SOURCE: Kahn, Coppélia. “The Providential Tempest and the Shakespearean Family.” Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, edited by Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn, pp. 217-43. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.

In the following essay, Kahn investigates the role of the family in the process of male identity construction as depicted in five Shakespearean romances.

I

Shakespeare rarely portrays masculine selfhood without suggesting a filial context for it. Of all his heroes, only Timon has neither kith nor kin—but through his obsessive giving he tries vainly to make all Athens his family, dependent on him for nurturance. Even the most pathologically solitary hero, Richard III, defines himself by systematically exterminating his family and violating its bonds in novel ways. It goes without saying that Shakespeare depicts all his women characters as sisters, daughters, wives, or mothers. Cleopatra is only superficially an exception, for her milieu of...