Sibling relationships in Shakespeare's plays : course, quality, and function
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Despite recent interest in family relationships in Shakespeare, the fifty-five or so sets of siblings in the plays have been largely overlooked. This study groups Shakespeare's siblings into the following chapters: twins, rival brothers, civil brothers, sisters, and brothers and sisters. Each chapter shows similarities in Shakespeare's presentation of three broad aspects of the relationship: course (what happens between the siblings); quality (the emotion and realism of the relationship); and function (the dramatic purpose it serves in the play as a whole). Each chapter then discusses each relationship separately, showing its conformity and distinctiveness. The three sets of twins experience the same separation, mistaken identity, and reunion; display a similar closeness and paradoxical distance; and provide their plays with a quest structure and with humor based on mistaken identity. In most of the eleven sets of rival brothers, an evil brother abuses his sibling to gain the family inheritance. Although these rivalries usually lack realistic motivation, emotional confrontations, and convincing reconciliations, they provide the initial conflict and extensive parallelism. The twenty-four sets of civil brothers cooperate to defend family honor against a dynastic challenge; are politically supportive, personally affectionate, and constructively critical; and function in the background as the cement of society and as foils to rival characters. Although the sisters in all five sororal relationships disagree about a husband and/or father, they have more intimate conversations and more realistic relationships than the brothers. All the sisters are foils to each other. Civil sisters function much as civil brothers do, whereas rival sisters have the more important role of setting up parallel plots in their plays. The thirteen brother-sister-relationships, by far the most affectionate, follow three different courses and function either to provide the central figures of the plot or to illuminate the brother's character. Besides revealing these consistent patterns that Shakespeare uses in presenting sibling relationships, this study also suggests the strong correspondence between siblings in the plays and in Elizabethan--and in universal human--life.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.