Review Article
Lessons from Shakespeares Tiger Mothers: Parental Authority in Coriolanus and Merchant of Venice
Annalise Acorn1* and Katherine Clackson21Department of Law and Ethics, Faculty of Law, University of Alberta, Canada
2Attia Reeves Tensfeldt, Canada
- *Corresponding Author:
- Annalise Acorn
Faculty of Law, University of Alberta, Canada
Tel: +1 780-492-3111
E-mail: aacorn@ualberta.ca
Received Date: March 09, 2016; Accepted Date: March 16, 2016; Published Date: March 23, 2016
Citation: Acorn A, Clackson K (2016) Lessons from Shakespeare’s Tiger Mothers:Parental Authority in Coriolanus and Merchant of Venice. J Civil Legal Sci 5:181. doi:10.4172/2169-0170.1000181
Copyright: © 2016 Acorn A, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Shakespeare, as always, is a goldmine. In many of his portrayals of the parent-child relationship Shakespeare explores the extent of the parent’s legitimate authority over the child as well as the of parents’ attempts to control and mould their children in the service of family ambition.What Shakespeare’s depiction of Coriolanus shows is that going from submission to tyrannical authority as a child to effective in adulthood may be impossible. Children habituated to valuing their parent’s external preferences over their own internal ones may not have the capacity to know let alone honour their own truth.
