trast, passionately destroys his kingdom in order infant nursing from his daughter. The implied to thwart the fixed movement of the ritual pat- relationship is unnatural because it allows the tern and to convert the pattern's linear progres- father to deflect his original incestuous passions sion away from the father into a circular return into Oedipal ones, thus effecting a newly in- to him.21 The discord his violation engenders cestuous proximity to the daughter, from whom continues to be projected through accumulating the marriage ritual is designed to detach him. ritual substructures: in a parody of giving his And when this form of appetite is thwarted by daughter's hand, Lear instead gives her "father's France's intervention, Lear effects yet another heart from her" (126); in a parody of the ring substitution of state for daughter: having or- rite, Lear takes the golden round uniting king dered Cornwall and Albany to "digest the third" and country and parts it, an act that both drama- part of his kingdom, he and his gluttonous tizes the consequences of dividing his realm and knights proceed to feed off it and through their demonstrates the anguish he feels at losing his "Epicurism and lust / Make . . . it more like a daughter to a husband. tavern or a brothel/ Than a grac'd palace" Once Lear has shattered the invoked sacred (1.4.244-46). Compelled by nature to give up space by collapsing two incompatible rituals into his daughter, he unnaturally gives up his king- it, he shatters also all claims to paternal au- dom; when his appetites cannot feed on her, they thority. From this scene onward, the question of instead devour the paternity of his land. Lear's paternal relation to his daughters and his The father devouring his own flesh is the kingdom pervades the drama through the King's monstrous extension of the circular terms of ceremonial invocations of sterility against the Lear's dowry proposal. The image belongs not daughters he has generated and the land he has only to the play's pervasive cluster of monsters ruled. In the prototype of a harmonious wedding from the deep but also to its dominant spatial that concludes As You Like It, Hymen-who pattern of circularity. Within both the narrative "peoples every town"-defines Duke Senior's movement and the repeated spatial structure in- correct paternal role as that of the exogamous side the drama, the father's retentive passions giver of the daughter created in heaven: deny the child's rite of passage. When Cordelia departs from the father's realm for a new life in Hymen from heaven broughther, her husband's, the ritual Yea, her hither, ostensibly fulfilling sep- brought the is condemned to at That thou mightst join her hand with his aration, journey futility Whose heart within his bosom is. its outset, for Cordelia departs dowered with (5.4.112-15)22 Lear's curse: "Without our grace, our love, our benison" (1.1.265). Although the bride and Hymen characterizes the generating of children groom have exchanged vows, the denial of the as a gift from heaven, an essential spending of father's blessing renders the separation incom- the self designed to increase the world. By con- plete and the daughter's future blighted. Cor- trast, Lear's image of the father is the "bar- delia, like Rosalind, must therefore return to be barous Scythian, / Or he that makes his genera- reincorporated with her father before she can

This content downloaded from 168.28.16.242 on Sat, 23 Aug 2014 18:12:43 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Lynda E. Boose 335 undergo the ritual severance that will enable her movements. Cordelia returns to her father, and to progress. She thus chooses father over hus- the final scene stages the most sterile of altar band, returning to Lear to ask his blessing: tableaux: a dead father with his three dead "look upon me, sir, / And hold your hand in daughters, the wheel having come full circle benediction o'er me" (4.7.56-57). In lines that back to the opening scene of the play. Initially indicate how futile the attempt at incorporation barren of mothers, the play concludes with the has been when the precedent rites of passage death of all the fathers and all the daughters; the have been perverted, Cordelia asserts, "O dear only figures who survive to emphasize the steril- father, / It is thy business that I go about" ity of the final tableau are Albany, a widower, (4.4.23-24), and characterizes her life with and Edgar, an unmarried son. France as having been one of constant mourning In Shakespearean tragedy, the cost demanded for the father to whom she is still bound. of the daughter is appallingly high. No matter Shakespeare rewrote the source play Leir to how wrongheaded the inflexible father may be, make Cordelia remain in England alone (rather the child who severs herself from him-even than with France at her side) to fight, lose, and from allegiance to his impossible demands- die with her father, a revision that vividly il- becomes guiltlessly agentive in the wrack of the lustrates the tragic failure of the family unit to original family and tragically incapable of creat- divide, recombine, and regenerate. The only re- ing a new one. Such images of amputation and spite from pain the tragedy offers is the beauty sterility are implicit in Gratiano's address to the of Lear's reunion with Cordelia, but that reunion dead young wife of Othello: takes place at the cost of both the daughter's life and the future life of the And for all Poor Desdemon! I am glad thy father's dead. family. match was mortal to and the of this the father's in- Thy him, pure grief poignancy reunion, Shore his old thread in twain. in this both initiates transigence-which play (Oth. 5.2.204-06) and conditions the tragedy-remains un- changed: it is still writ large in his fantasy that Even Juliet, the most determinedly independent he and his daughter will be forever imprisoned of all the daughters of tragedy, never considers together like birds in a cage.23 At the end of the what would seem to be the most practical solu- play, excluding any thought of Cordelia's new tion to Romeo's banishment, that is, leaping life with France, Lear focuses solely on the over Verona's walls and going with him to Man- father-daughter merger, which he joyfully envi- tua. Instead, Juliet tries to effect a resolution sions enclosed in a perpetuity where no inter- that-even at the symbolic cost of her own life lopers-short of a divine messenger-can -will reunite her with her husband inside the threaten it: "He that parts us shall bring a brand structure of the Capulet family tomb. If the al- from heaven, /And fire us hence like foxes" ternatives thus posed are equally unattractive, (5.3.22-23). The rejoining is the precise oppo- the dilemma thereby created is quintessentially site of that in As You Like It. To Rosalind's Shakespearean: the "unresolvably problematic question, "if I bring in your Rosalind, / You will sense of experience" that raises questions we can bestow her on Orlando here?" Duke Senior re- "neither ignore nor answer" (Rabkin 29, 31) but sponds, "That would I, had I kingdoms to give affords no easy answers. with her" (AYL 5.4.6-7, 8). In the Duke's In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare characterization of Orlando's newly received en- gives us two versions of the daughter's solution dowment as "a potent Dukedom" (5.4.169), to the repressive demands of the father. In each, the implied fertility of both kingdom and family the father follows the folktale motif of trying to is ensured through the father's submission to the lock up his daughter and retain her for himself. necessary movement of ritual. In King Lear, the Portia's physical self has been symbolically father who imagined that he "gave his daughters locked up inside a lead casket by her dead fa- all" extracts from his daughter at the end of the ther's "will," a term that suggests the father's play the same price he demanded in the opening desire to maintain both legal and physical pos- scene-that she love her father all. The play's session of her. Jessica, meanwhile, is literally tragic circles find their counterpart in its ritual locked up inside her father's house-a house

