Are Mothers Really Missing in Shakespeare's Plays and Does it Matter?
Some Continuing Studies students brought up the idea that Shakespeare had mother issues, the supposed evidence being that he includes so few mothers in his plays. How badly can you miss the point? In this count of mother and widowers, Mike shows that the difference is not significant, that there are practical reason for mothers to not be included in many plays, and the emphasis of this claim is in the wrong place.
One of the old wife's tales of Shakespearean criticism is that he seldom puts mothers in his plays, and it is significant that he does not. This survey of mothers in Shakespeare's plays will see if they are really notable for their absence.
Shakespeare wrote or contributed to 42 known plays. Two have been lost, narrowing our sample to 40. Sir Thomas More has just two brief scenes by Shakespeare who did not guide the project. That play is not representative, reducing our sample to 39 plays. Seventeen of these have mothers, just half a play short of 50%. These plays are:
All's Well That Ends Well
Antony and Cleopatra
The Comedy of Errors
Coriolanus
Cymbeline
Hamlet
Henry V
Henry VI, Part Three
King John
Macbeth
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Pericles, Prince of Tyre
Richard II
Richard III
Romeo and Juliet
Titus Andronicus
The Winter's Tale
Including some of these plays may surprise you. The mothers in Henry VI, Part Three, Macbeth, and Richard II have small parts but they are important characters. In Henry VI, Part Three, Lady Gray parlays King Edward's lust into security for her sons by becoming his queen. The Duchess of York in Richard II is a loving if sometimes hysterical mother. Lady Macbeth says she "has given suck." it is commonly assumed that the Macbeths had a child who died, but I include the play not because of this but because of Lady Macduff's short but important scene with her son. Cleopatra has a large part. She is a mother in Antony and Cleopatra, though none of her children appear on stage. I include her because she is such a bad mother, willing to sacrifice her children to avoid being led captive into Rome.
Some characters may be claimed as mothers, but I exclude them from the count above. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Titania is the Fairie Queen and something of a maternal figure to her fairies and a surrogate mother to the Indian boy, but she is not actually a mother. Juliet in Measure for Measure is pregnant when the play begins but does not function as a mother. Queen Katherine in Henry VIII is a mother, but her children do not appear in the play. Anne Bolin becomes a mother at the end of that play. I do not count her because while much is made of her child, the future Queen Elizabeth I, the scene is incidental to the story.
Since half the plays do have mothers, one wonders how this myth began. One possibility is the high number of widowers in the plays, the same number as the plays with mothers: 17 plays with widowers and 17 with mothers. Widowers appear in:
As You Like It
Cymbeline
Hamlet
Henry IV, Part One
Henry IV, Part Two
King Lear
Macbeth
The Merchant of Venice
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Much Ado About Nothing
Othello
Pericles, Prince of Tyre
The Taming of the Shrew
The Tempest
Titus Andronicus
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Winter's Tale
There are technically 19 plays with widowers, but Brutus in Julius Caesar and Antony in Antony and Cleopatra become widowers over the course of the action. I do not count them, and I remove Antony for an additional reason. He has a long-term relationship with Cleopatra but marries Octavia during the play. He does not function as a widower in the same way that Leonato and Polonius do. This reduces the number of plays to 17. Likewise, Duncan is not around long enough to register as a widower in Macbeth (if that is what he is; there is no wife around), but let's leave him in since he leaves two children to the play's action. So we count 17 widowers who really function as such.
There are practical reasons why some plays may lack mothers. It was not uncommon for women to die in childbirth in early modern England, while it was obviously uncommon for men to die during the birth of their children. First audiences would not find single fathers as noteworthy as we do. An estimate in the Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society found that 10% of all women died giving birth.
Fathers are necessary for certain of Shakespeare's plots when mothers are not. This is particularly true when a daughter must be married and a dowry agreed upon. There is no reason such characters cannot have a wife, as Capulet does in Romeo and Juliet, but mothers are not needed for the plots of Shrew, Verona, Ado, and other plays. Why pay an extra actor for a day's work when a mother character is unnecessary, and besides, there were only three or four boy actors available for each play. They had to be deployed carefully.
I do not think Shakespeare is noteworthy for a lack of mothers. There are plenty of them in his plays and no significant difference between the number of mothers and widowed fathers. Shakespeare did repeatedly return to the theme of fathers and daughters, something underexplored in Shakespeare criticism though the actor Oliver Ford Davies wrote a book about it. We do better to study what Shakespeare did, not what he did not do.
Click here for more about Davies's book. My thanks to Marilyn Aukis Bonomi for telling me about Davies.
