Shakespeare and the Misrecognition of Fathers and Sons

Abstract

I am going to look at some deferred, denied and disappointed reunions between Shakespeare’s fathers and their estranged sons. But I begin, for the sake of a prefatory contrast, with Shakespeare’s daughters, and specifically with those plays late in Shakespeare’s career where the father’s strong longing for reunion with his lost daughter is also, almost, a longing for union with a woman who must be simultaneously daughter, mother and wife. Pericles, who has fled down the years the dreamlike knowledge of an act of father—daughter incest which illogically but powerfully portends his own unenacted guilt, comes the closest of these Shakespearean patriarchs to fulfilling that fantasy of union; and his language of recognition, mixing pain with joy in ecstatic attainment, almost literalises the fact:

Give me a gash, put me to present pain,

Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me

O’erbear the shores of my mortality,

And drown me with their sweetness — Oh come hither,

Thou that begett’st him that did thee beget... (Pericles V.i. 196–200)¹