This content downloaded from 168.28.16.242 on Sat, 23 Aug 2014 18:12:43 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 336 The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare that becomes, through Shylock's calling it "my tures and denies the bond-a term fundamental sober house" and its casements "my house's to the tragic plot of the play-ends up symboli- ears" (2.5.36, 34), an anthropomorphic refig- cally disavowing the sanctity of the conjugal uration of the father himself. bond of her own heredity, a point that receives In this play, each father's determination to comic allusion through Launce's hope "that you lock up his daughter sets up the test by which are not the Jew's daughter" and Jessica's re- the daughter defines herself. While more theolog- sponse, "That were a kind of bastard hope in- ically oriented readings have seen Jessica as a deed; so the sins of my mother should be visited nominative figuration of the House of Jesse and upon me" (3.5.11-14). In purchasing her her flight from Venice to Belmont as a symbol escape to an imagined freedom, the daughter for the transition from Old to New Testament sells her mother's "ring" and her father's law, an allegorical interpretation of Shake- "stones," symbolic representations of the female speare's characters that did not allow for the and male generative organs. And in figuratively possibility of irony would end up making Grati- delegitimizing herself, the daughter reciprocally ano-surely the most graceless figure in the play disinherits and defiles the father in a way that -an emblem of a theological concept he seems alludes to the Old Testament family laws of Shy- as incapable of representing as does Jessica. lock's faith. For in the same chapter of Leviticus While biblical allusion is clearly important in that ostracizes any sons of Aaron who have The Merchant, we must remember that Shake- "cuttings in their flesh" as being polluted before speare is writing drama, not theological allegory. the Lord and states that if the "daughter fall to Jessica serves as a dramatic foil to Portia; playe the whore, she polluteth her father," it is against Portia's relationship with both her also written that any man who may "haue his wealthy father and her impoverished suitor we stones broken" is defiled and shall not "come are implicitly invited to measure Jessica's. And nere to offer the sacrifices of the Lord" (21.5, 9, inasmuch as the play gives us two specific test 20, 21).24 The Old Testament precedent sug- objects-the caskets and the rings-that enable gests that in demanding a pound of Antonio's Portia to engineer her transition from filial to flesh, Shylock is calling for a retributive defile- conjugal bonds, they should likewise be under- ment against the man who has spat on Shylock's stood as test objects that measure the success of Jewish gabardine, broken the legal bond, and Jessica's rite of passage. furthermore-at least in Shylock's mind (see To escape the repressive will of her father, 2.7.1-10)-joined with the other Christians in Jessica climbs out the casement windows carry- severing Shylock's flesh. For "my daughter," ing "a casket" full of Shylock's jewels and Shylock tells us, "is my flesh and blood" (3.1. money, gilding herself with her father's ducats 37). The precedent also makes Solanio's meta- and essentially selling herself to a Lorenzo who phoric use of "stones" a cruelly appropriate seems as interested in the acquired ducats as in means of mocking Shylock's anguish over Jes- the daughter who stole them. Jessica's theft here sica's disavowal of a heritage that to her father is dual. From the symbolic house of the father is "rich and precious." Behind Solanio's gleeful she simultaneously steals both herself and her mimicry of the comic hoarder ranting in the father's fortune, leaving the House of Shylock streets for his stolen ducats lies the figure of the empty in every sense. When in court the de- tragic father castrated by his daughter and disin- feated Jew states: herited from the future:

Nay, take my life and all, pardonnot that: A sealed bag, two sealed bags of ducats, You take my house when you do take the prop Of double ducats, stol'n from me by my daughter! That doth sustain my house; you take my life And jewels, two stones, two rich and precious When you do take the means whereby I live stones, (4.1.374-77) Stol'n by my daughter! (2.8.18-21 )") the voice that speaks is not only the miser's. It is What Jessica buys in return for the symbols of also the father's. her parents' procreative act is a monkey, a gro- Shylock's daughter, who defies all the struc- tesque imitation of the infant human form. And

This content downloaded from 168.28.16.242 on Sat, 23 Aug 2014 18:12:43 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Lynda E. Boose 337 in act 5, scene 1, she is left singing a moonlight living daughtercurb'd by the will of a dead father. duet with Lorenzo that-beneath the beauty of Is it not hard ... that I cannot choose one, nor re- fuse none? its lyrical surface-uneasily equates their love to (1.2.22-26) that of Troilus and and Cressida, Pyramus But, unlike Jessica, Portia does not try to ensure Aeneas and and Jason and Thisbe, Dido, her happiness by throwing away the filial bonds all ominous of bonds some- Medea, archetypes -any more than she will ensure Antonio's free- how shattered in with to conjunction attempts dom by denying Shylock's claim or by overturn- invalidate or cultural Loren- family allegiances. ing the legal structure outright. Instead, she zo's line "In such a Did Jessica steal night/ characteristically works out a solution that from the And with an unthrift wealthy Jew, / amounts to fudging a bit. She resolves the stric- love did run from Venice" unwit- (5.1.14-16) tures of institutional bonds by readjusting them a in Jessica's tingly suggests poverty implicit to her own will, thus achieving a sort of inde- on the of her stealth. The purchase night gilded pendence within the given structures. In the who meant to discard her is daughter paternity marriage riddle, she must passively rely on the furthermore left with an ironic dependence on base natures of the suitors themselves to cause her father's a fortune obtained not money, by them to choose wrongly. But she does-without but as Lorenzo legacy by robbery, unwittingly actually disobeying her father-manage to guide in his about "thieves for suggests joke acquiring Bassanio's choice by first telling him to "pause a wives" The final bitter of Jes- (2.6.23). irony day or two / Before you hazard" (3.2.1-2; my sica's stolen comes at the end of the dowry play, italic) and then giving him a hint that she gave when Lorenzo describes the second seized for- no previous suitor, in the form of the music and tune will from as "manna" they get Shylock the song whose end lines rhyme with the word dropped from heaven. The reference echoes "lead." Portia's courtroom to the of paean quality mercy To attribute to Portia a conscious complicity and alludes to the sustenance simultaneously in directing Bassanio's choice is not to demean that the Old Testament Father the freely gave her integrity. Rather, it is to do justice to her children of Israel as wandered in the wil- they role as the daughter-heroine of comedy who derness en route from to freedom in the bondage must play a part in shaping her own future. Promised Land. Jessica's attempt to make the While the death of the father does free a male transition from filial to bonds means conjugal by heir like Petruchio to choose an independent fu- of theft is, in its ritual as unsuc- implications, ture, it does not likewise free the heiress richly cessful as Shylock's attempt to lock up and pos- left in Belmont. Nor for that matter does the sess his treasure, the treasure that is ulti- family marriage ritual allow even the fatherless daugh- the herself. mately daughter ter to walk independently down the aisle and In contrast to Portia's father has not Shylock, give herself away; fatherless or not, she is always conflated his ducats and his but has daughter a property to be bequeathed by some figuratively understood that his true treasure is Portia. What paternal authority. And to resolve the poten- he has locked inside the casket is not his up tially unacceptable alternatives symbolically but his "counterfeit," the jewels daughter's posed by the paternal structures surrounding of the fortune. In the riddle image family game her, the daughter-heroine of comedy must often the successful suitor will be the one who values resort to disguise, either literal or figurative. Portia to choose not the or silver enough gold Since Portia, as she says, can neither "choose she with her as but the lead casket brings dowry one, nor refuse none," she must subtly find a that him to and hazard all." What requires "give way to lead the suitor she first silently chooses to France as true of Cordelia is likewise recognizes choose her. Faced with the predicament drama- true of Portia: she is herself a dowry. tized in the marriage ceremony, she enacts the Like Jessica, Portia chafes the restric- against archetypal resolution frequently defined in folk- tions of this bond. With a on her use of quibble tale romance. Led to the altar, "given" to the "will," she laments: husband by the father before she herself is ever O me, the word choose! I may neither choose who asked to acknowledge that she will "take this I would, nor refuse who I dislike; so is the will of a man," she must either acquiesce to her father's

