Within great achievements we can often detect the contributions of talented women. Pierre Curie was even outdistanced by his wife Marie. Eleanor Roosevelt now earns her own recognition alongside her husband’s. Rosalind Franklin’s photographs provided data for the Nobel Prizes of the “discoverers” of DNA. We still talk of the Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. But no one has ever talked of Mary Arden’s contribution to the plays of her son William Shakespeare. Yet, despite the popular view that we know very little about Shakespeare, there is something relevant known about his antecedents. His grandfather, Richard Shakespeare, was a tenant farmer of a branch of the prominent Warwickshire Arden family. His son John was more ambitious, moving to Stratford to develop his skills as a craftsman and entrepreneur, with sufficient talent, sociability, and ambition to work his way up the municipal hierarchy to become its head, aided on the way by marriage into the genteel family who were his father’s landlords. Their upper-class connections would inspire his own ultimate success in sharing their gentility through the award of a heraldic crest. His son William carried that social climbing to the ultimate pinnacle of official appointment to the royal court of King James I.
His mother Mary Arden’s resilient character suggests what she could contribute to the potential for William’s meteoric career. Her father was prosperous, and though she was his eighth child it was she that he designated as his executor and a principal heir. The view that she and her husband were illiterates conflicts with their numerous legal and administrative responsibilities. Another shared trait of the married couple was inheritance of rooted Catholic family traditions, for which the Ardens even suffered executions. This ominous maternal context invites the careful elusiveness of William’s communication of any personal political and theological views.
Socially Mary Arden was well above her husband in social rank, and she was certainly temperamentally and physically resilient. She lived about seventy years, outliving her husband after bearing eight children, a likely model for feminine dynamism, reflected in her son’s registration of his high expectations of women in both his life and art. The fact that he married a woman eight years his elder suggests acceptance of female superiority in sexual relationships, a ratio also present in the pattern of the adulterous romance with the Dark Lady outlined in the Sonnets, in which the Lady seems to have held the initiative to a disconcerting degree.
However, it has often been assumed by critics that an author’s life and professional aims have little to do with the nature and status of his writings. Feminists have also urged us to admit the irreducible patriarchy of Elizabethan life and letters, supposedly reflected in Shakespeare’s plays. As for mothers in the scripts, the very title of my colleague Janet Adelman’s influential study, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origins in Shakespeare’s Plays, suggests the negative readings they may receive. The blurb summarizes that book thus: “In her original and highly charged account, Adelman traces the genesis of Shakespearean tragedy and romance to a psychologized version of the Fall, in which original sin is literally the sin of origin, inherited from the maternal body that brings death into the world.” In Adelman’s account, Shakespeare’s confrontation with maternal power has devastating consequences both for masculine selfhood and for the female characters in whom that power is invested: the suffocating mothers who must themselves be suffocated. Ironically, the seeming corroboration of such a sinister status lies in Puritan tirades such as John Knox’s hysterical rodomontade against The Monstrous Regimen of Women— in which, paradoxically, he is denouncing the dominance (regimen) of many great Renaissance monarchies by women rulers, from the time when Marguerite de Navarre headed France during her brother Francis I’s imprisonment by the Emperor Charles V. That successful regency (ended by her securing of her brother’s release) provided a precedent for the far longer Regency of France by Francis’s daughter-in-law Catherine de Medici— at the same time as England was ruled by Mary I, and later when Elizabeth I also ruled in England, while threatened by Mary, Queen of Scots from her northern kingdom. So that domestically and politically it could be said that William Shakespeare experienced something approximating to matriarchy at all levels of society.
Looking at Shakespeare’s scripts we find his experience of womanhood in general, and mothers in particular to be a central feature, unlike their minimal roles in the work of his nearest contemporaries in talent and achievement: in their best-known plays neither Christopher Marlowe nor Ben Jonson reflect deep concern with women’s family status as mothers. By contrast the numerous examples of mothers in Shakespeare’s plots invites creation of a whole range of subcategories of distinctive family structures in which mothers are decisive—present, or even when absent. For some mothers are literally too powerfully present, others disastrously absent; some prove evil, while several prove essential to the happy resolution of story lines, while victims like Juliet, Ophelia and Cordelia notably lack supportive mothers.
