The Missing “Mother” in Shakespeare

Enough and more has been said and written on Shakespeare and his works and yet the immortal bard continues to stimulate his students and enthuse his worshippers alike with ever­-refreshing thoughts and reflections on his plays and characters. Louis B. Wright of the Folger Library strikes a note of despair on the subject of Shakespearean study. He says:

“The field of Shakespearean criticism today is so vast and has such a ramification of specialized topics, from aesthetic appreciation to Freudian analysis, that non-specialists, literary scholars, much less other folk, find it difficult to sort out the significant from the trivial.”

Necessarily the student of Shakespeare has to lean very heavily on the great master’s works themselves, while consulting a few eminent and acknowledged authorities on Shakespearean drama like Bradley, Dowden, Herford and Dover Wiison and their like in more recent times.

One cannot hope or claim to be any more original in discussing Shakespeare, while much that may be interesting or even intriguing is stumbled upon by a close and discerning study of his works. When Ruskin makes the sweeping observation that Shakespeare has no heroes but only heroines, it has not merely remained an energetic expression of a point of view or of a perspective, but has come to be a highly interesting topic of debate and discussion, a debate that may never end.

If in a similar strain one were to maintain that Shakespeare has no mothers, but only fathers, the statement equally sweeping may deserve some consideration. A quick perusal of the plays reveals to us the interesting fact that Shakespeare has not given mothers to almost all his heroines in comedies, tragedies and romances. Even the few mothers for the heroes or young men are not fully developed characters, not even sizable sketches, with the possible exception of Gertrude in Hamlet, Tamora, in Titus Andronicus, Volumnia in Coriolanus, and lady Capulet, the only exception where young women are concerned, who is hardly recognisable as a character. These mothers do play some part in the plays but not the roles typical of motherhood.

Before we deal with the exceptions referred to, we have every reason to be surprised at the conspicuous omission of the role of a mother in the great majority of his plays, wherein the feminine fortunes of the young loves fluctuate between exhilarating adventures and helpless frustration and tragedy. Shakespeare who has not left unplumbed every facet and fact of human situation and emotion, strangely enough, left out of his purview the essential relation and the most normal and profound influence of a mother on those young women, who get themselves so much involved, with a good deal of initiative and courage, in the plays, as to warrant, if not to justify, the observation of Ruskin.

Even from the earliest comedies to the later Romances, the heroines are mostly young ladies, whose amorous adventures are both necessary and possible, handicapped as they are by the absence of their mothers and having been conditioned to dwell in a world mainly of men, exposed to temptations and trials, mostly of their own making.

In his later comedies, Shakespeare has provided for con­sultations and confidences for his heroines, lady friends of their own age, though sometimes different in temperaments and attitudes. To this category belong those friendly pairs of Rosalind and Celia, Hermia and Helena, Hero and Beatrice, Sylvia and Julia and Portia and Nerissa. Some of them are close cousins too. Whatever be the solace they can offer, the sacrifice they can do, they cannot be substitutes to the mother, who in the conception of all civilised world, is the manifestation of the ideal womanhood. Considering the way they are thrown helplessly into each others company, and together seeking sanctuaries in forests and love in labours, one only feels that a timely word or gesture of a mother to their fathers or even to themselves, would have saved them from the anguish of adventurous love and from a forest of troubles.

Yet there are other heroines who do not have even this comforting company of a cousin or a friend and who perforce depend on their own instinct of selection and self-preservation. The moment they fall in love, more often at first sight, they are inexorably carried away by the logic of their love and, of course, by the arms of their lovers. They remain helplessly and totally at the mercy of their men. They are no Hippolytas or Cleopatras, with age to chasten and experience to guide.

Shylock’s only daughter Jessica is all youthful exuberance and the very spirit of love; and she is to languish in a home where the father is coldly divided between his ducats and his daughter, where she is practically plying the household chores like Miss Agnes in David Copperfield, confined in the darkness of a cheerless and affectionless home, which is no home. Let alone love, even for a spell of fresh breeze and light, Jessica would jump right into the outstretched arms of any young man. What a vacuum for one so young and spirited, is the void of an understanding mother!

Portia is a little sober among these youthful loves. A lady of considerable affluence, and fairer than the word fair, Portia is reputed to be wise for her years. This wisdom is sustained by an implicit faith in her father’s superior wisdom. A lady like Portia can, not only get along in any situation, but can help others to wriggle out of tight corners. She is an exceptional young woman, who does not allow herself to be swept off her feet by the currents of youthful passion. The presence or absence of the mother in her case does not make any material difference.

