Bad Dads: An Examination Of A Recurring Archetype In Shakespeare's Plays

Bad Dads: An Examination of a Recurring Archetype in Shakespeare’s Plays
Children all over the world complain about their parents. Some say that their parents are too restrictive, too absent, or too embarrassing. This has of course been a major complaint for many a year, and it goes so far back as to Elizabethan England. In many of William Shakespeare's plays, parents are not portrayed as desirable ones. They, in fact, do a terrible job, and often the suffering of characters in the play originate from the parent’s poor treatment of their children. Although there are infrequent appearances of acceptable fathers in Shakespeare’s works, fathers repeatedly fall short of being parental role models in Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and A Midsummer Night’s
Sometimes this occurs when the patriarch has a distasteful past with one of the party, sometimes this is because of a fear of losing social standing in their community, and sometimes the father’s only excuse is that he does not like the daughter’s choice of a husband. These authors all support their claims through the use of different examples that can be found throughout Shakespeare’s works, use outside evidence in popular culture to further clarify the reasoning behind their arguments, and even go so far to being prepared also with research that provides cultural context for that period in time which the authors give reasonings for many customs that may prove to be foreign to people today. Based on the informative nature of all of these criticisms, the authors are writing these to be used for decoding Shakespeare’s works in an academic
In the beginning of Othello, Iago and Rodrigo are sent to awaken Desdemona’s father in order to alert him to his daughter’s elopement with Othello. Brabantio is outraged at his daughter’s abandonment of him. When he goes before the Venetian Senate to argue that Desdemona was forced into marrying Othello, Brabantio claims, “If she confess that she was half the wooer,/Destruction on my head if my bad blame/Light on the man.—Come hither, gentle mistress./Do you perceive in all this noble company/Where most you owe obedience?” (Othello, 1.2.274-278). Barbentino is extremely worried about what this marriage between Desdemona and Othello will do to his social standing as Barbentinto is a honorable soldier as well as being understood as living as a wealthy gentleman. Othello threatens his standing because of his race. His being foreign makes this marriage hard to come to terms with, and begins the fall that Iago meticulously plans for Othello’s