This content downloaded from 168.28.16.242 on Sat, 23 Aug 2014 18:12:43 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 338 The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare will or violate the ritual by refusing-unless she And in the four late romances-plays in which can ensure by contrivance that the hand to oracular prophecies and the sudden descent of which she is transferred is the one she herself divine beings constantly reshape the linear nar- has already chosen. In mythic terms, the daugh- rative-the shattered human world, through ob- ter escapes her father's castle not by climbing sessive reenactments of broken rituals, strives to out of its casements but by symbolically throw- recapture what has been lost and thus to recon- ing down the key to the suitor she chooses. Like nect itself with the sacred world of its origins. Rapunzel, who lets down her hair, Portia directs The design closely approximates Mircea Eliade's Bassanio to discover the key that will unlock description of the ritual process as humanity's "Portia's self" from confinement. Jessica-like attempt to effect the "myth of the eternal return." Desdemona, a daughter inside tragedy-chooses Within these late plays, the declining world of to escape at the cost of violating the family inflexible paternal authority rediscovers a re- house and all it represents; Portia also demptive teleology through the ritualized recla- "chooses," but in a way that leaves the structure mation of that particular bond which could only intact for the future. be viewed as a liability to the family's prospects And unlike Jessica, who in selling her moth- for economic and patrilineal prosperity. In The er's betrothal ring rejects the value of the con- Winter's Tale, the murderous wrath Leontes di- jugal bond it represents, Portia insists on the rects against his innocent wife and daughter is value of her ring and on the family ties it sym- punished by the immediately conjunctive death bolizes. When Bassanio gives away her ring at of the son he imagines will carry his lineal pos- Antonio's request, here acceding to the demand terity. Only when he comes to value "that which that his friend's love be "valued 'gainst your has been lost"-the daughter Perdita, who is a wive's commandment" (4.2.450), the act is not matrilineal rather than a patrilineal extension- one that Portia dismisses lightly. At the end of is Leontes allowed the partial restitution implicit the play, having first induced Bassanio to repeat in his adoption of Florizel. And even this com- his vows of faith, Portia puts Antonio into the pensation is made possible only through the re- role of surrogate priest and bonded witness to turn and affirmation of the hitherto unvalued the sanctity of those vows. By acting as Bas- daughter. sanio's "surety," Antonio figuratively takes out a In Pericles, another play in which redemption bond once again for Bassanio; only this bond depends on reclaiming the lost female child, a guarantees the validity of Bassanio's marriage at riddle game and caskets again serve as ritual the pledge of Antonio's soul rather than, as structures through which the father-daughter re- previously, of his flesh: "I dare be bound again, lation is expressed. The Prince of Tyre, perceiv- / My soul upon the forfeit, that your lord / ing the horrible truth that explains how An- Will never more break faith advisedly" tiochus can be "father, son, and husband mild" (5.1.251-53)."6 In a further mimesis of the to his own daughter (Per. 1.1.68), flees from ceremonial pledge to "love, honor and keep" the this daughter, whom he calls a "glorious casket recipient of the ring, Portia makes Antonio the stor'd with ill" (77). Parallel to Lear's barbar- priest, giving him the ring and telling him to give ous Scythian who gorges on his own generation, it to Bassanio with the instructions to "bid him the daughter in Antioch is "an eater of her keep it better" (5.1.255; my italic). The com- mother's flesh" (130); both are autophagous edy thus ends with a correct ritual enactment, and monstrous images of generative consumma- which resolves the threat to union implied by tion perverted into degenerative consumption. Bassanio's transfer of Portia's ring. Antiochus' daughter is a type of living death. Not only in The Merchant of Venice but fre- While Portia was the family jewel inside the lead quently throughout the canon, Shakespeare casket, the life locked into the symbolically ma- draws on ritual substructures for the conclusions ternal container by the "will" of her dead father, of his plays. Within these patterns, tragedy ends this daughter is the casket itself, containing in- with an emphasis on broken or inverted ritual side her the deadly ill of the father's incestuous designs; comedy ends with the scattered ele- generation. ments of ritual regrouped and correctly enacted. As D. W. Harding aptly points out, whether

