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Volume 2, Number 3 (1977) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum PATRIMONY AND SHAKESPEARE'S DAUGHTERS W. NICHOLAS KNIGHT University of Missouri-Rolla, Department of Humanities inheritance by women. His father had mortgaged away what was to have come to him from Mary, his mother. His only son, Hamlet, had died at the age of ten, leaving his twin sister Judith, and Susanna, an older sister (conceived before wedlock) to be Shakespeare's only direct heirs. So, for Shakespeare, his time and ours, inheritance important to the continuation of social structures has been implicity sex-linked through patrimony to male heirs. This brief explication using approaches from biography, law and psycho- logy will, hopefully, suggest that the preoccupation of Shakespeare with fathers and daughters in his last plays coincides with a similar concern evidenced in his life. Leonard F. Manheim in "The Mythical Joys of Shakespeare; Or What You Will," Shakespeare Encomium (The City College Papers I) ed. Anne Paulucci, 1964, pp. 100-112, cautiously paralleling Norman N. Holland's psychological approaches to Shakespearean studies, suggests that the depiction of twins in Twelfth Night is understandable through psychoanalytical techniques and reveals an incest motif. In a biographical footnote (p. 112) he suggests, but leaves to reader speculation, the connection between twins and an incest-taboo concern in Shakespeare's plays as well as in Shakespeare's biographical relation to his own twins. Professor Manheim eyen suggests that legal action in Shakespeare's life may be a clue to some connection between his life concerns and his art. It appears that Shake- speare has a preoccupation with this theme from Comedy of Errors, through Twelfth Night to King Lear and the last romances (Pericles, Winter's Tale and Tempest). Coppelia Kahn (Wesleyan University) recently in an unpublished paper entitled "The Shakespearean Family Romance" presented at the Shakespeare Association of America meetings in New Orleans, April 1977, develops this as an exclusively literary theme in Twelfth Night to raise questions about daughters and inheritance. In this paper I wish to combine the interdisciplinary approaches of literary, psychological, biographical and legal studies to concretize Shakespeare's concern over inheritance.) Perhaps we can also observe in this how the mechanism of societal inherit- ance travels along libidinal lines already cut by paternalism and in this case particularly toward daughters. Shakespeare's Jacobean tragedies and romances evidence some astonishing corroboration of biographical material in Will's own story as the theme of land acquisition and conveyance is pursued through the process of inheritance, from the point of view of the testator, William Shake- speare; he personifies the figure in King Lear with Prospero in The Tempest.. In this later period, when Shakespeare puts a mirror up to the judicial process and mocks a court, as he does in King Lear (1605), he assumes it must represent the bifurcated fount of justice he has been advocating in his earlier comedies and pursued in his personal court cases in Queen's Bench and Chancery. LEAR: I'll see their (his daughters', Goneril's and Regan's)King Lear, among other things, reveals Shakespeare's preoccupation at this time with justice and right due authority; an aging man's concern about his inheritance and his offspring, in the striking absence of a mother; and with laws pertaining to these circumstances. The play can be read as a pro-. jection of some of the dramatist's personal involvement evidenced by the bio- graphical events and legal actions Shakespeare is engaged in at the time. His concern over the lack of male lineage is visible in Macbeth (1606), where Macbeth has no heirs and goes about killing the sons of others, Duncan's two, Banquo's, Macduff's, and Siward's, and where Duncan settles his inherit- ance, in like manner as Claudius upon Hamlet (I. ii. 106-122); DUNCAN: Sons, kinsmen, thanesHe also evidences his awareness of legal bonds and obligations between persons in the famous: "He's here in double trust;" (I. vii. 12). Trusting or entrusting someone with an obligation is formalized by the legal act of establishing a trust. A trust is what Shakespeare will have to set up to assume that his estate will devolve upon his daughters, in hopes that it will eventually be received by males of his own flesh. Lear's main source of action is of a father dividing his estate among his daughters upon their marriages. When he does so, he discovers that his judgement has betrayed him and that he has brought forth by the laws of the body and by laws of inheritance, to which he is now subject, both