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The Family in Shakespeare's Time
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About the lecture
In this module, we explore the importance of the family in Shakespeare’s time, focusing especially on: (i) the abandonment of Catholicism in England, and with it the abandonment of being single as the ideal state, (ii) the turn towards marriage and family as a holy state under Protestantism and (iii) The painting King Henry VIII and his Family and its depiction of a nuclear family between Henry VIII, Jane Seymour, and her son Edward and its different reality.
About the lecturer
Dr Emma Whipday is Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at Newcastle University. Her research focuses on gender, family, power, and performance in early modern culture. Her most recent publications include Shakespeare’s Domestic Tragedies (2020), which was the co-winner of Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award 2020 and (as co-editor) Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England (2022).
Hello.
00:00:06I'm Dr Emma Whipped, lecturer in Renaissance literature at Newcastle University,
00:00:06And I'm going to be talking in this course about how family,
00:00:11gender and power intersect in the plays of Shakespeare.
00:00:14And I want to start by thinking about
00:00:18why family was so important in Shakespeare's England.
00:00:20But in order to understand that,
00:00:24we have to know a little bit about the larger religious history.
00:00:26So as I imagine, you know,
00:00:29Henry the eighth broke with the Church
00:00:30of Rome and therefore took England from Catholicism
00:00:32to Protestantism in order to marry and Berlin and divorce Catherine of Aragon,
00:00:36his daughter Mary's mother.
00:00:41When he did this, there was a huge religious shift across the entire country
00:00:43that was reinforced when his son Edward, as a young boy,
00:00:47took the throne after his father.
00:00:50But after Edwards sudden death when his sister, Mary, inherited.
00:00:53Suddenly the country moved back to Catholicism
00:00:57and on Mary's death, when her sister Elizabeth, of course,
00:01:00the daughter of Amber Lynn,
00:01:03inherited
00:01:04the country moved back to Protestantism again,
00:01:05and in this religious turmoil there was a shift between what
00:01:09family meant to different people and two different sections of society,
00:01:12and this was because in Catholic England
00:01:18there was an emphasis on being single as the perfect virtuous state,
00:01:21a monk or a nun who committed themselves to single virginal life was seen as ideal.
00:01:25And if you couldn't bear to do that, that
00:01:32then you were expected to marry as partly a way of ensuring that you didn't
00:01:34have sex outside of marriage and ST Paul had put it in the Bible,
00:01:38it was better to marry than burn.
00:01:43That is better to marry than to burn in hell for having premarital sex.
00:01:45However, in Protestant England,
00:01:50things changed because under Edward and then Elizabeth,
00:01:52there was an increasing emphasis on the family
00:01:56as the place where Protestant values could be
00:01:59created and developed as a way of ensuring
00:02:02the entire country was faithful in the ideal,
00:02:05at least
00:02:08to Protestantism.
00:02:08So suddenly,
00:02:10marriage was seen as the ideal as a way of bringing up that Protestant family,
00:02:11and Edward and then Elizabeth ordered sermons
00:02:16to be preached throughout the country,
00:02:19reinforcing this ideal,
00:02:21in the words of one of these sermons.
00:02:23Some are in high degree, some in low,
00:02:25some kings and princes,
00:02:29some inferiors and subjects,
00:02:31priests and laymen masters and servants,
00:02:33fathers and Children, husbands and wives,
00:02:36rich and poor,
00:02:39and everyone have need of the other.
00:02:41So this is an ideal of an hierarchical household.
00:02:44The idea that the father,
00:02:48husband master should be ruling over the wife and Children and servants
00:02:49just as the monarch rules over the country or as God rules over humanity.
00:02:55Of course,
00:03:01this is slightly complicated by the fact that
00:03:02Elizabeth herself wasn't living in a nuclear family.
00:03:03She was unmarried. She was ruling as a single woman.
00:03:06But in having these sermons preached around the country,
00:03:10she was ensuring that she was seen as the exception rather than the rule
00:03:13that everyone else was supposed to live in these idealised nuclear families.