This content downloaded from 168.28.16.242 on Sat, 23 Aug 2014 18:12:43 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Lynda E. Boose 339 or not Shakespeare wrote this opening of Peri- which labor / I found that kindness in a father" cles, the events at Antioch "have a sharply de- (66-67). fined significance for the broad topic of the rela- Although the rest of the play can rightly be tion between father and daughter, since they ask called a flight from incest, years later Pericles is us to contemplate, and decisively reject, the pos- aroused from his silent apathy only by the sight sibility of incest" (59). The background story of of an unidentified young woman who reminds Antioch, which Gower narrates at the beginning him suddenly of his dead wife, the triggering as- of the play, is a mirror of that leading up to sociation that lies at the heart of the father's Pericles' recognition of Marina in act 5. Gower incestuous love for his daughter. Having spent tells of a great king who the play fleeing the punishment of recognizing the father's ugly secret in Antioch, he finds him- unto him took a peer, self, now a father, aroused to life by his own Who died and left a female heir, daughter. But having once looked into the So buxom, blithe, and full of face deadly mirrors of the first scene, Pericles can go As heaven had lent her all his grace; on to reject the implicit seductiveness of the sit- With whom the father liking took. uation reflected in his own response to Marina. (1.21-25) In this play, which is characterized by a highly symbolic, mythic set of connections, the While yet oblivious to the deadly perversion in lust between Antiochus and his daughter is Antioch, Pericles had thanked Antiochus for condignly punished by fire from heaven, which having "taught / My frail mortality to know it- consumes them. The punishment meted out to self, / ... For death remembered should be like Pericles throughout the play has no such obvious a mirror" (1.1.41-42, 45); once aware, he cause, and it seems in fact so basically causeless calls the princess a "Fair glass of light" from that it makes him appear almost Job-like. The whom his "thoughts revolt" (76, 78). Yet this implicit "cause," however, is rooted in the mat- scene has still another mirror, one that frames ter of Antioch that begins and ends the play the other two and reflects the unnatural reality and that Pericles' actions unconsciously mirror. of the relationship: the mirror of ritual enact- Pericles, mistakenly presuming his wife dead, ment. The scene features a father, a bride, and a had thrown "her overboard with these very groom and parodies the appropriate and ex- arms" (5.3.19), abandoning the woman who, pected progression of a marriage ceremony. In- locked up in a casket, at that moment gave birth stead of enacting the father's role of bringing in to the daughter whom he ultimately finds in the and giving away his bridal-decked daughter to a brothel in Mytilene. Symbolically, this action re- waiting husband, Antiochus demands-while flects the same choice that the father in Antioch music plays-"Bring in our daughter, clothed made. Such a choice discards the conjugal bond like a bride / For embracements even of Jove and the treasure of legitimate family generation, himself" (6-7). The father has here positioned which here, as in The Merchant of Venice, is himself in the groom's role to receive and em- represented by the emblematic womb-tomb of brace this daughter, who is clothed like a bride casket-coffin. but is not one, and he embraces her in the in- Only after Pericles, having wandered for congruous person of Jove the father. Instead of years, comes full circle back to face the terrify- relinquishing her to a husband's hand, Anti- ing secret from which he had fled can he release ochus warns the daughter's suitor to "touch not, Marina from the brothel in which he finds her; upon thy life, / For that's an article within our and only after the father has freed his daughter law" (87-88). Here, the daughter's necessary from the structure to which the image of his own search for a husband to supplant the father, the desire has symbolically consigned her can the successful metamorphosis of love in As You husband again move forward in his own life. At Like It, is prevented by the insidious bond of the end of the play Pericles sets off again to "kindness," culminating in the relationship of reestablish the legitimate order of the family by unnatural kin and kind semantically alluded to reclaiming the lost treasure that is rightly his. In in the princess' riddle: "I sought a husband, in recovering Thaisa and asking her to "come, be

This content downloaded from 168.28.16.242 on Sat, 23 Aug 2014 18:12:43 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 340 The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare buried/ A second time within these arms" of daughters, Prospero is undoubtedly the most (43-44), Pericles effects the reclamation and successful in enacting his proper role. His pur- rebirth of the family "fortune," here reversing pose, much like that defined by Hymen in As his earlier act of throwing it away in a coffin. You Like It, has always been to educate, disci- Through the daughter's return-and only pline, and nurture Miranda so that he can set her through her return-can the king in both Peri- free, as he does Ariel. Prospero understands the cles and The Winter's Tale proceed to recover need to play the father's mock role as the barrier the mother, whom the daughter resembles yet to young love, the need to make Ferdinand re- who symbolically "died" in conjunction with the alize the value of his daughter through laboring daughter's birth. In both plays the physical pres- to earn her lest "too light winning / Make the ence of the daughter exerts a unique, enor- prize light" (1.2.452-53). He also understands mously evocative power over the father, initially the need for the daughter to choose her husband attracting him in a way that is definably incestu- over her father, a choice that Desdemona and ous. Yet from this attraction and from it alone Cordelia could not make their fathers accept. springs the force of regeneration incipient in all When he commands Miranda not to talk with the father-daughter relationships, even the tragic his prisoner or reveal her name, he is purposely ones. The spiraling inwardness of Leontes' and acting to fulfill both roles. While Lear casts Cor- Pericles' paternal narcissism leads both of them delia away so that he can keep her, Prospero to the threatened incestuous moment. But the ties Miranda to him so that she will disobey his recognition obtained in this frightening instant commands and initiate the required transition of generates an impulse to create life anew, the loyalties from father to husband. Yet, for all his exogamous impulse that compels the father to awareness, Prospero turns aside from watching relinquish his daughter and bring back to life the Miranda and Ferdinand play out the parts he abandoned mother. The final scene of each play himself has written for them and makes the moves into a markedly mythic structure to enact pained comment "So glad of this as they I can- what becomes a dual progression of the ritual not be" (3.1.92). passage, the separation of daughter and father Shakespeare shows us that it is no easier for leading to the incorporation of the daughter into Prospero to give up Miranda, even to a husband a new union, simultaneous with the reincorpora- he himself has chosen, than it was for poor Bra- tion of the father into the one he had cast away. bantio to relinquish Desdemona. Throughout As opposed to the sterile circularity of the vio- the play Prospero remains disproportionately lated ritual in King Lear, the structure of these preoccupied with tormenting thoughts of his plays returns to its origin so that the family can daughter sexually possessed by another male, an be recreated through the redemption of the ritual obsession that has its analogue in Brabantio's now correctly enacted. The recreation is made dream. Hence the father lectures Ferdinand- possible by the daughter's regenerating both the the future son-in-law whom old Prospero never mother and the father who generated her. She manages to like very much-that becomes, in Pericles' words, the force "that If thou dost break her before beget'st him that did thee beget" (5.1.195). virgin-knot The relation in The All sanctimoniousceremonies may ... be minist'red, father-daughter Tempest, . . barrenhate ... and discord shall bestrew the last of the romances, is somewhat similar, in The union of your bed with weeds so loathly that Miranda, like Perdita and Marina, is the That you shall hate it both. (4.1.15-22) force that preserves her father. Here, however, there is no mother for Prospero to rediscover And hence he sets Ferdinand to work hauling when he at last gives up his daughter and aban- logs, doing the labor that Caliban refused to do, dons his island. Instead of the miraculous re- thereby domesticating Ferdinand's energies in a union with a lost daughter as the force that way that could never reform the uneducable lust suddenly resuscitates life, The Tempest shows us of Caliban. In his betrothal gift to Miranda and a father who has never lost his child and whose Ferdinand, the dowry masque he evokes out of concern for her welfare has always given him his the powers of his mind, Prospero includes the will to live. And of all the Shakespearean fathers rainbow goddess Iris, the emblematic fertility of