good and bad offspring. The play reveals other fears: that of the patrimony being stolen from the son in the subplot of Edmund's stealing the inheritance from his legitimate brother Edgar, recapitulating Shakespeare's experience of Edmund Lambert's holding from his brother-in-law what was to have been Shakespeare's inheritance. The root of evil in both plots is traceable to sexual misconduct. The evil of Goneril and Regan is reflected in their sexual incontinence with Edmund. Edmund blames his evil upon his being Gloucester's natural son. Cordelia, innocent and chaste, remains true but is tragically destroyed by the old man's folly and preoccupation toward his daughters, wherein they become his missing wife, and mother, as well as the daughters of the piece. LEAR: Tremble, thou wretchLear is portrayed as a father revered by the three daughters, abused by two and mothered by one. In the first scene of King Lear, the audience is witness to familiar legal actions relating to inheritance. Lear engages in the legal operations of the divesture of property, the entailment of estate, the reservation in grant, and the construction of a dowry. Documents bearing Shakespeare's third signa- ture on legal papers show that in 1612 he confirmed, in the Belott-Mountjoy suit, that he had participated on November 19, 1604, (the year before writing Lear) in the setting up of a dowry by Christopher Mountjoy, his French Huguenot landlord who had property on a corner of Silver Street in London. Later Stephen Belott sued for the fulfillment of the dowry that was to accompany Mary Mountjoy. So, Shakespeare bore witness to an inheritance that another Mary was to gain which had been threatened. That was one dowry; Shakespeare was going to have to arrange for two in his immediate family; and Lear handled three at once. All were threatened by the fathers' capacity and desire to withdraw, or alter, the endowment, inheritance, or patrimony. Thus, Lear abounds in justice, mortality, sexual dilemmas, family, but chiefly celebrates an old man and his idealized good and loyal daughter. Although saying she owes half her love to him and half to her husband, Cordelia returns to console him in life and join him in death. This favoring in Shakespeare's personal life culminated in the marriage of his eldest daughter Susanna on June 5, 1607, to the brilliant Dr. Hall, an accomplished and learned physician who resided in Stratford. Within the proper grace period was born a grand- daughter, christened Elizabeth Hall, on February 21, 1608, and likely being honored on a secondary level by Shakespeare in the passage on the birth of Queen Elizabeth in Henry VIII (1613): KING: What is her name?In the same year, following the birth of Elizabeth Hall, on September 9, 1608, Shakespeare's mother Mary is buried. These family events of birth, death and marriage have psychological impact upon the great Lear (1605), with his daughters; the strange Pericles (1606-1608) and its explicit incest motif between father and daughter; and the problematic tragedy of Coriolanus,(1608- 1609), with Volumnia the dominant mother-figure. The ambition instilled in the dramatist by the father's ruse and prompted to compensation by his father's fearful fall was from 1601 onward redirected to the women in Shakespeare's life, being projected in Coriolanus upon the mother- figure in Volumnia (emerging first in the wife-mother ambitious drives in Lady Macbeth) and then upon his daughters as evidenced by King Lear. Prospero, in The Tempest, like Lear, has a daughter, Miranda, and no wife; the father projects his fear of the sexual corruption of his offspring upon the character of the natural man, Caliban, as it is in Lear upon Edmund the natural son. This fear and concomitant desire to protect his daughters as represented in Lear and Prospero are carried to their explicit culmination in Pericles, and in Leontes of The Winter's Tale. The feminine preoccupation is portrayed in Pericles by the liaison between Antiochus and his daughter, and the characters of Thaisa, Marina, and their counterparts Dionyza, Lychorida (a nurse) and a Bawd presided over by Diana. Similarly, The Winter's Tale presents the wife, Hermione, who is lost and returned upon the maturation of the daughter, along with Perdita, who is ready for marriage; with Paulina, a spokeswoman for this wife-daughter complex of figures against Leontes' jealousy. These plays, written when the males of Shakespeare's generation as well as his parents are dying around him, reveal how Shakespeare's mind was turning from London's Court and the Inns of Court to Stratford, his pastoral fields, and residence, after the earlier loss of his only son, distantly echoed in Mamillius' death in The Winter's Tale, to concentrate on his