the trouble with gender in othello - Auburn University Electronic ...

and Juliet show what happens after the comedy ends: “Plays that continue
beyond the point where comedy ends, with the old fogies defeated and a happy
marriage successfully concluded, depict the condition as utterly disastrous”
(Orgel 674). It should also be borne in mind that while the theme of children
subverting their parents is a theatrical convention that dates back to the Greek
and Roman theater:
The degree to which this dramatized generation gap reflected
actual social conditions remains highly problematic, but,
presumably patriarchs in the audience participated in the laughter
at the obtuse sennex (sic) foiled by his canny children even as they
returned to their homes to exert their patriarchal, and often
tyrannical, power over their own offspring. (Lenker 22)
It is a safe assumption, according to historians dealing with the time period, that
no matter what happened on the stage of a comedy, the patriarchy was alive and
well in Shakespeare’s England (Lenker 17-19). 1 Lawrence Stone hypothesizes
that there was an increased enforcement of patriarchy during the early modern
period:
The growth of patriarchy was deliberately encouraged by the new
Renaissance state on the traditional grounds that the subordination
of the family to its head is analogous to, and also a direct
contributory cause of, subordination of subjects to the sovereign.
6