SOURCE: Ford, Jane M. “The Triangle in William Shakespeare.” In Patriarchy and Incest from Shakespeare to Joyce, pp. 36-53. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998.

In the following excerpt, Ford explores Shakespeare's resolution of the father-daughter incest threat in a number of his plays, particularly King Lear, Pericles, and The Tempest.

Thou simular of virtue/ That art incestuous. 

William Shakespeare, King Lear

Although variations on the father/daughter theme are central to at least twenty-one of Shakespeare's plays (Boose 1982, 325), the focus here is on four of the plays that illustrate basic patterns of resolution of the incest-threat for the father and the daughter through marriage to a suitor.

… [Relatively little] intimate detail is known about Shakespeare's family relationships. This has only served to stimulate endless speculation, usually based on the correlation between known historical facts found in public records and the sequence and content of the various plays. In...