SOURCE: Novy, Marianne. “Multiple Parenting in Pericles.” In ‘Pericles’: Critical Essays, edited by David Skeele, pp. 238-48. New York: Garland Publishing, 2000.

In the following essay, Novy discusses thematic issues associated with family separation and recognition, and the social dynamics of child development suggested by the presence of substitute parents in Pericles and two of Shakespeare's other late romances.

For about forty years, with the combined influence of women's history and the French “mentalites”/Annales School led by Philippe Aries especially important, we have been learning that the family as an institution has a history. Writing this history has not proved to be simple. Lawrence Stone's view that family relations in early modern England were distant is countered by evidence of affection, and in particular of grief at death in the family, in research collected by Alan Macfarlane, Keith Wrightson, Linda Pollock, Michael MacDonald, and others; yet if Stone...