This content downloaded from 168.28.16.242 on Sat, 23 Aug 2014 18:12:43 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Lynda E. Boose 341 Ceres, and the archetypal wife-consort Juno. him: the father must take part with his nobler Significantly, from this vision the father banishes reason against his fury and let his admired Venus and her son, turning them back on their Miranda go. Yet doing so leaves Prospero with way to the celebration, where he fears they the lonely emptiness apparent in his confession would have done "some wanton charm upon this to Alonzo: "I / Have lost my daughter . . . In man and maid, / Whose vows are, that no bed- this last tempest" (5.1.147-48, 153). As in right shall be paid/ Till Hymen's torch be Pericles and The Winter's Tale, the ritual dis- lighted" (4.1.95-97). solution of the father-daughter bond is dramati- The forces of erotic chaos that Prospero cally realized; but in this final play the relation- hoped to banish from his daughter's pro- ship gains added depth through the exploration thalamion are, however, not so easily van- of the central paradox always inherent in its res- quished. For before the masque has ended, olution. Here, we are not left entirely with the Prospero realizes that Caliban and his confeder- "brave new world" imagined by Miranda and in ates are on their way, and the very thought of some respects promised to the reclaimed families the would-be rapist abruptly dissolves the insub- of the two earlier romances. For Shakespeare stantial pageant into thin air. goes beyond the happy ending to show us the In The Tempest, Prospero essentially over- pain and loss bequeathed to the isolated father comes his incestuous desire to retain his daugh- who has acted out the required rite of separa- ter imprisoned on his island. He recognizes his tion. For while at first glance the church cere- own repressed but monstrous wishes in confess- mony might seem only to dramatize the transfer ing that Caliban, who would people the island of a passive female object from one male to an- with Calibans, is a "thing of darkness I / [must] other, in reality it ritualizes the community's Acknowledge mine" (5.1.275-76). Caliban, coercion, not of the bride, but of her father. Ul- the monster of The Tempest, whose name sug- timately, it is he who must pay the true "bride gests an anagram for "cannibal," refigures the price" at the altar and, by doing so, become the incestuous, self-consumptive desires imaged in displaced and dispossessed actor. As the celebra- Lear's "barbarous Scythian" and in the "mon- tory reunification that concludes Shakespeare's strous lust" between Antiochus and his daughter comedy begins in the final scene, it is therefore in Pericles. He is also a force on whose nature left up to Prospero to complete the demands dic- nurture will not stick. And so while daughter tated by his role and-like every father of every and father are simultaneously released from the bride-retire from the scene to seek out his seat enchantment of living together forever isolated in the congregation. Thus Prospero concludes on an island controlled by the father's shaping the ritual and the play with his only remaining fancies, Caliban must remain enslaved on it. expectation: Their release and their ability to return to the to see the natural order of civilization are made possible nuptial Of these our dear-belov'd the arrival of Ferdinand, who comes- solemnized, only by And thence retire me to where like the of the tale-to take the my Milan, prince fairy third shall be bride from her father's fortress and lead Every thought my grave. away (5.1.309-12) her out into generative space and time. The end of The Tempest leaves us with a fa- University of Texas ther who has learned what nature requires of Austin

Notes

1 Stone accounts for the drama and poetry of the nobles" (Family 103-04). This qualification does not sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries by modifying extend to his view of parent-child relationships. his "rather pessimistic view of a society with little love 2 Stone also points out that the high infant-mortality and generally low affect" to allow for "romantic love rate, "which made it folly to invest too much emo- and sexual intrigue . . . in one very restricted social tional capital in such ephemeral beings," was as much group . . .that is the households of princes and great responsible for this lack of affective family ties as were

This content downloaded from 168.28.16.242 on Sat, 23 Aug 2014 18:12:43 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 342 The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare any economic motives (Family 105). For Stone, included a related special session, The Love between paternal authority-not affection-was the almost ex- Shakespeare's Fathers and Daughters, Paul A. Jorgen- clusive source of the family's coherence. Furthermore, sen chairing. Before becoming the division topic, the the domestic patriarchy of the sixteenth century was subject had been examined in special sessions for three not merely a replica of family structures inherited from consecutive years: 1976, Marianne Novy chairing; 1977, the past but a social pattern consciously exploited and John Bean and Coppelia Kahn chairing; and 1978, reinforced by the state to emphasize the injunctions of Carol Thomas Neely chairing. Special sessions con- obedience and authority; nor was it replaced until tinued in 1980 and 1981, with Shirley Nelson Gamer absolute monarchy was overthrown (see Family 151- and Madelon S. Gohlke as chairs. A parallel phenom- 218). Meanwhile, because of the prevalent child-rearing enon has meanwhile been taking place in sixteenth-, practices, the maternal impact was relatively insignifi- seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century historical scholar- cant, hence not nearly so important to the psycho- ship, which Hill explains by saying that ". . . the family logical process of maturation; in Stone's estimate, our as an institution rather suddenly became fashionable, familiar "maternal, child-oriented, affectionate and per- perhaps as a by-product of the women's liberation missive mode" of child rearing did not emerge till movement" (450). about 1800 (Family 405). During the Elizabethan era, Most of the work on fathers and daughters in the upper-class practice of transferring a newborn infant Shakespeare has been done, as might be expected, on immediately to a village wet nurse, who nurtured the the romances. See the essays by Cyrus Hoy, D. W. child for two years, substantially muted any maternal Harding, and Charles Frey. Of particular interest is the influence on child development and no doubt created Schwartz and Kahn collection, which was published an inestimable psychological distance between mother after I had written this paper but which includes several and child. Stone cites the strained and formal relation- essays that express views related to my own. See esp. ship between Juliet and Lady Capulet as vivid testimony David Sundelson's "So Rare a Wonder'd Father: of the absence of affective mother-child bonds that re- Prospero's Tempest," C. L. Barber's "The Family in sults from such an arrangement (106); in the Capulet Shakespeare's Development: Tragedy and Sacredness," household, it is even left up to the nurse, not the and Copp6lia Kahn's "The Providential Tempest and mother, to remember Juliet's birthday. Yet Stone does the Shakespearean Family." not measure the relationship between Juliet and her 5 Margaret Loftus Ranald has done substantial work father against his hypothesis of the absence of affect. on the legal background of marriage in Shakespeare Old Capulet is indeed the authoritarian dictator of plays. I have found no marriages (or funerals) staged Stone's model, but he is also a "careful father" who literally in the plays of Shakespeare or of his contem- deeply loves his child. Instead of being eager to have poraries. Although, for instance, the marriage of Kate her off his hands, Capulet is notably reluctant to give and Petruchio would seem to offer a rich opportunity up the daughter he calls "the hopeful lady of my for an indecorously comic scene appropriate for The earth" (1.2.15; all Shakespeare quotations are from the Taming of the Shrew, the action occurs offstage and we Evans ed.); his bull-headed determination to marry only hear of it secondhand. Nor do we witness the her to Paris following Tybalt's death is born, para- Olivia-Sebastian marriage in Twelfth Night. Even the doxically enough, from the deeply rooted affection that fragment of the botched ceremony in Much Ado does Stone's hypothesis excludes. not follow the liturgy with any precision but presents a 3As Christopher Hill suggests in his review of dramatized version of it. This omission-apparently Stone's Family, much of the evidence used could well consistent in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama-may imply its opposite: "The vigour of the preachers' have resulted from the 1559 Act of Uniformity of propaganda on behalf . . . of breaking children's wills, Common Prayer and Divine Service in the Church, suggests that such attitudes were by no means so uni- which stipulates sanctions against "any persone or per- versally accepted as they would have wished" (461). sones whatsoever . . . [who] shall in anye Entreludes Hill and others have criticized Stone for asserting that Playes Songes, Rymes or by other open Woordes, de- love and affection were negligible social phenomena clare or speake anye thing in the derogation depraving before 1700 and for presuming throughout "that values or despising of the same Booke, or of any thing therein percolate downwards from the upper to the lower conteyned" (1 Elizabeth i, c. 2, in Statutes 4:355-58). classes" (Hill 462). Because of the scope and impor- Given the rising tempo of the Puritan attack on the tance of Stone's subject, his book has been widely theaters at this time, we may reasonably infer that the reviewed. As David Berkowitz comments, "the possi- omission of liturgy reflects the dramatists' conscientious bility of endless symposia on Stone's vision and per- wish to avoid conflict. Richmond Noble's study cor- formance looms as a fashionable activity for the next roborates this assumption (82). Of the services to which half-dozen years" (396). Hill's review and the reviews Shakespeare does refer, Noble notes that the allusions by Keith Thomas and John Demos seem particularly to "distinctive features, words, and phrases of Holy well balanced. Matrimony are extremely numerous" (83). 4 6 One could chart the new emphasis on the family Van Gennep built his study on the work of Hart- by reviewing the Shakespeare topics at recent MLA land, Frazer, Ciszewski, Hertz, Crowley, and others conventions. The 1979 convention featured Marriage who had noted resemblances among the components of and the Family in Shakespeare, Shirley Nelson Garer various disparate rites. His tripartite diachronic struc- chairing, as its Shakespeare Division topic and also ture provides the basis for Victor W. Turner's discus-