The easiest mothers to dispose of are the disastrous ones, since they do not reflect any great insights into maternal misconduct born of first-hand experience: they are mere caricatures manipulated to suit plot designs, not felt knowledge of feminine wickedness. I have in mind Tamora, the ruthless Queen of the Goths in Titus Andronicus, or the wicked queen who, in the interest of her daughter, tries to kill the more attractive Marina in Pericles; and her analogue, Imogen’s enemy in Cymbeline. There is little to be learned from these stereotypes. A little more interesting are failed mothers, such as Lady Capulet, who deserts her daughter Juliet at a time of crisis, to support her husband’s fixation on Juliet’s forced marriage—with almost no index of motivation. It is very revealing that the most interesting group of questionable mothers in Shakespeare is defined by their over-concern with family well-being, and particularly with that of their sons: Constance relentlessly presses the claim to the English throne of her son Arthur in King John, to poor effect; Gertrude’s over-emotional fixation on Hamlet complicates his concerns with her behavior, and it undercuts his capacity to act rationally, as when he kills Polonius in her bedroom. Volumnia’s obsession with the guiding of the military reputation of her son Coriolanus verges on coercion, and it leads audiences to a misreading of the hero’s autonomy in his actual consistently positive actions.
Paradoxically it is just this near morbid interference with male autonomy that marks out the next, more positive maternal category in Shakespeare: the successful manipulators, who resolve the calculated tangles which beset their male dependents. I have in mind the Countess in All’s Well who contrives the overcoming of her son Bertram’s resistance to her ward Helena’s love for him. Even more impressive is the triad of afflicted mothers who confront Richard III, and whose chorus of curses heralds his defeat at Bosworth. Less obvious is Queen Isabel who proposes her intervention in the Anglo-French treaty which ends the war in Henry V by the marriage of her daughter, a similar role to that of the Abbess whose intervention ends The Comedy of Errors, and to Thaisa’s, who achieves a similar resolution in Pericles—all three being women endowed with matriarchal status and social power.
One of the great paradoxes of mothers’ roles in Shakespeare is that some of the most significant are the ones that are not there. Their absence creates a deep distortion of each of the play worlds involved: The Taming of the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love’s Labor’s Lost, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Henry IV, Othello, King Lear. In the comedies the young women lack maternal advice in the face of male volatility, in dealing with which their seemingly widowed fathers are of little assistance—only the mental agility of the heroines can save them and their obtuse lovers from such disasters as those which befall the naiver Juliet, Ophelia and Desdemona. Some fathers even constitute a threat to their daughters, from excessive interest in their marital options, as seen in the ridiculous will of Portia’s father; or the racism of Brabantio in repudiating Desdemona’s marriage to the Moor, Othello ; or Lear’s frustrated over-reaction to Cordelia’s inept emotional obtuseness at his abdication, on the occasion of her carefully planned marriage. Of course the most extreme example of disastrous unconfined paternal interest is the incestuous relationship in the opening scenes of Pericles, whose discovery almost precipitates the hero’s murder. For Shakespeare, a competent mother’s absence from the scene constitutes the risk of impending social ruin, as a result of paternal volatility or incompetence.
So how does Shakespeare express his sense of effective maternal interventions? With sons there is usually an uneasy sense of intense monitoring of the kind seen in Gertrude and Volumnia. With daughters the mothers are far more poised and effective, as we see with the Countess of Auvergne, who unfailingly supports Helena in the face of her son Bertram’s outrageous conduct, which is frustrated by help from another mother, Diana, who saves her daughter from Bertram’s predations by bonding with the Countess and Helena. A similar matriarchal dominance appears in The Merry Wives of Windsor—though Ann Page escapes it to marry the suitor of her own choice, while the other males are totally outmaneuvered by the Wives. In All Is True, a similar matriarchal authority marks the Catholic Queen Katherine of Aragon, who successfully protects her daughter Mary from Henry VIII’s erratic behavior, and consistently displays superior insight and wisdom to her male persecutors, before the heavenly derived masque that provides a mystical celebration of her virtue.
