SOURCE: Novy, Marianne. “Shakespeare and Emotional Distance in the Elizabethan Family.” Theatre Journal 33, no. 3 (October 1981): 316-26.

In the following essay, Novy probes the issue of emotional barriers between family members in Shakespeare's plays.

One of the most startling ideas in Lawrence Stone's The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500-1800 is the claim that most people in sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century England “found it very difficult to establish close emotional ties to any other person.”¹ As he reconstructs it, the Elizabethan family was characterized by “distance, manipulation, and deference” (p. 117). Stone may overstate his case, but evidence suggests that he is onto something. Some of his harshest critics, like Alan Macfarlane and Randolph Trumbach, point to similar cultural traits in the England they describe in their own work, though they differ with him about origin, time span, and degree.² It seems that the Elizabethan aristocracy and middle class strove...