3 Family Relationships in Shakespeares plays. With the end of Orestes’ trials and tribulations comes the end of the curse on the house of Atreus-an event that signals the restoration of order and prosperity to a previously tangled and tragic situation. Father-daughter relationships in Shakespeares plays Cymbeline, Hamlet. Thus The Eumenides is not simply about the salvation of one man, but of an entire family. In fact, at the end of the play, the exiled Orestes is even able to return to his familial kingdom of Argos, his guilt erased and his birthright restored. The events of The Eumenides, however, finally put a stop to this curse. Your husbands brothers wife shows him still seeing the Ghost as her husband, emphasising the incest and her identity being defined by her relationships. Ancient Greek mythology often takes on the topic of cursed families, and one of the most famous is the “House of Atreus.” Orestes is the last survivor of this royal family (along with his sister Electra, who is absent from this play), has been cursed for generations, with relatives seeking revenge on each other in a variety of horrific ways. The question of family ties, however, goes deeper than simply a question of mother versus father. His father’s death, in essence, wipes out his mother’s. In the end, in a display of typical Ancient Greek sexism, Athena and a jury of Athenians decide that the father takes a privileged role, and that Orestes is therefore blameless. The double blessing that Polonius gives Laertes shows this ritual comically, as do those of earlier sons. They exemplify Shakespeare’s complex employment of the ritual in Hamlet and throughout his plays from the farcical to the serene.
Hamlet familial bonds trial#
The trial of Orestes thus basically becomes about which parent-mother or father-should matter more to a child. Epigraphs from William Roper’s Life of Sir Thomas More represent rituals of familial blessing in transition from the feudal to the early modern. Apollo and Orestes, meanwhile, believe that Clytemnestra sacrificed any allegiance her son owed her when she killed his father. Shakespeare makes his viewpoint overwhelmingly clear that he believes a strong family bond is crucial to keep a family sane through the examples of the Polonius. The Furies unequivocally believe that the bond between a mother and child is sacred, and that no excuse Orestes offers can purge his guilt. The question of the play, then, is not whether or not Orestes committed this crime (he never denies his guilt), but whether he deserves to be punished for it. Orestes, after all, has killed his mother Clytemnestra in order to avenge her murder of his father Agamemnon. At the core of The Eumenides sits a conflict of familial bonds.
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