new return to his wife, daughters, their marriages, and their offspring, in the way Leontes does in the same play. Pericles turns out to be analysis of the father finding himself in his lost daughter-wife figures. Coriolanus is a study of a son's feelings toward his mother, written following Shakespeare's own mother's death. These personal preoccupations are not devoid of legal implications as sons possess mother's inheritance, as fathers transmit themselves to daughters and husbands treat wives tyrannically. Along with the characteristic motifs of this period in The Winter's Tale (1610-1611) Shakespeare presents a last trial scene depicting a court perverted by the taint with which King James threatened Chancery, his assertion of royal authority. Coinciding with this emerging preoccupation over mothers, daughters, female innocence, mercy and equity, is that of Shakespeare's fear and distaste for the willful and threaten- ing male justice figure of a father, a King, or a Leontes (lion) type, becoming converted in time from malevolence, to folly, to benignity, to benevolence in Claudius, Lear, Leontes and Prospero, respectively, as Shakespeare ultimately controls this figure in his art, and through his art, in his own father and then King James himself. At this time, it is known from Thomas Greene's letters indicating that he is about to move out of New Place in 1610, Shakespeare returns to Stratford. Here in this town with pastoral associations far from London City, he turns to his second daughter, Judith. In writing The Tempest, he speaks of a man exercising his magic by which the world is brought to admire his daughter, with the wife-mother absent, protecting Miranda from Caliban and bestowing her upon a Prince. These factors from the plays would be of little value to a biography except that they are borne out by events from Shakespeare's life. His interests in his daughters as handled in his art are met with manifestations of these fears from the real world in sexual slanders upon his favored daughter and sexual corruption foist-ed upon his less favored daughter. Both are revealed by law suits; one pursued by himself, with Thomas Greene as his legal aide. As has been observed, Shakespeare's eldest daughter, Susanna, was married on June 5, 1607, to John Hall, a learned man, a distinguished physician and a noted citizen. Scandal erupted in the Hall household in 1613. As a conse- quence, on July 13, Susanna sought a writ of slander and brought action for defamation (cf. Measure for Measure, II. i. 190) in the Consistory (an Ecclesias- tical) Court at Worcester. Susanna's charge was against John Lane, whose uncle, Richard Lane, Shakespeare had asked to be one of the witnesses for the commission out of Chancery on the Lambert controversy (through which Shakespeare lost his mother's inheritance finally in 1599) and had been of Shakespeare's party in the suit to Chancery on the Stratford tithes. John Lane (Jr.) had accused Shakespeare's daughter by saying Susanna "...had the running of the reins and had been naught (i.e. immoral) with Rafe Smith at John Palmer (a small town)." Ralph Smith was a Stratford haberdasher and hatter; his uncle was Hamlet Sadler, the close friend of Shakespeare (for whom he named his son). The males of the second generation of close acquaintances were a threat to the reputation of his daughters; and in the case of Judith, to come, and, at first, Susanna, the Shakespeares struck back at the male contemporaries of the son William no longer had. With this court case, Susanna has become subject to precisely the slanderous accusation of adultery as in something of a prophetic manner for Shakespeare's biography was Hermione in The Winter's Tale, anticipated by Desdemona in Othello. John Lane, "...a ne'er-do-well, was some years later hailed. into court for riot and libels against the vicar and aldermen, and was then described as a drunkard." (cf. S. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare's Lives (Oxford, 1970), p. 27.) Robert Whatcott was the lawyer who represented Mrs. Susanna Hall and is often not recognized, or is misidentified, by scholars and critics when they encounter his name as one of the witnesses of the dramatist's will. He is another one of the numerous attorneys or representatives working for, or associated with, the Shakespeare family. John Lane did not appear in court to support the rumors he had spread and was excommunicated. Susanna's chast ity had been maligned, but like Hermione, she survived the accusation triumphantly, and like Cordelia was ultimately honored by the father, receiving New Place and virtually all his personal property upon his death. The epitaph upon her tomb after she dies in 1649 reads: Witty above her sex, but that's