SOURCE: Dubrow, Heather. “‘This Jewel Holds His Building on My Arm’: The Dynamics of Parental Loss in Pericles.” In In the Company of Shakespeare: Essays on English Renaissance Literature in Honor of G. Blakemore Evans, edited by Thomas Moisan and Douglas Bruster, pp. 27-42. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002.

In the following essay, Dubrow analyzes the dynamic involving parents and children in Pericles, positing that Shakespeare's treatment of familial relationships reflected a widespread apprehension about parental loss in Elizabethan and Jacobean society.

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Festschriften and romance are cognate literary genres in that the bonds between generations impel and inform both of them. But if those bonds are celebrated in collections like this one, they are variously celebrated and contaminated, lost and recovered, rejected and reinterpreted, in romance. More specifically, whereas many critics are prone to associate that genre with the loss of children, the death of...