This content downloaded from 168.28.16.242 on Sat, 23 Aug 2014 18:12:43 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Lynda E. Boose 343 sions in the essay "Liminality and Communitas" (Ritual The Martene manual specifies that the bride is to wear Process 94-203). it on the left hand to signify "a difference between the 7 The church canons of 1604 seem to have confused estate and the episcopal order, by whom the ring is the situation further by continuing to recognize the publicly worn on the right hand as a symbol of full and validity of the nuptial pledge but forbidding persons entire chastity" (Legg 207). The Rathen Manual, under twenty-one to marry without parental consent; which follows the Use of Sarum, contains a rather this ruling would make the marriage of minors illegal charming piece of folklore widely believed through the but nonetheless binding for life and hence valid (Stone, eighteenth century. It, too, allusively suggests the sexual Family 32). Until the passage of Lord Hardwicke's significance of the ring: "For in the fourth finger there Marriage Act in 1753, confusion was rife over what is a certain vein proceeding to the heart and by the constituted a legal marriage and what a valid one. In chime of silver there is represented the internal affec- addition to bringing coherence to the marriage laws, tion which ought always to be fresh between them" this act was designed to protect increasingly threatened (35-36; see also Wheatly 503). Even after the priest parental interests by denying the validity as well as the took over the ceremonial role of transferring the bride's legality of a religious ceremony performed without hand from her father's to her husband's, he did not also certain conditions, including parental consent for parties become the intermediary in transferring the ring from under twenty-one (Stone, Family 35-36). the groom's keeping to the bride's finger. Such an in- The concern for parental approval has always focused corporation of duties might seem logical were it not on, and in fact ritualized, the consent of the bride's that this part of the ritual simultaneously imitates and father. In 1858, the Reverend Charles Wheatly, a noted licenses the sexual act. authority on church law, attributed the father's giving The English reformers retained both the symbol of away his daughter as signifying the care that must be the ring and the groom's accompanying pledge to "wor- taken of the female sex, "who are always supposed to ship" his wife's body, a retention that generated con- be under the tuition of a father or guardian, whose con- siderable attack from the more radical reformers. The sent is necessary to make their acts valid" (496). For controversy over this wording occupies the major supportive authority Wheatly looks back to Richard portion of Hooker's defense of the Anglican marriage Hooker, whose phrasing is substantially harsher. rite (see also Stone, Family 522, on the attempts in Hooker felt that the retention of the custom "hath still 1641 and 1661 to alter the wording of the vow from this vse that it putteth we men in mind of a dutie "worship" to "honor"). Hooker justifies the husband's whereunto the verie imbecillitie of their [women's] "worship" as a means of transferring to the wife the nature and sex doth binde them, namely to be alwaies "dignitie" incipient in her husband's legitimizing of the directed, guided and ordered by others .. ." (215). children he now allows her to bear. She furthermore Even though the validity of a marriage was not vested receives, by this annexation of his worship, a right to in parental consent, "the Protestants, including the participate in his material possessions. The movement Anglicans, considered the consent of the parents to be of the vow, from sexual to material pledge, thus as essential to the marriage as the consent of the bride sequences a formal rite of passage, a pattern alluded to and bridegroom" (Flandrin 131). Paradoxically, "both in Hooker's phrase, "the former branch hauing granted Church and State claimed to be supporting, at one and the principall, the latter graunteth that which is an- the same time, freedom of marriage and the authority nexed thereunto" (216). of parents" (Flandrin 132). The ambiguity arose be- ' The ceremonial transfer of the father's authority cause the child was obliged, under pain of mortal sin, to the husband is acknowledged by the Reverend John to obey the parent. Technically, the child was free to Shepherd in his historical commentary accompanying choose a marriage partner, but since the church never the 1853 Family Prayer Book: ". . . the ceremony took steps against the prerogatives of the father, the shows the father's consent; and that the authority, which notion of choice was problematic. he before possessed, he now resigns to the husband" s Given the high parent mortality rate, a number of (Brownell 465). By implication, however, the cere- brides necessarily went to the altar on the arms of their mony resolves the incestuous attraction between father legal guardians. Peter Laslett notes that in Manchester and daughter by ritualizing his "gift" of her hand, a between 1553-1657 over half of the girls marrying for signification unlikely to be discussed in the commentary the first time were fatherless (103), but some historians of church historians. When first the congregation and have criticized his reliance on parish registers as the next the couple are asked to name any impediments to principal demographic barometer. the marriage, there are, Wheatly says, three specific 9 The groom's pledge suggests the wedding ring's dual impediments the church is charging all knowledgeable sexual and material symbolism. Historically, the ring parties to declare: a preceding marriage or contract, symbolizes the dowry payment that the woman will re- consanguinity or affinity, and want of consent (483). ceive from her husband by the entitlement of marriage; The final act of Ben Jonson's Epicoene enumerates all it apparently superseded the custom of placing tokens the possible legal impediments that might be subsumed of espousal on the prayer book (see Book of Commzon under these three. Prayer 408). It also signifies the physical consumma- The bride's father, by virtue of his special promi- tion, a point frequently exploited in Renaissance drama nence in the ritual, functions as a select witness whose and also implied by the rubrics in the older Roman presence attests to the validity of the contract. The Catholic manuals, which direct the placing of the ring. Friar in Much Ado asks Hero and Claudio whether

