Fathers and Sons in Shakespeare: The Debt Never Promised (review)

As its title promises, Fred B. Tromly’s excellent book examines the relationships between fathers and sons in Shakespeare’s plays. Its central premise is that Shakespearean sons are typically ambivalent about their fathers. Focusing on a group of ‘the most complex and divided sons in the plays,’ Tromly traces a pattern in which these sons either rescue their fathers from death (young John Talbot in 1 Henry VI, Hal in 1 Henry IV, Edgar in King Lear) or attempt to revenge the fathers after their deaths (Hamlet and Laertes). According to Freud, the rescue-motif in boys’ dreams – the fantasy of saving their fathers’ lives – stems from a defiant wish to settle accounts; the rescue is, in Tromly’s paraphrase, ‘a form of payback’ as they rid themselves of the burden of debt. Tromly finds evidence for an analogous, dark interpretation of the rescue-motif in Shakespeare’s plays in the scenes which follow the filial rescues: ‘having risked his life to save his father, the apparently dutiful son proceeds to avenge himself (in a devious way) against that same father. It is as if the son compensates for the rescue by a reprisal, undoing what he had done.’ Balancing his debt to Freud and psychoanalytic criticism with a sensitivity to the plays’ historical contexts, Tromly prefaces his analysis with a substantial chapter highlighting the social and religious prescriptions of filial duty in Elizabethan England, as well as the likelihood of actual filial resistance to such prescriptions.

In general, Tromly’s argument is highly persuasive: he makes good use of Shakespeare’s sources, showing significant contrasts with the plays, and his close readings are typically illuminating. However, he argues in part from silence: thus in his interpretation of Hal as ambivalent son, Tromly makes much of the silence he finds in Hal’s soliloquy in Part One (1.2), in which the prince does not refer to ‘his father’s usurpation and thus to his own dubious legitimacy as crown prince and future king.’ I am not persuaded that such a “lack” can bear the burden Tromly places upon it, nor that when Hal frees the Douglas after the battle of Shrewsbury the apparently magnanimous gesture ‘conceals hostility toward his father.’ Certainly Tromly makes a stronger case for filial ambivalence in Hamlet, who is coerced into bloody action by the Ghost’s demands; and especially in Edgar, who withholds emotional comfort from the blinded Gloucester, refusing in act 4 to reveal himself and offer the reconciliation his father longs for.

In a final biographical coda, Tromly allows himself to consider the possible implications of his study for the relationship between the playwright and his father. Reviewing the evidence, he finds good reason to suppose tension between John Shakespeare and his eldest son. John, a businessman who suffered severe losses when William was an adolescent, was unlikely to have been happy with the boy’s early, unthrifty marriage. (The pregnant Anne Hathaway brought little in the way of dowry to repair the ‘severely straitened’ fortunes of the family.) Probably even more distressing to his father was William’s subsequent decision to join a company of players: as Tromly notes, John could not have foreseen the substantial wealth a theatrical career would bring his son. With this wealth, however, William was able to rescue his father economically and socially, making him a gentleman before his death. Indeed, ironically William became ‘the ambitious, successful businessman his father had once been . . . In his commitment to investing in land and agricultural products in the vicinity of Stratford and in his participation in financial practices that bordered on the unscrupulous and illegal, such as money lending and grain-hoarding, William Shakespeare quite literally profited by his father’s example.’