The ending of King Lear devastates the audience as well. No play creates a clearer sense of a plunge into the abyss. At the same time, Lear, like Shakespeare’s other tragedies, gives us the luxury of experiencing such feelings vicariously. At the curtain’s drop, we can walk away from the battlefield, the heath, the death chamber, saddened but also enlightened. In gentler ways, the comedies, too, can teach us about the choices and forces that drive and shape our lives. While the consequences in the lighter plays are not so intractable or dire, the characterization in those plays, too, is complex and psychologically realistic, grounded in Shakespeare’s remarkable insight into the human mind and heart. In Carol Rutter’s words, “The reason we still go to see these plays is that they continue to inform us who we are” [Clamourous Voices: Shakespeare’s Women Today, ed. Faith Evans (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. xi]. This book has argued for the benefits, aesthetic and practical, of knowing a key cross-section of Shakespeare’s characters: from daughters who seem to be their father’s ideal children, to those who reject or feign that role, to those who have grown beyond their early nurture to assume the parental role themselves; from fathers whose prescience and generosity make them model parents to those who dictate and restrict, to those who become the beneficiaries of their daughters’ wisdom and love.
Why does Shakespeare focus on the father-daughter relationship, and on the moment when the daughter is poised to leave her father’s home and try her own wings? Because that is the moment of truth, when the father’s convictions and hopes, his conception of his daughter and of himself, undergo the crucial test. At that point the daughter makes her choices: what she wants, whom she loves, and how she feels about her father’s approbation or disapproval. The plays remind us that parents cannot reinvent the children that they have borne. Instead, their aim should be to understand who they are and to give them room to grow: to nurture their gifts, resist crushing their spirits, and then get out of the way, except to be open to what they can teach their elders. It is a process that requires infinite empathy and hope, and that pays the highest rewards or, if we get it wrong, exacts the direct consequences.
Unlike small children, who are likely to tell adults frankly what they think, adolescents, like Juliet and Bianca, are sophisticated enough to know what their parents want to hear—and to say the words that we signal to them that we expect, whether or not they mean them. If communication breaks down further, they may stop confiding in us altogether and take upon themselves decisions about matchmaking or even survival. Children have to be willing to reach out, to risk telling a parent what is troubling them, and to explain more fully if the adult gets it wrong. But often it is the parent who, like Capulet who rants and threatens or Baptista who plays favorites and dotes, squelches the attempt at communication. Some of the worst mistakes that parents make, in Shakespeare’s plays and in life, come when they act out of embarrassment or vanity. Both are signs that the parent is focused on his own needs, not the child’s. Shakespeare takes that idea to an extreme when he has King Lear say, “Better thou / Hadst not been born than not t’have pleased me better.” Of course, the irony is that he is berating Cordelia, his one loyal daughter. Shakespeare was a father, too.
Time and again, these plays teach us that the daughters cannot be fooled about fairness or sincerity or love. Adolescents have a reputation for being rebels, but, in Shakespeare’s day as in our own, they are also idealists. The plays urge us to credit their strengths, to treat them as individuals—beware the shadow of the favored sibling—and, most important, to model for them the qualities that we want them to develop. The most attentive witnesses to our character are the young people in our care, who learn moral lessons, positive and negative, from what we say and do, whether or not we offer them wittingly. Shakespeare’s daughters are watching as their fathers deal with an unfavorable turn of fortune, address an authority figure or an underling, or react to a fault in their behavior. They know how Duke Senior bears up under exile, how Polonius kowtows to his king, what evokes Lear’s rage or Prospero’s tenderness. They relish their father’s praise, and all but the most hardened of them hate feeling that they have not measured up to his expectations. At the same time, Shakespeare shows us the need to signal to our daughters that we do not see them simply as the sum of their gifts and achievements—the traits that reflect well on us—but as uniquely, intrinsically precious. Loving one’s children does not mean absolving them of responsibility, however, and support does not mean license. Shakespeare’s good fathers hold themselves and their daughters to high standards of accomplishment and integrity. Prospero, Duke Senior, even Portia’s dead father whose strengths are revealed chiefly in the terms of his will, expect their children to be diligent, trustworthy, loyal, and loving, and they demonstrate those qualities by their own example.
Ultimately, Shakespeare teaches us, parents cannot do better than to bless their child’s imminent departure from the family home with Prospero’s wish. He is speaking to Ariel, the “airy spirit” that he has cherished like a son: “To the elements / Be free, and fare thou well.” That old-fashioned pronoun may need some glossing: Prospero does not say fare thee well—good-bye, so long—but fare thou well—may you prosper. Of course, Ariel is supernatural. With human children such as Miranda, the end should be a beginning. The great hope for the self-sacrificing and bereft old magician, as Shakespeare well knew, is the wonderful secret at the other end of child-rearing. Beloved children, like Miranda, Rosalind and, all too briefly, Cordelia, return, and in the form of their parents’ best young friends. As Carol Gilligan notes, the tales of these heroines’ struggles for selfhood have the force of myth. In an age when we are groping for standards and guidelines, when the bases for individual identity can seem ephemeral and social coherence precarious, Shakespeare’s plays offer deep roots of human understanding and emotional health.