There remains one erratic mother in the canon, Lady Macbeth. Shakespeare accurately indicates that she is a mother, despite questioning by such scholars as L. C. Knights in his notorious essay “How Many Children Has Lady Macbeth?” In trying to mock A. C. Bradley’s literalism about the reality of Shakespeare’s characters, Knight neglects the fact that, historically, Macbeth’s wife did have a son by a previous marriage, Lulach, who inherited Macbeth’s throne by his mother’s provenance. The play’s text reflects this strikingly in her notorious lines of reproach to Macbeth’s cowardice in refusing to assassinate King Duncan:
What beast was’t, then,
That made you break this enterprise to me?
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And, to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man. Nor time nor place
Did then adhere, and yet you would make both:
They have made themselves, and that their fitness now
Does unmake you. I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.
[I.vii.47–60]
We must be shocked by this subversive asservation, but it reflects the same determination to ensure a virile outcome at any price which we see in Joan of Arc in Henry VI Part 1; and in Queen Margaret of Anjou throughout Henry VI, in advocacy of her son and husband; and above all in Volumnia’s cult of her son Coriolanus’s heroism.
Shakespeare has no doubt that women are as capable as politicians as on the battlefield itself, a view initiated in his longest female role and one of his earliest, Queen Margaret, who figures prominently in all four plays of his first English tetralogy—the three parts of Henry VI plus Richard III— in which she appears successively as romantic heroine, wife, political Machiavel, mother, and prophetess. This type of multiple characterization of a uniquely talented historical woman climaxed in Shakespeare’s deployments of Cleopatra. The latter may be Shakespeare’s supreme celebration of female dominance, and it is notable that at the height of her power in the play Cleopatra chooses to incarnate herself as the goddess Isis , publicly presiding over her family. Isis is seen as the ideal mother and wife, and patroness of nature and magic. Isis is identified as the mother of the falcon-headed Horus, symbol of kingship. Isis is also known as protector of the dead and goddess of children. Her name Isis means “throne” as seen in her head-dress, which is a throne. Personifying the throne, she also represented a pharaoh’s power: he was depicted as her child, sitting on the throne she provided.
In this iconic kind of role we encounter other authoritative mothers in Shakespeare’s last plays, ones probably written near or after his mother’s death in 1608: Pericles and The Winter’s Tale. In the first we see the supposedly dead Thaisa, buried at sea by her husband Pericles, restored to life and enshrined as a priestess by her rescuers, only to be restored to her mourning husband at the end of the play. This resurrection recurs even more memorably when Hermione returns from the death that even the audience had been deceived into believing has occurred in the first act. In Shakespeare, Catholicism and Romance, Velma Bourgeois Richmond points out that Hermione first reappears as a seeming statue in a chapel, echoing the concealed icons of the Virgin Mary banished by the Reformers, and her resurrection suggests the transcendence of mortality by that figure. This transcendence is the key to the much-favored artistic theme of the assumption of the Virgin, favored by such painters as Titian and Rubens. However, the motif is even more literally echoed in the deathbed masque honoring Queen Catherine of Aragon, near the end (IV.ii) of what was probably Shakespeare’s last play, All Is True—now usually known as King Henry VIII. There the complex stage directions require the Queen’s coronation by “six persons in white robes” who are “inviting her to a banquet” and “promising eternal happiness.” The recurrence of this pattern of maternal resurrection, in the years following the death of Mary Arden Shakespeare, suggests the playwright’s thoughts about such an option for mothers like his own, to...