00:03:17As Mary Beth Rose put it in her book, The Expense of Spirit,
00:03:21the Protestant idealisation of holy matrimony constitutes a coherent,
00:03:26elaborate and self conscious effort to construct
00:03:31a new ideology of the private life.
00:03:35So essentially, this wasn't accidental.
00:03:38This was a purposeful attempt to create this ideal around the nuclear family,
00:03:40and this wasn't just preached in sermons.
00:03:45There were a series of books known as domestic conduct books about
00:03:47how people should be behaving in the family and in the home
00:03:51and in one of these, a book called Christian Economy by William Perkins
00:03:55and An Economy here means the running of the household rather than economy,
00:03:59as we might now think of it in monetary terms.
00:04:03In this book, William Perkins wrote,
00:04:06A Family is a natural and simple society
00:04:09of certain persons having mutual relation one to another
00:04:12under the private government of one.
00:04:17So there are a couple of things here that are important.
00:04:20The first is this idea of mutuality,
00:04:22the idea that it's not just that one person rules over everything.
00:04:24It's that people have responsibilities,
00:04:28whether they're in a ruling or in an obedient position.
00:04:31And they should be linked somehow,
00:04:35either through blood through family relations or through service through
00:04:37the master and servant or mistress and servant Bond.
00:04:41But at the same time, you'll notice that
00:04:44Perkins is very careful to say, the private government of one,
00:04:46just as they're just one monarch
00:04:50at all. Just one god.
00:04:52The idea is that there should be just one person ruling over the household,
00:04:53and in this patriarchal society,
00:04:58this one person is, of course, a man.
00:05:00But this ideal didn't always map onto the reality.
00:05:04Real life families were extremely complex,
00:05:07especially in a world where high mortality meant that
00:05:10there was a high number of step families.
00:05:13It's ironic that considering Elizabeth was responsible for
00:05:15helping reinforce and popularised this ideal of the household
00:05:18as a sort of miniature state that was also the bedrock of the safety of the country.
00:05:22But she herself grew up in an extremely complex family.
00:05:27She had four different stepmothers,
00:05:31and we can see this tension between the ideal and the reality.
00:05:33In a surviving portrait called The Family of Henry the eighth,
00:05:37this portrait was commissioned by Henry himself,
00:05:41and it shows Henry with his son and heir, Edward,
00:05:44and the mother of his son of air and air, Jane Seymour, in the centre of the portrait,
00:05:47framed by two pillars.
00:05:52On either side of the pillars are his two daughters by his other marriages,
00:05:54Mary and Elizabeth, who are also as to the throne after Edward.
00:05:58But they're on the edges of the picture.
00:06:03The nuclear family is at the centre,
00:06:06however,
00:06:09What slightly uncomfortable about this is that Jane Seymour at this
00:06:09point had been dead for many years she died surely,
00:06:13after after giving birth to Edward.
00:06:15He has a new wife, Catherine Parr.
00:06:18A number of wives later, in fact, but she doesn't get to appear in the portrait.
00:06:20So the portrait is a fantasy of a nuclear family that Henry's already lost,
00:06:25complicated by the presence of his daughters,
00:06:29the half sisters of the son and heir at the centre of the picture.
00:06:32I think Shakespeare is interested in exploring
00:06:37the tensions that are evident in this
00:06:39portrait between the ideal of the nuclear
00:06:41family of the household of the Protestant home
00:06:44and the reality
00:06:48that so many people experienced from the queen to her subjects.
00:06:49And in the next lectures,
00:06:54I'm going to be exploring how this is interrogated by Shakespeare in his place.
00:06:55
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Whipday, E. (2023, January 17). The Family - The Family in Shakespeare's Time [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/options/the-family-c25d8932-61bc-4946-af87-acb1f1394c0e?auth=0&lesson=11570&option=13453&type=lesson
MLA style
Whipday, E. "The Family – The Family in Shakespeare's Time." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 17 Jan 2023, https://massolit.io/options/the-family-c25d8932-61bc-4946-af87-acb1f1394c0e?auth=0&lesson=11570&option=13453&type=lesson