We can practically leave out of consideration the history plays, since they are largely men’s plays. Constance in King John is a sketchy role of a mother fighting for her son Arthur with a hysterical passion. Though her portrayal has been much admired, next to those of John, Arthur and the Bastard, Shakespeare has not given her the stature of a queen Katharine in Henry VIII. Even here the relationship is that of mother and son. Katharine in Henry VIII, is a fully drawn portrait. Dr. Johnson said that “the genius of Shakespeare comes in and goes out with Katharine.” She is invested with queenly dignity and touched with the heroic and tragic. The pretext for her rejection is that she hasn’t borne Henry VIII a successor. As such, for all the grandeur of her character, she does not find a place in our discussion on Shakespearean mothers.

Ophelia is unfortunate in that her father is too busy to think much of her existence excepting for an occasional reprimand. The brother, like the father, has a few pedantic precepts in keeping with the conventions of the time, for his sister. While the one is busy eavesdropping, the other is an occasional visitor to his home. In moments of crisis she has neither the strength nor the resourcefulness to stand her ground. She yields without a word of protest to her ultimate fate.

Granting that Ophelia’s mother, assuming one, cannot stand up to her worldly-wise husband in the matter of love between their daughter and the prince, still it is very probable, she can yet prevent the mental breakdown and eventual death of her daughter, after Polonius’s death. Frustrated in love, with the father out of the scene and the brother out of sight, to whom else can she open up her heart but to a beloved mother, who alone can provide the necessary psychological ballast for the unfortunate lady to stay steady. R. R. Young in his introduction to his edition of Hamlet has quite put his finger on the right place when he says:

“Ophelia is unfortunate in that she lacks guidance.....She is quite lost in this world of intrigue and deceit, and her innocence is even used by her own father in his stratagems.” Young has touched merely the fringe of the problem, perhaps inadvertently.

One wonders whether that great tragic beauty, Desdemona, would have fallen to the brave stories of the Moor, if only she has a mother to steady her faltering steps in life. Brabantio knows next to nothing about his daughter when he describes in the full Court of the Duke, his daughter as

“A maiden never bold;
of spirit so still and quiet that her emotion
Blushed at herself......”

No wonder events later prove him to be entirely on the wrong. It is her tragedy that in the great crisis of her life and love, she has to seek counsel and comfort from the very man who has to adroitly put the noose round her neck. Dowden possibly is implying such a pathetic predicament of Desdemona when he says, “But if Desdemona loves not with the most ‘instructed’ heart, she yet loves purely and with tender devotion.”

Cordelia’s, no less her father’s, tragedy can be said to stem from the situation of Lear being a widower for a long time. At his age, Lear has had enough of power to a point of disgust and which in a way has kept him pre-occupied with the affairs of the state. He is now in a mood to abdicate his power and is seeking spiritual solace, and identity in his daughters, particularly from Cordelia, in the absence of his queen. Yes, a kingdom for one who says, “Papa, you are everything to us. We love you first and last and none else.” This is no mere caprice of a senile father. U is strict barter, a quid pro quo. What he loses in material possessions he wants to gain in spiritual returns. The long bereavement in his beloved queen and the sense of loss which has been lying dormant in the tumult and commotion of the affairs of the state, rears up at the moment of retirement from active rule. His is a heart, an old heart, hungering for love, for a new identity, for spiritual moorings. Poor Cordelia fails to read this tremendous vacuum in and urge of her father and utterly upsets the balance of the old man. Her refusal to toe the line of her elder sisters, who do not see any harm, in humoring what they consider as a mere whim of an aged father, further aggravates the situation. How else should one explain such eruption of fire and brimstone from old Lear, except as a case of Love’s perversion, becoming positive hatred? The absence of a mother has indirectly hit very hard Cordelia who could not divine into the depths of vacuum the old king felt.

Let us hear Lear:

“I loved her most, and thought to set my rest
On her kind nursery – Hence, and avoid my sight!
So be my grave, my peace, as here I give
Her father’s heart from her! ...”

He is seeking love, rest, kind nursery and peace in her.

In sharp contrast to the situations of Ophelia, Desdemona and even of Cordelia, Prospero is all attention and love to Miranda. Miranda, in her utter isolation and innocence, does not feel any need or want to be satisfied. For Prospero too she is his sole comfort and joy, in an island with that grotesque Caliban haunting and scheming against them all the time. It is a mysterious world of magic, silence and wonder and normal human relations get shrouded in a mist of magic spells.

