SOURCE: "Father-Daughter as Device in Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies," in Carnegie Series in English, No. 12, 1972, pp. 51-62.

In the essay below, Hart assesses the function of the father-daughter device in Shakespeare's romantic comedies and the varied problems that arise from that relationship.

Father and daughter relationships recur throughout Shakespeare's romantic comedies. He takes a common and a simple family relationship, recognizable immediately to his audience as emotionally powerful, and suggests variations upon that relationship until he has worked the vein as thoroughly as he can within that genre. He begins with father-daughter as a device for expounding plot in the early comedies, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, and A Midsummer Night's Dream; he develops it as a complicated contrast of ideal positions in The Merchant of Venice; and then in the later comedies, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night...