This content downloaded from 168.28.16.242 on Sat, 23 Aug 2014 18:12:43 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 344 The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare they "know any inward impediment why you should the "work of generation" to the increase of money not be cojoin'd" (4.1.12-13). Leonato dares to respond through retentive "use." To Antonio's question, "Or is for Claudio, "I dare make his answer, none," because, your gold and silver ewes and rams?"Shylock responds, as father of the bride, he presumes to have full knowl- "I cannot tell, I make it breed as fast" (MV 1.3.95-96). edge that no impediment exists. When he learns of 12 McCown discusses the use and inversion of epi- Hero's supposed taint, the rage he vents over the loss thalamic conventions in Juliet's address to the night of his own honor is the more comprehensible when we (3.2.1-31). My article "Othello's Handkerchief' understand his special position in the ceremony as a analyzes the handkerchief in terms of Elizabethan sworn witness to the transfer of an intact daughter. wedding customs. For examinations of epithalamic 11The sections on the celebration of "Festiuall daies" traditions in Renaissance poetry, see also the works by and times of fast that precede Hooker's defense of the Virginia Tufte and R. V. LeClercq. English "Celebration of Matrimonie" are especially 13 The bride was expected to bring with her either helpful in understandingElizabethan ritual, for in these property or a substantial cash sum as her "dowry." In sections Hooker expands his defense of the Anglican the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, this rites into an explanation of, and rationale for, the whole money usually went directly to the father of the groom, notion of ritual. Having first isolated three sequential who often used it as a dowry to marry off one of his elements necessary for festival-praise, bounty, and own daughters.In return, the groom's father guaranteed rest-he goes on to justify "bountie" in terms remark- the bride an annuity, called a "jointure,"to provide for ably compatible with the theories of both Bataille and her if she survived her husband (see Stone, Family 88- Levi-Strauss on the essential "spending-gift"nature of 89, and Ranald 69). In the closing moments of Romeo marriage. To Hooker, the "bountie" essential to cele- and Juliet, Shakespeare creates an irony of pathos by bration represents the expression of a "charitable referring to this custom. Juliet has in truth "survived" largenesse of somewhat more then common bountie. .... her husband by dying after him; the "jointure"that old Plentifull and liberall expense is required in them that Capulet here requests from the groom's family on abounde, partly as a signe of their owne ioy in the behalf of his daughter is the dowry that has been goodnesse of God towards them" (292, 293). Bounty crucially missing throughout the play, the cessation of is important to all festival rites, but within the mar- enmity representedin Capulet's demand for his "brother riage rite this "spending" quality incorporates the Montague'shand." The terms of the dowry and jointure specific idea of sexual orgasm as the ultimate and settlements were fixed before the wedding and were precious expenditure given the bride by her husband, often made public during the ceremony by the priest's a notion alluded to in Bataille and one that functioned asking the groom, immediately following the ring rite, as a standardElizabethan metaphor apparent in phrases "What shall the morwyn gift be?" (Rathen 2, 36). In like "Th' expense of spirit" (sonnet 129) or Othello's the York and Sarum manuals the question was what comment to Desdemona, "The purchase made, the "dower" the woman should receive from her husband fruits are to ensue; / That profit's yet to come 'tween (see Howard 1:306-07). The significance of these me and you" (2.3.9-10). The wedding ceremony negotiations as a precondition of the wedding is evi- ritualizes this notion of bounty as the gift of life by dent in The Taming of the Shrew, where Petruchio having the father give the groom the family trea- delineates Kate's jointure to her father even before he sure, which the father cannot "use" but can only begins his otherwise unorthodox wooing and where the bequeath or hoard. The groom, who ritually places choice of Bianca's husband clearly rests entirely on coins or a gold ring on the prayer book as a token which suitor can ensure the shrewd old Baptista the "bride price," then fully "purchases"the father's trea- largest jointure for his daughter. sure through his own physical expenditure, an act that 14In his famous Essai sur le Don (1923), Marcel guarantees the father's "interest" through future Mauss concludes that exchange in primitive societies generations. This money-sex image complex is pervasive involves not so much economic transactions as recipro- and important in many of Shakespeare's plays. The cal gifts. Building on these conclusions, Levi-Strauss pattern and its relation to festival are especially evi- analyzes exogamy and the prohibition of incest as dent in Juliet's ecstatic and impatient speech urging substantially identical rules of kinship that reflect a night to come and bring her husband: reciprocal gift system based on the condition of sur- passing sumptuousness. He stresses that the idea of a 0, I have bought the mansion of a love, mysterious advantage attached to reciprocal gifts is But not possess'd it, and though I am sold, not confined to primitive society but is inherent in our Not yet enjoy'd. So tedious is this day own notion of the father "giving away" the bride (52- As is the night before some festival. 62). The parodic dowries concluding Romeo and (3.2.26-29). Juliet reflect the same reciprocity of escalating gener- osity. In another context, this pattern enables us fully to 15Hooker also makes the point that the sacramental- understand Shylock's miserly refusal to give or spend ity invoked by ritual is profaned when festival celebra- and the implications of his simultaneous loss of daugh- tion overflows the measure or when the form of ter and hoarded fortune. His confusion of daughter and ceremony becomes parodic. Hooker asserts that the ducats is foreshadowed when he recounts the story of festivals of the "Israelites and heathens," though they Jacob and equates the increase of the flock through contained the necessary elements, "failed in the ende

