The Wife-Less Fathers in Shakespearean comedies are Insensitive Towards their Daughters and a Poor Judge of Men and Matters! | Original Article

ABSTRACT:

William Shakespeare ( baptised 26th April 1564 – 23rd April 1616) is one of the finest men of letters the world has ever produced whose worth and significance was felt not only by his contemporaries but also even till date across the globe and times. Though Shakespeare became a married man at an early age of 18, his dramas majorly do not depict wives as strong characters or more so the primary male characters do not have wives at all. Not to forget the fact that if the drama has a strong wife, like in Macbeth or Hamlet, the fate is doomed. On further analysis, we find that in quite a few of his dramas, the father-daughter relationships are estranged chiefly because of the absence of mothers literally or metaphorically. The present study focuses on discussing how the fathers are primarily insensitive or indifferent to the needs of their daughters if their wives were not around. To quote a few Leonato- Hero in Much Ado About Nothing, Shylock-Jessica in Merchant of Venice, and apparently Prospero- Miranda in The Tempest. The idea here is to establish a rationale about the sensitising effect of the mothers as wives and how imperative is their presence