“Must I Remember?”: A Just-So Story about Shakespeare and His Mother

Since the pre-oedipal turn in psychoanalytic thinking, psychoanalytic and feminist critics, sometimes in concert, sometimes not, have studied the roles of mother-infant themes in Shakespeare's drama and poetry. In Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays (1980), edited by Murray Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn, several contributions concentrated on pre-oedipal issues. Schwartz's essay drew on Winnicott's (1971) concept of potential space to understand how Shakespeare's dramatic worlds and our imaginative response to them turn on crucial early phases of infantile development. Madelon Gohlke Sprengnether analyzed how deep fears of dependency on women become destructive in King Lear and other tragedies. Janet Adelman explored Coriolanus's ferocious drive toward independence, which reveals at every stage his ultimate failure to separate himself from Volumnia, his mother. My own contribution tried to show how the tragedies and romances were shaped by crises central to the earliest manifestations of emergent selfhood: “at one extreme, a deeply feared longing for merger subverts relations of trust; at the other, failed autonomy gives way to helpless isolation” (Wheeler, 1980, p. 151).

Recognized in the dedication of this volume as the critic “who fostered so much of this work,” C.L. Barber (1980) is represented with an essay called “The Family in Shakespeare's Development: Tragedy and the Sacred.” Distinctive to Barber's essay was his effort to understand patterns in Shakespeare's artistic development in relation to what is known about Shakespeare's life. Pivotal to this study, and to The Whole Journey: Shakespeare's Power of Development (Barber & Wheeler, 1986), were Barber's explorations of Shakespeare's father's well-documented rise to and fall from prominence, and the loss, in the new religion, of sacred resources for dealing with extreme personal crises.

Barber noted: “One cannot, of course, derive Shakespeare's creative achievement from such facts. But one ca