The sad lot of Imogen conversely proves how very unfortunate is a young woman without a mother and what is worse having a step-dame to reckon with. Parting from Cloten, the second lord contemplates on the state of Imogen:

“.........Alas! poor princess,
Thou divine Imogen, what thou endur’st
Betwixt a father by thy step-dame govern’d,
A mother hourly coining plots, a wooer
More hateful than foul expulsion is
of thy dear husband, than that horrid act
Of the divorce he’ld make!........”

That in brief sums up the sad plight of Imogen, in the context of our present discussion.

Reverting now to the exceptions mentioned at the outset of this discussion, young Shakespeare under the immediate spell of senecan tragedies, and under the compulsions of his theme of Titus Andronicus, has given the character of a mother, Tamora. In this earliest tragedy of Shakespeare, Tamora is but a robot in the revenge theme. From the time her eldest son Alarbus is sacrificed to propitiate the shades of his own sons, by Titus, queen Tamora is an avenging monster with no quarters given or taken. As such she is more a political character like Volumnia than a mother who stands for love, understanding, forgiveness and sacrifice, a mother ministering to the quiet happiness of a home.

What of Gertrude the queen mother in Hamlet? One might ask. But then Prince Hamlet is in no need to be protected and guided by a mother and that too by one who has fallen so low as to feed on garbage. She has been so seduced as not to under­stand the true nature and quality of the grief of her own son. It is part of prince Hamlet’s mission enjoined on him by his father’s spirit, that he should purge her off her taints and thus redeem and restore her to the sacred position of a real mother.

To his mother’s agonising cry:

“O Hamlet, thou has cleft my heart in twain” the son replies:

“O, throwaway the worse part of it,
And live the purer with the other half.
Goodnight – but go not to my uncle’s bed;
Assume a virtue, if you have it not.”

This is pure and simple instruction to a fallen woman, nevertheless a mother. Certainly it is not Shakespeare’s intention to hold up Gertrude as the mother, the ideal of maternal virtues.

Volumnia is there but only to play politics, to appeal to her brave son Coriolanus to spare his motherland. Her role in the play is anything but maternal. It is more political, actuated by an overweaning ambition on behalf of her son. “There is an occasional element of inhumanity in her words to and about him”. She tells Virgilia, Coriolanus’s wife:

“Hear me profess sincerely: Had I a dozen sons, each in my love alike and none less dear than thine and my good Marcius, I had rather had eleven die nobly for their country than one voluptuously surfeit out of action.”

In the words of Prof. Iyengar:

“Volumnia is in no small measure the architect of her son’s tragedy – O, the pity of it. She is her son’s fate, just as Gertrude is her son’s, for the dominating good mother can ruin a son as much as the incestuous bad mother.”

However, in both the instances the relationship is one of mother and son, son who can take up the role of a protector. We can just drop out Hermione as a mother, since she goes underground practically till the end of the play. It is not motherhood under exposure but fidelity to her husband.

So we come to the very meagre sketch of lady Capulet, the only exception to the general absence of mother and daughter relationship. Lady Capulet is not taken up seriously by anyone of the eminent critics of the play, Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare has chosen to give the nurse, the foster-mother of Juliet, a more interesting and prominent role, who along with Mercutio is a superb creation. Juliet’s affection for the confidence in the nurse is as spontaneous and complete as her coolness and distance to her mother.

Which mother can resist an appeal from her only daughter couched in such pathetic and piteous terms?

Jul:       “Is there no pity sitting in the clouds,
That sees into the bottom of my grief?
O, sweet my mother, cast me not away!
Delay this marriage for a month, a week;
Or, if you do not, make the bridal bed
In that dim monument where Tybalt lies.”

Yet, lady Capulet has neither pity nor tenderness to give from her unfeeling heart. The simple fact is that Shakespeare just ignores her. Editor George Sampson in his introduction to the play disposes off Juliet’s parents in two sentences. He says, “Lady Capulet has an early outburst of super literary ecstasy..........but never again returns to that adorned and precious: manner. Capulet himself is a fair study of fatuous and testy old age..........”

Recalling Shakespeare’s achievement, Creiznach observes:

“Here it is that Shakespeare’s unique position in the realm of poetic fiction becomes most strikingly apparent. Like a creator he sits enthroned over twelve hundred beings, kings. cavaliers clowns, criminals, radiant embodiment of ideal womanhood, elves and goblins; all are the offspring of his mighty brain. And among all these various figures, there is not one that is not both individual and typical, a sure witness to the truth of Goethe’s dictum that ‘the particular, if it be significant is also universal’.

One wishes that Shakespeare had thought of adding to this magnificent world of myriad characters, at least one seriously-developed character of a mother, an ideal mother who is as important in the play as a Lear, or a Shylock or a Prospero. That such a character of a mother is not there is a point of curiosity one cannot willingly let slip.