Shakespeare's Missing Mothers, part 2

Following up on last Thursday's comic highlighting some of the many mothers missing from Shakespeare's plays, here are some more missing mothers, rightfully restored to their places.

A few thoughts:

  1. From a dramatic standpoint, there's definitely a reason why Shakespeare left these mothers out in favor of mothers like Volumnia and Margaret of Anjou...

  2. King Lear really suffers from a lack of mothers. Mothers would have sorted that whole play out before you even got to the second scene.

  3. I kind of want to do a series of comics now on how Mrs. Polonius manages to diffuse the entire situation at Elsinore and everyone ends up over at her place talking through their feelings over cups of hot tea and some scones.

 

Shakespeare's Missing Mothers, part 1

The number of Shakespearean characters who have a father but are, for some usually unspoken reason, missing a mother is often commented on. This isn't to say that there aren't any mothers in Shakespeare.... there are just a lot of missing ones. Let's see what happens when we put some of them back. 

Queen Lear would have SHUT THAT THING DOWN.