SOURCE: "Shakespeare's Imperiled and Chastening Daughters of Romance," in South Atlantic Bulletin, Vol. XLIII, No. 4, November, 1978, pp. 125-40.

In the essay below, Frey examines the complex and timeless responses of daughters to familial pressures.

Shakespeare's plays often open with generational conflicts that point up distressing consequences of patriarchy: fathers and husbands treating children and wives as mere property or appurtenances of themselves (for example, Duke of Milan in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Egeus in A Midsummer Night's Dream, fathers and husbands in The Taming of the Shrew and The Merry Wives of Windsor, the Capulets, Lear, Brabantio), children greedy for patrimony (Oliver in As You Like It, various characters in the Histories, and in Lear Edmund, Goneril, and Regan), or "lovers" greedy for dowry (suitors of Kate, and Portia, and Anne Fenton, Angelo in Measure for Measure, Burgundy in Lear). The elder generation often adheres, moreover, to...