Shakespeare and Emotional Distance in the Elizabethan Family

One of the most startling ideas in Lawrence Stone's The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500-1800 is the claim that most people in sixteenthand earlyseventeenth-century England found it very difficult to establish close emotional ties to any other person.' As he reconstructs it, the Elizabethan family was characterized by distance, manipulation, and deference (p. 117). Stone may overstate his case, but evidence suggests that he is onto something. Some of his harshest critics, like Alan Macfarlane and Randolph Trumbach, point to similar cultural traits in the England they describe in their own work, though they differ with him about origin, time span, and degree.2 It seems that the Elizabethan aristocracy and middle class strove at least to appear in control of their emotional attachments, though the cost might be suspicion and loneliness

Art · Historical Art and Culture Studies · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Psychology