Father-Daughter Relationships in Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice
Justification for the subjugation of females to males during the sixteenth century came from a variety of sources. Ranging from the view that God gave Adam authority over Eve as penalty for the fall, to a belief in the superiority of a husbands’ physical strength over that of his wife, attempts at rationalization of the restricted freedom of women came from every direction.1 Puritan reformers also believed that Eve was God’s gift, given to Adam ‘to consummate and make up his happinesse.’[1] From this perspective, we can easily make the mental adjustment necessary to embrace the view of women as property that could be ‘given in marriage, taken in battle, exchanged for favours, set as tribute, traded, bought, and sold.’[2] With this viewpoint in mind, it is interesting to move into a consideration of the father-daughter relationships presented in Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice to analyse how this viewpoint limited the freedoms of daughters.
To begin our exploration of father-daughter relationships in the context of patriarchal control, we must first examine how males viewed and represented daughters within the texts. In The Old Arcadia, Pyrocles as Cleophila not only ‘praises’ Philoclea in fragmented body parts (as opposed to a whole person), but also compares these parts to military instruments of war. ‘Her loose hair be the shot, the breasts the pikes be / Scouts each motion is, the hands the horsemen’ and ‘her cannons be her eyes.’[3] Although this comparison situates Philoclea in the degra...
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[10] Oxford English Dictionary Online
[11] Singh, 153.
[12] The Merchant of Venice, III.ii.83-96.
[13] D. Lucking, ‘Standing for Sacrifice: The Casket and Trial Scenes in ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ University of Toronto Quarterly (Spring 1989):355-75, quoted by J.G. Singh, in A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Dympna Callaghan (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2000), 150.
[14] The Jew of Malta, II.iii.52-3.
[15] II.iii.289.
[16] The Old Arcadia, 101.
[17] The Old Arcadia, 102.
[18] The Old Arcadia, 5.
[19] The Jew of Malta, II.iii.228-232.
[20] The Jew of Malta, II.iii.304-6.
[21] The Merchant of Venice, I.ii.22-5.
[22] II.v.56-7.
[23] The Jew of Malta, III.iii.39-42.
[24] The Jew of Malta, II.iv.1-4.
[25] The Merchant of Venice, III.i.31-33.
[26] The Old Arcadia, 360.
[27] Dusinberre, 124.
It was proposed that if the length of the PVC pipes were to increase, then the sound produced will have a lower amplitude each time because the sound will lose energy as it continues in the pipe for a certain amount of time. However, the data actually showed that with every increase in pipe length, the amplitude got louder as well, thus refuting the hypothesis. These results made sense because what was created inside the PVC pipes was a standing still sound wave, or a resonance wave. These kinds of waves have certain locations on its wavelength in order for the change in sound to be heard, which it usually half a wavelength. With this, the tuning fork is 83.3Hz and a usual wavelength is about 300Hz, 300/83.3 = 3.6 meters, which is about 4 meters (half = 2 meters). So for the change in sound to be heard, the pipes had to be about 2 meters in change according to the frequency of the tuning
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One of the aspects of the Middle Ages which is explored by numerous scholars today is that of the antifeminist stereotypes which pervaded literature and cultural mores during the period. In an era governed by men, the fact that women were treated as inferior is unsurprising; archetypal visions of femininity fit neatly into medieval history. However, most people would like to believe that such pigeonholing has been left in the past, allowing for more liberated times in which women are portrayed realistically and as the equals of men.
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