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

Abstract:Somewhere behind the dramatic power that gathers around psychological themes in Shakespeare’s plays traceable to a mother’s role in a child’s experience is the lived mother–child bond of Mary Arden Shakespeare and her oldest son. I will construct a model of Mary’s contribution that I think is consistent with what we know of the circumstances of her life, with what we have learned from psychoanalysis about mother–child bonds, and with the shape of Shakespeare’s artistic development as I understand it. Mary Arden Shakespeare, born to a strong Catholic family, was pregnant and gave birth to William after the deaths in infancy of two daughters, as the most deadly plague of the 16th century made its way toward Stratford, and as Catholic beliefs and ritual traditions were forcefully set aside by Queen Elizabeth’s protestant reformation. The crisis circumstances of Shakespeare’s earliest maternal experience, the later prolonged crisis of his father’s disgrace, and the plausible impacts of these crises on the mother-child bond, suggest a range of infantile and childhood experience consistent with, and reimagined in, the development of Shakespeare’s drama.