Maternal Authority and the Conflicts It Generates in Early Modern Dramatic Plots

Abstract

This chapter is the historical center of Plotting Motherhood. Dead and living mother plots precede and succeed these centuries, yet they telescope the process in which the western family begins to take a recognizably modern form. Motherhood begins to embody a new significance in early modern texts; it becomes an open and consistent source of conflict, particularly centering on maternal authority and knowledge. Rose argues that Shakespeare’s response to conflictual conceptions of maternal authority is to eliminate mothers entirely from his romantic comedies; in Shakespearean tragedies motherhood is dramatized as a problem. Either maternal will manifests itself in opposition to the hero, serving as prologue to his doom (Coriolanus), or maternal authority and knowledge are represented as opaque and illogical, disturbing and excessive to the plot (Hamlet).