Shakespeare's Missing Mothers?
One of the old wife’s tales of Shakespearean thought is that he seldom puts mothers in his plays, and that is significant. This survey of mothers in Shakespeare’s plays will see if they are really are notable for their absence.

Shakespeare wrote or contributed to 42 known plays. Two have been lost, narrowing our sample to 40. Sir Thomas More has just two brief scenes by Shakespeare, and he did not guide the project. It is not representative, reducing our sample to 39 plays.  Seventeen of these have mothers, just two and a half play short of 50%. Those plays are:

           All’s Well That Ends Well
           Antony and Cleopatra
           The Comedy of Errors
           Coriolanus
           Cymbeline
           Hamlet
           Henry V  
           Henry VI, part three
           King John
           Macbeth
           Merry Wives of Windsor
           Pericles, Prince of Tyre
           Richard II
           Richard III
           Romeo and Juliet
           Titus Andronicus
           The Winter’s Tale

The mothers in Henry VI, part two, Henry V, Macbeth, and Richard II have very small parts, but they are important characters. In the first tetralogy, Elizabeth parlays King Edward's lust into security for her sons by becoming his queen.  The Duchess of York in Richard II is a loving, if somewhat hysterical mother.  Lady Macbeth says she "has given suck." It is commonly assumed the Macbeths had a child who died.  I include the play not because of this, but because of Lady Macduff's short, but important scene with her son.

Some characters may be claimed as mothers, but I exclude them for the following reasons. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Titania is the Fairie Queen and something of a maternal figure to her fairies, and a surrogate mother to the Indian boy.  Juliet in Measure for Measure is pregnant when the play begins.  Queen Katherine in Henry VIII is a mother, but her children do not appear in the play. Anne Bolin becomes a mother at the end of this play. I do not count her because, while much is made of her child, the future Queen Elizabeth I, the scene is incidental to the plot. Cleopatra is a mother, though none of her children appear on stage. I include her because she is such a bad mother, willing to sacrifice her children to avoid being led captive into Rome.

With the exception of Anthony and Cleopatra and Macbeth, I do not count any of these on my list, but one could argue for inclusion.

Since nearly half the plays have mothers, one wonders how this myth begin. One possibility is the high number of widowers in the plays. There are many, but when we compare the number of widowers with mothers, they are nearly the same. There are 19 plays with widowers compared to the 17 with mothers.  Widowers appear in:

           Anthony and Cleopatra
           As You Like It
           Cymbeline
           Hamlet
           Henry IV, part one
           Henry IV, part two
           Julius Caesar
           King Lear
           Macbeth
           Merchant of Venice
           A Midsummer Night’s Dream
           Much Ado About Nothing
           Othello
           Pericles, Prince of Tyre
           The Taming of the Shrew
           The Tempest
           Titus Andronicus
           Two Gentlemen of Verona
           The Winter’s Tale

This is 19 plays with widowers, but Pericles, Brutus in Julius Caesar, and Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, become widowers in the course of the action. I do not count them. I also remove Antony because he has a long-term relationship with Cleopatra and marries Octavia during the play. He does not function as a widower in the same way that Leonato and Polonius do, though his children are mentioned in the play. This reduces the number of plays to 16. Likewise Duncan is not around long enough to register as a widower in Macbeth (if that's what he is--there is no wife around), but let’s leave him in since he leaves two children to the play’s action.

We’ll call it 16 widowers who really function as such. Now let’s count the plays with widows to see what that tells us:

           All’s Well That Ends Well
           Coriolanus
           Edward III
           Hamlet
           Henry VI, part one
           Henry VI, part three
           King John
           Richard III
           The Taming of the Shrew
           Titus Andronicus
           The Winter’s Tale

Note, I do not count Margaret in Henry VI, part two since she has married the King in the course of the action.

This gives us 11 plays with widows compared to 16 with widowers. I do not feel this is significant enough to excite the kind of speculation it has. I shall suggest two reasons anyway.

It was not uncommon for women to die in childbirth, while it was very uncommon for men to die during the birth of their children. I suspect the early modern period would not find single fathers as noteworthy as we do. (Note to self: Get statistics for this and revise.)

Fathers are necessary for certain plots when mothers are not. This is particularly true when a daughter must be married, and a dowry agreed upon. There is no reason such characters can not be married, as Capulet is in Romeo and Juliet, but mothers are not needed for the plots of Shrew, Verona, Ado, and others. Why pay an extra actor for a day’s work, and why figure out how to stage-manage a character not needed by the plot?

Instead of finding significance in characters who are not there, it makes more sense to focus on the same things as Shakespeare.  Between 1595 and 1600, with Romeo and Julietas a notable exception, there were a large number of plays that focused, in part, on the relationships between fathers and daughters. Noting the lack of mothers misses the point. The repeated father/daughter connection during this limited period is the point, and a far more profitable line of inquiry.

I do not think Shakespeare is noteworthy for a lack of mothers. There are plenty of them in his plays. There is no significant difference between the number of widows and widowers in his plays. We shall do better to study what Shakespeare did, not what he did not do.


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