This content downloaded from 168.28.16.242 on Sat, 23 Aug 2014 18:12:43 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Lynda E. Boose 345 it self, so neither could they discerne rightly what forme ments to marriage, since of course Henry at one time and measure Religion therein should obserue. . . . they or another tried nearly every legally acceptable means are in every degree noted to haue done amisse, their to extricate himself from his numerous marriages. The Hymnes or songs of praise were idolatrie, their bountie accusation that he had been "seduced and constrained excesse, and their rest wantonnesse" (294). On the use by witchcraft" was one he considered leveling at the of ritual as the human means to recover the sacred hapless Anne Boleyn. After all-Richard inI had suc- dimension of existence, see Eliade: ceeded in nullifying (at least temporarily) his brother Edward Iv's marriage to Henry's grandmother, Eliza- Driven from religious life in the strict sense, the celestial beth Woodville, and the marriage between Humphrey, sacred remains active through symbolism. A religious Duke of Gloucester, and Eleanor Cobham had been symbol conveys its message even if it is no longer annulled on the same grounds. These details are in- consciously understood in every part. For a symbol cluded in Henry Ansgar Kelly's highly informative speaks to the whole human being and not only to the study (241-42). See also Church and the Law of intelligence. . . . Hence the supreme function of the Nullity, which notes that the impedimentof vis et metus myth is to "fix" the paradigmatic models for all rites remained unchanged by the Reformation (58). 19 and all significant human activities. ... By the con- C. L. Barber also notes the ritual connection: tinuous reactualization of paradigmatic divine gestures, "Lear begins with a failure of the passage that might be the world is sanctified. (129, 98-99) handled by the marriage service, as it is structured to persuade the father to give up his daughter. Regan and Goneril, to meet Lear's de- Unquestionably, the late C. L. Barber's is the best though married, pretend study mand on them in all-but-incestuous terms. Cordelia book to date on the relation of Shakespeare'splays to defends herself by reference to the service" (in Schwartz underlying patterns of ritual. and Kahn 197). 16 Hooker also stresses the necessary separation of 20 Measure for Measure provides the most dramatic festival and fast, celebration and mourning, for "as oft testimony to the importance of fixing the dowry provi- as ioy is the cause of the one and grief the welspring sions before the wedding. Although Juliet is nearly of the other, they are incompatible" (212); "Seeing nine months and she and Claudio therefore all things are done in and offices pregnant although time, many believe themselves have not are not possible at one and the same time to be dis- spiritually married, they the in church because of still unre- charged, duties of all sortes must haue their legalized wedding necessarily solved seuerall successions and seasons . . ." When dowry provisions. (197). 21 Alan Dundes out the Theseus bids Philostrate call forth the he points psychological dimen- nuptial revels, sions of various folktale a number of directs that mourning be banished-"Awake the types underlying pert Shakespeare's the central in and nimble spirit of mirth;/ Turn forth to plays; significantly, figure melancholy the folktale is the The theme funerals" (MND 1.1.13-14). Likewise usually daughter-heroine. Spenser, acting of which Freud himself as a as his own poetic master of revels in incest, recognized power- Epithalamion, ful undercurrentin is manifest in the folk- ritually banishes all evil sounds of King Lear, spirits, mourning, tale father who demands that his or other activities that would counter the mood of mar- daughter marry him; Shakespeare transforms the overt demand into a love riage celebration. This felt imperative governing the test requiring that she love her father all (358). In segregation of ritual activities underlies Shakespeare's Dundes' interpretation,the more obvious strategic use of colliding ritual structures. father-daugh- 17 ter incest wish is actually an Electral daughter-father Robert Herrick, who gave us detailed pictures of desire that has been transformed through projection. May Day customs that did not survive in later genera- Dundes also lists other discussions of the father-daugh- tions ("Corinna's Going A-Maying"), also recorded a ter incest theme in King Lear (359). number of now forgotten Elizabethan wedding customs, 22 Hymen's verses emphasize the religious sense of including that of shrouding the bride in her wedding sheets: the marriage ritual. In this context the genetic father is only a surrogate parent, appointed by the heavenly parent to act out the specific role of bequeathing the But since it must be done, despatch, and sew daughter to a new union; Hymen himself functions as in a sheet Up your bride; and what if so the mythic priest, the agent authorized by heaven to It be with or rock, walls of brass oversee the transfer. Wheatly's notes reflect this same Ye tower her as up, Danae was, sense of the religious meaning of the roles played by Think you that this father and priest: ". . . the woman is to be given not to Or hell itself a powerful bulwark is? the man, but to the Minister; for the rubric orders, that I tell but like a ye no; the minister shall receive her at her father's or friend's Bold bolt of thunder he will make his way, hands; which signifies, to be sure, that the father re- And rend the cloud, and throw signs her up to God, and that it is God, who, by His The sheet about like flakes of snow. Priest, now gives her in marriage . . ." (497). (141-50) 23 See Barber's essay in Schwartz and Kahn, esp. pp. 198-221. Barber additionally provides a striking icono- 18 The divorce trials of Henry viII provide a wealth graphic association, noting the image of Lear with of information on the conditions recognized as impedi- Cordelia in his arms as being effectively "a pieta with

This content downloaded from 168.28.16.242 on Sat, 23 Aug 2014 18:12:43 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 346 The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare

the roles reversed, not Holy Mother with her Dead marriage, dated 28 Nov. 1582, is an extant record. The Son, but father with his dead daughter" (200). sureties who purchased it were named later as "trusty" 24 Geneva. Deuteronomy 23.1 contains a similar text friends in the will of Richard Hathaway, Anne's father. that the 1611 King James Bible translates as "He that That the bond mentions no spokesmen for Shakespeare's is wounded in the stones, or hath his priuie member family has generated a number of suspicions, including cut off, shall not enter the Congregation of the Lord." Sir Sidney Lee's feeling that it was taken out to prevent "Stones" is not only an Old Testament term but a reluctant bridegroom from evading his obligation to Elizabethan cant for testicles (Partridge). marry the pregnant bride. Schoenbaum, however, 25 When Iago shouts to Brabantio, "Look to your thinks that it was customary for the bondsmen to be house, your daughter, and your bags! Thieves, thieves!" friends of the bride's family, to ensure an unmarried (Oth. 1.1.80-81), his innuendo is the same as Solanio's. heiress protection from fortune-hunting suitors. If so, 26 A similar incident took place in connection with then Shakespeare would seem to be flouting tradition in Shakespeare's own marriage when Anne Hathaway's his conclusion to The Merchant of Venice, for the father appointed two friends to guarantee the wedding bondsman here is clearly a friend of the groom's. (Schoenbaum 78-79). The bond for Shakespeare's

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