not all,So, as he had desired, something of himself against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune had been preserved. On February 10, 1616, when she was nearly 31, Judith, the younger daughter of Shakespeare, married Thomas Quiney, the son of Shakespeare's friend, Richard Quiney, and grandson of John Sheakespeare's companion, Adrian. Thomas was a vintner, or innkeeper, and was 26, much Judith's junior, which was reminiscent of Will's marriage. Perhaps she had tried to please him, and later even named her son "Shaxper." Unfortunately, he died in infancy. Fate was against her. Anthony Burgess narrates the developments of the situation well: "Marriage to a tavern-keeper was scarcely what WillA certain Margaret Wheelar had become pregnant by Quiney nine months before, and this sexual conduct suddenly became evident to society a month after the wedding. Quiney must have reminded Shakespeare of his characterization of Angelo in Measure for Measure and Bertrand in All's Well That Ends Well, but, fortunately, in art the objects of their adulterous designs are suddenly switched at the last months for their betrothed. Wheelar and the child died and were buried on March 15, 1616. On March 26, with the lawyer, Thomas Greene, Will's former lodger, as prosecuting counsel, Quiney confessed in court that he had had "carnal intercourse with the said Wheelar" and was sorry. He had good reason for being genuinely sorry for, the day before the trial, Shakespeare had altered his will drastically, much reducing poor Judith's expecta- tion; she was punished for her match. Thomas had to do public penance. He appeared in the parish church on three successive Sundays at the end of which time William Shakespeare was to be dead! Thomas had married into the Shakespeare family without producing his share of the marriage settlement of one hundred pounds in land. Later, he was to be fined for swearing and for allowing drunkenness on his premises. (See Burgess.) The episode of Judith, as well as that of Susanna, shows that the plays of the later period were, strangely enough, prophetic about events to happen in Shakespeare's life. They initially evidenced a fear in the father which, while handled in the art, in turn was to manifest itself in the form of threats from offspring of contemporary friends fortunate to have sons, but not of fortunate character. The Shakespeares took up the law to protect themselves, to punish and reward at a time when the dramatist was personally nearly reenacting the tragedy of the good and evil daughters of King Lear and reexperiencing a mood toward daughters captured in the adulterous slander of The Winter's Tale and the sexual looming of The Tempest: PROSPERO: Then, as my gift and thine own acquisition Evil, particularly with sexual overtones, corrupted metaphysically in the art but had erupted in reality after being anticipated in the unconscious. The ordering of the law was invoked for punishment, vindication, reward and the casting away of the unruly sons (Caliban, Edmund, John Lane and Thomas Quiney). The patrimony had been attached by the ignorant, unknowing and false accusing (Lane and Edmund figures) and the unconscious, willful, and beastly (Quiney and Caliban figures) again, and close to the end (had it hastened the end?); Judith's marriage was in February; Quiney's trial was in March; and Shakespeare was dead in April of 1616. All his fears had come upon him and the blows had come across the generation from sons of friends. But the legacy survived, with judicious alterations. Shakespeare's estate, through his use of the law, was to have gone to his son Hamlet; he protected his daughters to receive it by legal means, and kept it intact for some future male heir by the reach of law through time. If Shakespeare's death was not hastened by difficulties over his daughter's inheritance at least his plays corroborate a preoccupation on this subject, with evidence of considerable psychological weight upon him. He was under the social pressures to make a good end upon his family. The difficulty of doing so with the sexual bias of the law against women as direct heirs of their fathers' devotion or their grandparents' love, when passing through the female line, is clearly provided by his life records in conjunction with passages from his last plays. In the case of Shakespeare, despite his knowledge of the tragedy of King Lear and Cordelia, he had to be inequitable to Judith, his younger daughter and twin of his only son, and give all to Susanna. One of the wealthiest men in Stratford had to disinherit one of his daughters to protect his estate from her husband and there is literary, legal and perhaps biographical evidence that he was not pleased at all about having to do this. |
